A serious outbreak of Return-On-Investmentitis - Making the case for live events

What strange things humans are. We’ve been amused, perplexed and ultimately stimulated into writing this blog in response to a newish trend of making the financial case for live events/communications. Okay, so we know we’re in an era of austerity and that we must all make every penny count but that does not mean that spending on a conference is wayward, rash and irresponsible.

As dozens of live event agencies rush to make the business case for live communication – there’s a whole lot of ROI calculations out on the Internet; designed, presumably to appease or persuade “procurement” that “doing this live event is a good thing and yes, we really can show a return on investment”.

How do you measure value?

But we’re left wondering “how do you measure the ROI on a company conference, a press and public launch or an AGM?

We’ve created only a few events in our lives out of thousands where we can genuinely attest to a measurable ROI. The most memorable was a large-scale analyst meeting for a major tech company on the east coast of the United States, where we outlined the company’s roadmap, staged a host of live demos, showed presentations that had been editorially scrutinised for almost a month and where the most onerous Q&As had been thought through and exercised. The net result after this one day analyst event was a share price which closed at $19:53 cents (it had begun that day at $11.65) on the back of the huge number of “buy” reports from the analysts attending our event. Our client was delighted as several billion dollars were added to their capitalisation. Now that’s what we call ROI!

Our point is that these types of live events are rare where true measurable results can be obtained at the time or in advance as a cost justification. No one could have forecast the market response from our prize analyst event.

Of course, we create exceptional value and massive benefits but how does one calculate the financial value of persuasion, motivation, inspiration, influence, enthusiasm for your business and its products and a real press and analyst buzz? Value can only be demonstrated by what follows from the event , how the audience acts as a result, not by attempting the impossible – calculating ROI for the event itself.

So don’t be persuaded into nonsensical thinking.

Of course, you should define your Critical Success Factors with a clear mind, make sure you know what you want to spend and what you want to spend it on; plan early and execute in a compelling fashion. But when you come to think about live, face-to-face communications, remember that humans love to meet other humans, that they love to see and experience new things and learn and yes, they even will do more business with you if your event is done right.

Next time I’ll be writing about “partner power” in live communication.

Marc Balhetchet