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BBC Gardeners ’ World Fair Spring
Paul Byrom has been a constant in the event industry for as long as I can remember , he has led Upper Street Events and served his time on the AEO Council as well as being elected chair three years ago . He is regarded as one of the industry ’ s deep thinkers and has always been at the forefront of innovation and progress . Byrom ’ s latest incarnation is as MD of Immediate Media ’ s Event business , Immediate Live , which has recently been created from combining River Street and Upper Street Events . Immediate Media is to quote their publicity “ the special interest content and platform |
company ” employing over 1,200 people across eight divisions . Their brands include Radio Times , BBC Good Food , Top Gear and BBC Gardeners World and Love Patchwork and Quilting ( a personal favourite ). I start by asking Byrom how business is going and am pleased to hear that last month yielded his “ best sales week ever ” having sold 9,000 tickets for the launch of BBC Gardeners World Fair at Beaulieu ( 28-30 May ) way ahead of expectations . “ We ’ re seeing really positive signs from visitors who are clearly less nervous than exhibitors , although that will still mean we are forecast to hit roughly |
30 / 40 % of our underlying revenue as we don ’ t have time to catch up over the course of the rest of the year .” So , positive signs , but like everyone in events , they are not out of the woods yet . Immediate Media can trace its routes back to 2011 when Private Equity firm Exponent brought together Magickalia ( a digital platform that had editorial content ) BBC Worldwide Magazines and a special interest publishing business called Origin based in Bristol . Byrom explains : “ PE brought the business together with the vision that publishers needed to be much more heavily into |
digital . Digital for us meant digital content , websites that were content rich . “ We felt that we could monetise that through things like programmatic revenues , and programmatic advertising started the journey . In 2017 , Immediate was acquired by Hubert Burda Media and the next stage of growth began . “ We devised the idea of the value curve reaching lots of people digitally , then progressing through ‘ news stand ’ which produces more revenue per person through to subscription with the opportunity increase the value further . The next natural step appears to be people who come to live events , we see that as a distillation of the most passionate advocates of our brands . We monetise the live experience at the highest revenue per head and that goes down the curve through print and digital .” This is helped by the fact that Immediate own some of the best-known brands in the UK . “ So , Immediate media has some mega brands , which helps us enormously so we have the Radio Times . For example , UK , largest selling consumer magazine . We then have BBC Good Food which we bought from the BBC in 2019 which has something |
32 — June |