One of the things we were talking about was FM reach – he thought it was an important number as regards to switchover. Me, not so much. The problem is that you only have to listen to FM for five minutes in one week and it’ll appear on the FM reach tally. I think even post the switchover, with the majority of radio stations off the platform, that FM Reach will probably still be significant – though it won’t be generating many hours (ie the volume of listening).

And that’s the thing – you have to look at hours to see how much listening is on the various platforms. A big issue with ‘digital’ is that people are gradually replacing their listening locations with digital listening devices (DAB, DTV and the internet) – you don’t change everything straight away. This is quite different to digital TV – where you have a primary set where you consume most of your television. The number of radio sets that people listen on means  digital reach is around 50% and digital hours are around 30%.

I thought it might be interesting to look at digital listeners specifically and see how much of their listening is to analogue and how much is to digital.

Looking across the UK at people who listen to ‘digital radio’ at some point during a week – 53% of their hours are given to digital radio.

In London it’s 57% of their hours given to digital radio.

Therefore if you’re an analogue-only radio station, it’s not good news. The availability of people to listen you is dropping.

If you’re a station that simulcasts, your at least in both places, but in the digital world you’re facing more competition for hours – ie you need to work harder to remain in the same place.

If you’re a station that simulcasts, but to a bigger area – then you get the best of both worlds. You remain a player in you market and you’re taking the fight to others to grow your hours.

And if you’re simulcasting and have an extra product (see Absolute/BBC or even Global/Bauer) – then again, you’re in a position to grow your hours and build your business.

Update: Phil’s responded on his (new!) blog.

I’m just going to say that again. Because it’s important.

Half of the UK’s radio listeners consume radio digitally at some point every week.

Plus 29.1% of all listening in the UK is through digital radio.

The digital listening (hours) breaks down like this:

In attractive chart form:

Digital Reach:

Digital Hours:

In reach terms, the internet and digital television do a good job in expanding the universe of digital consumers. However in hours terms, it shows how much online/digital television is a minority sport. Internet is more the poorer as pretty much every UK station is on it and broadband penetration at home and work is huge. Digital TV suffers from (outside the big brands) a lack of radio content. DAB has the same issue – there’s still a fair few big local stations not on it yet, but its consumption is strong and growing faster than DTV/internet.

There was a good line-up of speakers and Absolute have just put up all the videos from the event.

The session that I thought was the most illuminating was the one that explained Absolute’s thinking behind their new signed-in for streaming service. James Wigley goes into quite a bit of detail about how the system works and some of their early results too. I’ve embedded the video below:

The technology behind this kind of service is not insignificant and I imagine the changes needed for traffic management must be huge. However, what it does do is provide new opportunities for advertisers.

As a percentage of listening, streaming (to both to PCs and mobile) is still a very small part of what radio does. In fact it provides about a fifth of the hours that DAB delivers to radio broadcasters. However, that’s still 40m hours a week of listening – an amount that wouldn’t be sniffed at if you were a new entrant in the online music space.

This means that Absolute can start to target some of the money that’s going to Spotify, Last. fm et al by replicating their media formats and then aligning it with a brand that can deliver to a large audience.

It’s so easy for people to think about radio in binary terms and base all decisions on the model we happen to have had for the last 30 years. It’s great that there’s new ‘radio’ products like these that put us into some different games.

Radio is habitual. We make a decision to consume something and then consume it for a couple of hours. Everyday. Forever. When someone interrupts our habits by making a change to something we’ve enjoyed we get annoyed.

However, just because you like, or are used to something, doesn’t give it the god-given right to exist forever. Sorry.

ILR has gone through three distinct phases. We’re now in the third.

1. 1973 to 1992: Launch and growth.

ILR was new. There were few radio stations, no internet, four TV channels, limited newspapers and magazines. It was easy to compete against the BBC because you could find something that they didn’t do.

To win… be more local, be more friendly, play popular music, make sure people know about you and work out how to sell lots advertising (unless you go bust first).

2. 1992 to 2002: Least worst option.

Whilst in the background there was the gradual growth of CDs, multi-channel television and online – it still had a brilliant competitive set – there were hardly any competitors!

Plus through a mix of luck and judgement, commercial radio fixed it’s product.

Some may call it uninspiring, but the explosion of research-led programming meant that ILR played the right kind of music – in decent quality – FM! (and generally) told the DJ to STFU. Happily Radio 1 also threw itself off a cliff offering up its listeners.

The music shift was important as many of the stations positioned themselves with the optimum mix for their market. Broadly it was Radio 1 without the new stuff, Radio 2 without the old stuff – it was the station that everyone could agree on.

2003 onwards

The third age is not so happy.

The downside of being the ‘least worst option’ is that you create very little passion from the audience and you don’t super-serve anyone. When a better opportunity comes along you can be left behind. Playing the middle ground can get much harder.

This was fine before the explosion in choice meant that the listener who prefers dance but tolerated pop had somewhere better to go. The person who preferred a few older tunes gets an easy listening station. The person that wants more company gets the big stars on Radio 2.

ILR

The problem for the vast majority of ILR stations whether 2CR, The Pulse or BRMB is that they failed to re-invent their product when they should have done – about eight years ago – the point when everything was changing.

For the vast majority of ILR stations that haven’t re-branded, their 2011 product is the same as their 1994 one. But, amazingly, probably less tight and focused.

In the same time consumers and successful pop culture brands changed and evolved.

The biggest issue is that consumer has evolved much faster than the stations they grew up with.

I was involved in some of the background work for one of the many Capital re-brands. The research was fascinating. Capital scored incredibly high for loads of images – from news, to travel, to ‘being London’ – the music scores weren’t outstanding but were okay too. But when asked whether they listened the answer was no. They’d found something else that scratched an itch better – generally Heart for the women and Kiss for the youngsters. They still had enormous positive feeling for Capital, it just wasn’t for them.

It was the same story for many other ILR stations, though the lack of competition in each individual marketplace often hid the scale of the problem. 20-years of doing the same thing had burned the traditional ILR perceptions in the mind of the listener. Normally this would have been a good thing, but even though they thought that ILRs did a good job, a growing number of them shrugged and turned on something else. Being number one for local, or travel wasn’t enough. It was no longer ‘the station for people like me’ – and owning that or other images wasn’t going to fix it.

Heart, and then Capital.

This wasn’t the reason for the re-brand of 30-odd ILRs into Heart though. That was driven by cost saving and delivering a more easily buy-able product by advertisers.

Prior to the re-brand, product-wise they were a variable lot. Some, often the bigger ones, had done quite a good job. Looking at GWR FM or Trent FM – their audience had been down a little – but nothing drastic. Whereas Hereward and Invicta hadn’t fared so well. It’s no surprise that Heart has improved some and reduced others. The stats are harder however to crunch since Global changed the TSAs.

Heart’s success is they’ve generally kept a steady ship whilst massively reducing the costs. – I reckon by half to two-thirds. The Heart product is an excellent one, super-slick and relatively clutter free. The thing that really helped Global was that the brand’s values had been worked out a long time ago. It mattered less that listeners didn’t know the brand – what was really important was that they knew what they were. Then it was just communicating it to the audience. Something they did with loads of TV advertising.

Many of these stations had never had any TV-spend before. Existing listeners found that little of their station had really changed and at the same time non-listeners (who knew very well what GWR FM was etc) could be prompted to try it again. A smaller amount of  Hereward FM-related baggage to wade through.

Heart’s difficulty now is that as they’ve pulled back on the marketing gas they’re starting to see some cracks in audience growth, especially where they’ve merged a large number of stations into one. It’s still very early days on that though and you have to remember that they’ve saved a HUGE amount of money.

The product problem they face is whether they’ve actually just created a better ‘least worst station’ and just corrected the output (and pushed back) the years before they see more competition-related decline.

I say that, of course, as if it’s a bad thing. It might just be the nature of what mainstream radio now has to do. Constant Madonna-style re-invention.

Capital, I think is more interesting. In that network they’ve taken a niche product (the ex-Galaxies) and applied a clean lick of mainstream paint. For London it’s also a much more contemporary sound than its ever had before. They’ve also aligned it strongly to what’s modern, mainstream and cool.

As a young station it matters less what ex-listeners think – it’s about constantly attracting the young/pop fans (and those who see themselves as young/pop fans). They’ve managed, in their first year, to alter core brand values and start to shift perceptions. And in London the departure of Johnny (for whatever reason) will help them keep to this goal. They have, however, spent a huge amount of money on TV/big concerts to do this.

What does not work is a re-name (rather than re-brand). Lite FM’s change to Connect or that conglomeration of stations’ move to Touch was a failure because:

1. The old product wasn’t very good – and the new product wasn’t much better (most of the ex-Heart’s were quite good and the new Heart was slick)
2. The new station didn’t have any/strong enough brand values
3. There was little marketing explaining the new station or why people should bother to sample it.

Er, that’s the end of the introduction. You still there?

The main reason that BRMB, Beacon, Wyvern and Mercia need to change are their audience figures.

These stations are not terrible radio stations. Of course there are things that could be changed – music, personalities, production etc. However, even if they changed them to the optimal mix it would not necessarily reverse the declines.

The problem isn’t what they’re doing today. The problem is what’s happened to ILR over the last eight years.

As I talked about above, the changing nature of consumers, the multi-platform competition and these stations being trapped in the middle and not being allowed to evolve are the combination of reasons that there needs to be a big change.

Being ‘BRMB’ is the baggage – not just what’s on those stations today.

A re-brand can return growth to these stations. However, doing it successfully is difficult. Product, brand and marketing need to be perfectly aligned. Because as Lite, Touch, Capital and Heart have found, when you press the button there really is no going back.

There will be discussion about cost-saving, TV advertising opportunities, new competitive market, it being easier to sell to advertisers… and all of these are valid things. However – at the core there’s just a need for ILR to move on.

However, my personal view is that they’ve made the decision at the right time. It is always better to make bold changes when you’re at the top of your game. So often change comes from weakness – declining figures, lack of growth etc – that any new show is already starting thirty-love down.

For Capital, the Breakfast show is popular, people aren’t drifting off to other stations and they tend to be locked in for the rest of the day. Naturally a new host will generate some churn, but with listeners broadly happy it’s a great headstart for a new programme.

I’ve always thought X Factor was excellent at constantly innovating with a winning formula. At the point they were top of their game, they weren’t afraid to swap judges out – bye bye Sharon Osbourne (and Louis Walsh at one point), take the auditions in front of a live studio audience and reinvent Sunday night’s result show as the new Top of the Pops. Conventional wisdom would have been to NOT CHANGE ANYTHING – but they took their lead and constantly developed and improved their already winning product.

Interestingly it’s been when change has been forced upon them – X Factor USA taking away two judges and management focus – that the changes have been less successful.

Back to Capital, I’m sure they’re also haunted by the ghost of Breakfast presenters past. Chris Tarrant caused the old Capital massive success and then massive problems. They were so wedded to Tarrant (he was a constant issue even in PLC annual reports) that they kept hold of him way too long. By the time he moved on, they had a Breakfast audience who were older and didn’t listen to the rest of the output and whoever they replaced him with would have been a massive change. Net result it took years and years for Johnny to be established. They just waited too long.

It’s a problem that Radio 1 now faces too. Moyles is an excellent breakfast host, and probably generates the best breakfast show in the country. The programme is however drifting away from the rest of the network. It’s hugely popular, but the audience is getting much older and the programming has a habit of drifting older topic-wise. Did you hear the hour long (!) interview with John Cleese? It took me ten minutes to realise who it was.

Now, they’ve renewed Moyles for another few years to give the station some breathing room whilst they advance their talent plans, but by doing so they’ve piled on the trouble for the future. By then he’ll be even more off target and his disappearance will lose them a stack of older listeners plus they’ll have to work hard to re-attract the 15 to 24s who’ll already be listening to another breakfast show – perhaps the new one from Capital?

Who’ll be Capital’s new breakfast host? I think the smart money’s on Dave Berry. He’s similar to Johnny, younger, more relevant and still funny. However, Global are excellent at pulling a rabbit out of the hat, and I think someone like Scott Mills could make an appearance. If they go for a Scott-type person or bigger they’ll also have the opportunity of networking Breakfast across the old regional Galaxies – so their new host could come to Yorkshire and the North East. Whilst I think they would be mad to replace Hirsty, with Steve and Karen off to Metro – maybe we’ll see the new host waking up two areas!

In September, me and James ran a radio conference, Next Radio, which went down really well! It was a radio ideas conference and we had a fantastic selection of speakers talking about loads of different topics.

We’ve had lots of requests to put the sessions online, so i’m pleased to say that we’ve just put the vast majority of the videos live on the Next Radio website.

If you came to the conference you’ll be able to watch the videos for free (you should have received an email from us how to do that). If you didn’t come, then it’s £10 to buy a subscription to watch them.

We’ve thought a lot about whether to make them free or fee, so this is a bit of an experiment. If you want to see what they’re like – we’ve put one up on YouTube here. The people who paid for the conference (and the videos) were the delegates and our sponsors, so it seems right that the people who watch them contribute as well. However, agree or disagree, i’m very interested in your views in the comments below.

I think you will get something from each of the sessions, but three that cover very different areas, and are a great place to start are:

1. Brett Spencer’s session on local radio and social media.

2. Sam Bailey and Joe Harland’s take on visualisation.

3. Somethin’ Else’s Steve Ackerman talking about video games and audio.

It’s been quite a good quarter for digital, with listening on digital platforms now accounting for 300m hours a week (that’s more than Radio 1 and Radio 2′s total hours combined). There’s also some quite good news for the digital stations too – Planet Rock has its highest total hours ever – making it bigger than (all of) XFM. Two new digital stations also reach the 1m listeners club – Absolute 80s and Five Live Sports Extra – joining Smash Hits, The Hits, 6Music, 4Extra and Kerrang with Planet Rock and 1Xtra not far behind.

Also, just under 300,000 listeners stopped listening to any form of analogue radio wiping 2.2m hours off analogue’s totaliser.

But really, I’m less concerned about who’s slightly up and down and instead keen to see whether there’s any new trends popping up.

I’ve spent most of this quarter speaking at conferences and leading in-station seminars outside of the UK. The key thing they’re all interested in is trying to track how diverse platforms are going to affect their core analogue businesses. Many are in markets that don’t have any traction with broadcast digital radio, but they still see the internet, mobile and de-regulation as threats to their business.

When I present, I often talk about how amazing analogue radio is. It’s a platform where all consumers have multiple radios that pick it up, receivers are super-cheap, they are available in-home, on the move and at work. Plus limited spectrum means there are few competitors. Woo! I then talk about other industries who felt their barriers to entry were great too, until someone lobbed a hand grenade and blew them apart.

The story I often talk about is Craigslist. In America Craigslist has pretty much destroyed classified advertising for newspapers (and with it much of their business model). Now, it wasn’t Craig’s intention to destroy newspapers, he was trying to solve a different problem. Namely to provide a cheap/free way to get rid of your old stuff. It worked and the knock on was massive to a different industry.

I don’t know what the problem will be that someone will solve that harpoon’s our business, but I do know that if we stick to our one boat – analogue radio – then when it starts sinking it’ll be too late to do anything about it.

I thought it might be interesting to use RAJAR to look at how radio businesses are changing.

The data in the two charts below are the same, but are ordered differently. The data shows hours listened for the larger radio groups, broken down by All hours, Analogue hours, Digital hours (that’s DAB, DTV, Online and Unknown digital combined) as well as DAB, DTV and Net separately. At the end there’s two columns that show the ranking of the groups based on two things – All hours and Digital hours.

This chart below is ranked on All hours – in effect the top, er 14, radio groups as we measure them today.

The second chart shows it sorted on digital hours. If the industry was roughly doing the same thing, you’d expect the charts to be roughly similar. There are some strong similarities but there are some differences too. The groups that stand out are Absolute, Town and Country and Lincs. Absolute moves from being the 6th biggest group to the 4th biggest and Town and Country moves from 13th to 9th. Lincs FM group drop from 8th to 12th.

What does this show? I think for Absolute and T&C it shows they’re building new digital businesses. Both have launched new digital radio stations and extended coverage of analogue ones – Absolute upgrading AM to digital and T&C growing the coverage of some of its analogue stations.

I’m not surprised that some stations moan about digital. They look at it as a large cost to simulcast their service to their analogue audience. Well – it is! Clever groups are using digital to expand their existing stations or they’re creating new ones. For them it’s not about maintaining market share by being on a different platform to the same audience – it’s taking the fight elsewhere and battling for new hours.

And it’s hours that turn into cash – and digital, especially DAB, is a brilliant way to do just that. Global generate nearly 10million additional hours to listeners tuning into their brands on digital, outside of the analogue areas. Absolute now, in total, generate 6m hours more than they did in 2007 when Virgin Radio.

If you hear a radio group moaning that they want to protect analogue (at the same time as doing nothing digitally) surely there’s only one direction for their audience and their business?

A funny article just popped up on The Guardian’s website talking about playlisting in general and specifically that Global (owner of pop radio stations) play The Wanted (an artist managed by another company in their group).

The article touches on payola (paying cash/providing services to get songs on the playlist). In my experience most stations wouldn’t consider playing songs that they think would turn people off their radio station – even for cash. Where the line does get blurry is when events are involved. Whether it’s BBC or Commercial, when a radio station organises a big pop event, they’re guaranteed to up the plays of the artists being featured. Radio 1 often ups the plays before they announce the artists for the Big Weekend, so you can always tell who’s going to be playing.

Probably the closest stations get, is from ‘must carry’ acts for events, ie if you want a Rihanna you have to take a lesser artist on the rosta. That also might result in a few extra plays on the station for that artist.

In the article there’s a mention of the Broadcasting Code in relation to Global’s playing of The Wanted:

No commercial arrangement that involves payment, or the provision of some other valuable consideration, to the broadcaster may influence the selection or rotation of music for broadcast.

UPDATED: Jimmy Buckland writes to tell me ‘undue prominence’ has been removed from the Code. Serves me right for some late Sunday googling. You can tell I don’t really do regulation any more…. 

I’m not sure if this is relevant to Global. I think the question is probably less about the above but perhaps about ‘undue prominence’.

No undue prominence may be given in any programme to a product or service.
The Code goes on to say:
Undue prominence may result from:
the presence of, or reference to, a product or service (including company names, brand names, logos) in a programme where there is no editorial justification; or
the manner in which a product or service (including company names, brand names, logos) appears or is referred to in a programme.
They’re probably fine on 1, though the fine line is going to be 2. When does a DJ talk up for a song become undue prominence?

Undue prominence is a difficult thing though.

Stations could face the same charge about promoting a station website. Or even someone else’s website. Twitter perhaps, or maybe Facebook?

Selling your own products is nothing new though. We’ve already seen radio stations (and TV channels) named after brands –  Saga FM or the Audi Channel, anyone? Should Audi have had to report on Ford’s cars for balance? What about Sky’s cross-promotion of premium channels on its free to air or basic services?

At the end of the day, Global used their own platform to promote their own band, a band that if famous and successful would be completely on brand for their radio stations. Catch-22. Their first ‘hit’ was generated by significant airplay on Capital/Galaxy and Heart (with some late spot-plays from Bauer) alongside significant online support from the Global websites. The buzz generated by the ‘unexpected’ hit then guaranteed further airplay on other commercial stations and for the first time plays on Radio 1. They’ve gone on to be a successful, albeit odd-looking, boyband.

Surely it would be crazy if radio stations couldn’t use their own channels to promote their own activities? After all, if BMG were to a run a radio station, no one would be surprised if they played their own artists would they?

Perhaps if there has to be some transparency all a station should have to do is mention these activities in their Public File?

I leave the final comment to Popjustice…

This performance translates as 'please play One Direction across the Global radio network' #xfactor

16th October, 2011 7:14 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@Popjustice

Popjustice

It’s the first conference that me and James have both been responsible before. We’ve been on committees for events before, but basically with those, someone else does the main bit of work. This was very different partly because we would be out of pocket if it all went wrong! Mainly for my memory, but hopefully as something helpful to others, I wanted to write up some of the things that have crossed my mind when putting it together.

Venue

The venue was at the Magic Circle in Euston. It was great. Everyone’s asked me how I found it.  I think I just Googled ‘London Event Venues’ or something similar. It just stuck out and the numbers were perfect for what we hoped we would sell. They were incredibly helpful and friendly and the rooms were the perfect size for us. It was also different! We wanted to do something new – and the venue massively helped.

Ticketing

We used Ticketleap for the ticketing, which worked really well. Managing over 100 different transactions is difficult. TicketLeap have a great system which can use Paypal, making the whole process pretty easy. We only used about a fifth of their features, but that fifth was great. Taking credit cards, using a management service and coping with Paypal fees isn’t cheap though – around a fiver of the delegate fee goes on that, which still seems expensive to me. It’s clearly a good business to be in!

Price-point

I reckon over 75% of people who went paid for themselves. We wanted to do a conference that ‘radio do-ers’ could go on and keeping the price low meant that could happen. I was really pleased to see some students/recent graduates choosing to invest in their own careers by coming along.

£99 is tight

When you’ve paid for food, venue, ticketing, printing, insurance and photography there isn’t much left out of the £99. Getting the right price for food and venue makes a significant impact on the total cost.

Food

Our initial idea, to keep the costs low, was to have Pizza Hut pizza for everyone. We thought this would be fun and quirky! However all venues specify a caterer or selection of caterers you have to use. The lowest you can get food, some coffee breaks and the staff to serve it is £19.50/head. But that doesn’t really get you much. I met up with Simon from Squires Catering and we talked through the event and what we were after. They made some great suggestions and did a brilliant job for a good price. We’ve only heard positive things about the food, which we’re really pleased about.

Magicians are expensive

We wanted some close-up magic for the day. But not at £400/hour. We’re clearly all in the wrong business.

The Programme

Producing the programme – in reality one massive PDF which was also the first outing of the Media UK radio pocketbook – was made considerably easier by quick printing turnarounds afforded to us by digital printing. The programme actually went to print on Monday morning, and was delivered on Wednesday: useful for last-minute changes! We worked with Thinkpad Print and Design to produce them, printing a few more than we needed. The costs for that, paid for by Media UK, were £5.28 an issue.

Next time. No QR codes.

You have lots of ideas when you try and do these things. Sometimes just say no. I suggested that it would be really cool to have a QR code on the delegate badges linking to that person’s contact details. It stopped being a good idea when I had to manually create them all, and then manually do all the badges. All 150 of them. The QR code was then too small for some readers. Gahhhh. The delegate badges were also actually individually printed  business cards from Moo.

Presentations

Most conferences ask for presentations in advance. They rarely get them. I’m useless at doing it and generally turn up with my laptop asking whether I can do it from that? We bullied all of our speakers into getting them in advance. James then imported them into Keynote. He also fixed and harmonised video, audio, imagery and aspect ratio. This meant that there was no laptop swapping and all of the AV worked pretty flawlessly over the day. It also meant that we could keep the day on time. It was a huge amount of work – but very worthwhile.

Timings

As I was explaining the day to Catherine at the Magic Circle a week before the event, the look on her face suddenly made me very worried. It did seem ridiculously ambitious – loads of short sessions and a short lunch. I had a bit of a panic we’d bitten off way more than we could chew.

Luckily there were some things that kept us completely on time all day. Firstly was, again, bullying our speakers in keeping to time and getting them to do their presentations in advance. We also had an excellent floor manager in Helen Grimes. Helen’s been a Sonys and Radio Festival producer, in addition to her regular radio job. Having an experienced person to get the speakers ready and briefed before they went on stage is massively important and she did a great job. We also had Will Jackson at the front controlling a big screen with a countdown on. As a speaker, I found this invaluable to keep me on the straight and narrow.

No Questions

Not going to the audience for questions also helped massively. We curated twitter comments and added our own, but this allowed us to better manage the flow of each of the sections.

Sponsors

Having Ignite Jingles, the RAB, Hallett Arendt and particularly Broadcast Bionics on board really helped us to fund the day. It also meant we could afford better food and get the day filmed too.

Photography & Filming

This is expensive. We got a great deal from both of ours – Dan Smyth – for the photos and Create for the filming. It’s also good to have some people that you can provide initial direction for, and then just leave to get on with it. There’s a limited amount of things that you can actually do on the day – so having a good team doing those things was massively important.

Direction

Whilst not really being conscious of doing it, providing a strong ‘brief’ for everyone really helped. We knew what we didn’t want and we were also inspired by things like Ted – something that we could easily point to so people understood what we were after.

An Authored Event

Again, something that wasn’t apparent when we were doing it, but the event wasn’t just a branded experience – Next Radio – me and James were very much connected with it. For many of the delegates, even the ones that we didn’t know, it felt like they thought it was definitely from the two of us. Obviously on the day we were on stage a lot but also all the website material was written in a very personal way and even the email to delegates a few days before was from us personally – not the impersonal Next Radio ‘brand’.

I think this generated a significant amount of goodwill from the audience and helped the atmosphere on the day.

The Pub

We looked a bit into doing a sponsored drinks thing in a nearby bar, but in the end it didn’t really come off. Instead we signposted a particular pub to go to afterwards – I was amazed how many people came along – and then stayed! It was a sunny day and a really lovely way to end it as well.

Speakers

Every conference i’ve been to has been made or broken on the quality of the speakers. We picked a really great bunch. I think pretty much each session has been described to me as someone’s favourite, which is great. Also by giving them a short time to speak and by making them provide their material in advance, I think helped them be even better speakers.

Women

It would have been nicer to have more female speakers, we had quite a few extra that we really wanted, but for a variety of reasons they couldn’t come and do the day. In fact far more women turned us down than men. Maybe we were just unlucky? Maria Williams is doing a great job with Sound Women – so hopefully this will start to change. However, what’s also interesting is how few women wanted to come along. This was an event that was really open to a broad selection of people – young/old, new/established in their careers – I really don’t know why more women didn’t want to come? It can’t all be down to the fact our speaker line-up was very male, could it?

Good People

For it to all work it’s imperative that you have good people working on it. Sharing the bulk of the work with James made it all the more manageable. I don’t think it’s something that i’d been keen to do on my own. We both had complimentary skills that helped the workload greatly. On the day as well as Helen and Will, having Joe and Luke looking after delegates and registration and then having an extra pair of hands with Dave helping with all the technology meant the key areas were covered off by people who we trusted to just sort stuff out.  It was really valuable.

Summary

Overall, it was a fantastic day. We’ve had some great feedback something that’s been quite humbling. If we do it again it’s going to be hard to beat.