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Highlights from our last Omeda Idea Exchange

Last updated: December 6, 2024

Every December, we gather a list of our top resources from the year to summarize key takeaways and help you plan next year’s audience development goals.

But the highlight of our year was our seventh annual Omeda Idea Exchange, which took place in downtown Chicago in May 2024.

So we’re presenting out some of the biggest key takeaways from each session at OX7, along with full session videos and additional resources.

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Read on to learn from some of the media industry’s best and brightest, steal some ideas from our most successful clients, and see what you can expect at our next Omeda Idea Exchange this spring!

Adam Ryan, co-founder and CEO of Workweek (featuring Jacob Donnelly, Founder of A Media Operator)

Better together: how media companies can partner with experts to drive engagement and value in the post-platform era

• You can’t depend on your brand name to build an audience anymore. Now your audience expects five key pillars from your content: transparency, credibility, unique features and flairs of personality that will keep them coming back, information conveyed with relevant and context-specific language, and highly specific advice. (We summarized this here.)
• The shift to digital and the rise of SEO incentivized media teams to prioritize quantity over quality. But in the process, they lost sight of the real prize — creating a product and experience that audiences will love so much that they’ll incorporate it into their routines.

“The newspaper industry had such a habit with their audience,” Ryan says. “And everyone in the digital era said, ‘Well, I’m going to send 7 newsletters per week at 8 in the morning and that’s a habit.’ Wrong. Consistency is not a habit. A habit is a product. It’s an emotion. It’s something that people crave and look forward to.”

Check out the full session here.

Jacob Donnelly and Adam Ryan 

Amanda Landsaw, VP of Marketing at Endeavor Business Media

Building the audience team of the future

Amanda Landsaw told us how she’s helped scale Endeavor’s audience team from 9 to 23+ employees in the last five years, during which Endeavor has acquired 60+ brands and become the biggest B2B media company in America. Some of our biggest takeaways:

• Audience development is a central service. To really grow your business, you can’t silo your audience engagement efforts by brand. You need to have a cohesive, holistic and multi-channel strategy in place across your whole organization.
• Your teams can’t operate in silos. Especially as we transition to digital-first approaches, teams need to collaborate in real time to make sure the audience has one consistent, targeted and great experience.
• Privacy is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s essential and even more importantly, it’s a strategic lever to build your audience’s trust and loyalty. And everyone, from your CFO to your editorial team, has a responsibility for protecting your audience’s privacy.

“Audience development is not the sole responsibility of the audience development team. It has to be ingrained in the DNA of your company. Our audience, aside from our employees, is our most valuable asset. So how are we making sure that no matter the size of your company, no matter the role within your company, that the passion, the understanding and the respect for our audience is there?”  

Check out her full session here.

Amanda Landsaw

Kerry Smith, Division President of Access Intelligence and Jeff Stelmach, Global President of Spiro

Give them something to remember: Experiential marketing for media companies

Events are one of the most promising revenue opportunities for media companies in 2025. Smith and Stelmach told us how they’ve helped corporations like Oracle and Bud Light build events that create business impact — and how media companies can kickstart their own event strategies. Some key insights included:

• Even attendees from similar industries and demographics have different learning styles. Create programming targeted at each learning style to give each of your attendees more memorable, purposeful experiences.
• People increasingly want more immersive, personalized and convenient experiences. In the Freeman Trends Report, attendees said they valued immersive experiences, customized agendas and technology that makes it easier to navigate the event more than traditional event amenities like F&B and comfortable seating.
• Think beyond the standard conference offerings. Some examples: Oracle helped its attendees find best-fit connections more easily by helping them connect via a dedicated app, then letting them meet in an exclusive outdoor cafe outside of the event space. And Advisor Circle moved its wealth management conference from an indoor ballroom set up to a four-day outdoor festival in Huntington Beach, California.

Check out their session here.

Craig Fuller, Founder and CEO of Firecrown Media and FreightWaves Media

Two feet on the gas: How Craig Fuller has grown Firecrown Media into a high-flying media business

If you’ve been following media M&As, you know Craig Fuller’s been on a shopping spree. Since forming lifestyle brand Firecrown Media in 2021, the company has acquired FLYING Magazine, 25+ other aviation-related brands, and all of Bonnier’s marine-related assets. And recently it’s announced the formation of a new SaaS division called SONAR.

In this session, he told us how he grew FreightWaves and Firecrown Media, how he’s navigating a rapid growth phase, and how he’s using his media assets to broaden the influence of his brands. Here’s what he told us:

• Print still has a place. In a digitally saturated world, print gives people a rare opportunity to get truly lost in the content. Done well, print magazines are art pieces that your audience will savor and remember far longer than the flurry of digital articles they skim each day.
• Create differentiated strategies for your print and digital publications. Reserve your most important features and profiles for print, then use digital for daily news.
• Commerce-supported content is having a moment. So think outside of the box to drive additional revenue from your audience.

Check out his session here.

Dream team: How Questex combined insights and data to create a lean, mean go-to-market machine

Alexi Khajavi, President of Hospitality, Travel and Wellness at Questex and Rhonda Wunderlin, SVP of Performance Marketing at Questex

In this “back of the house/front of house presentation,” discover how Questex’s business and data teams worked together to create an unstoppable go-to-market machine. By combining its deep market knowledge with its audience database and off-site intent data, Questex was able to enhance its marketing segments, drive more actionable leads and ultimately, grow revenue.

Check out their session here.

Alexi Khajavi and Rhonda Wunderlin

Omeda client success stories

Throughout the event, our media industry clients told us about their biggest wins of the year – then walked through the workflows that helped them do it. Get the basics below, then click the links to each case study for step-by-step details.

• Virginia Business successfully pivoted from a free to paid subscription model by modernizing its audience development stack with Omeda.
• Gardner Business Media combined its Omeda first-party audience database with Zapier to score and activate their leads — and serve their advertising
• BNP Media won back 1,500+ paid subscribers with a personalized, multi-channel campaign across email, website and direct mail — and ran the whole thing from Omeda’s platform.
• Fusable combined its first-party data from Omeda with its Google Analytics data on reader engagement to surface best-fit targets for its ABM campaigns and drive more revenue.
• Endeavor Business Media used content recommendations in their re-engagement emails to surface content personalized to each individual’s past engagement, browsing and purchase history, which has helped them reactivate 500K subscribers and counting.
• Questex used Omeda’s integrated audience data platform to simplify its post-event survey process, collect more actionable audience feedback, and improve their event experiences.

Will we see you next year?

Early bird registration for our next Omeda Idea Exchange, taking place May 14-16, 2025, is currently open! Join us for three days of networking and learning with media industry leaders — and connect with your peers in the heart of Chicago. Learn more and register today.

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