B2B Presence » Follow Friday

Anil Aggarwal Brings Deep Market Knowledge to Another Growing Event

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 21:12:36 +0000

During the last several years, many of my colleagues in the business of producing events have been pessimistic, at best, about the prospects for large new trade shows. Anil Aggarwal is one who has proved them wrong. Anil has leveraged his knowledge of the payments industry and his deep understanding of the commercial trade show business to create and sell two major trade shows, the Prepaid Card Expo, and Money20/20. Now he’s building another empire, Shoptalk, an event that charts the current disruption of the retail and ecommerce markets. Given Anil’s deep understanding of this market, you can expect this conference to deliver on its promised 7500 attendees, this coming spring.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/anildaggarwal
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adaggarwal/

Sally Shankland, Moving On After a Long Journey from MFP

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 29 May 2015 15:49:43 +0000

Many of us who joined Miller Freeman Publications in the late 80′s (Fun fact: there was one fax machine for the entire company) have fond memories of working there. It was like attending grad school for business media, except they paid you. It was a smallish company and you knew everybody and they were open to acquisitions, startups, or any crazy idea you could come up with. One of those acquisitions was Healthcare Media, and National Sales Manager Sally Shankland. Healthcare Media was alway a bit more “professional” than the rest of MFP. Sally exemplified this professionalism and rose through the ranks as planet MFP was slowly sucked into black hole UBM. She joined CMP Healthcare Media in 1996. She moved to UBM in 2007 as CEO of UBM Medica and was named CEO of UBM Connect in 2012. She has also served as

a member of the board of directors of the Society of Independent Show Organizers. Now she’s leaving UBM, after 28 years with the company. She’s spent the last 8 months as the CEO of UBM Americas, during which the London-based parent company abruptly announced an “events first” strategy. I don’t think any MFP graduate would be excited about this strategy–we believed in the “3-legged stool” of print, online, and event media. Now Sally’s going to take her stool, and 28 years of great experience, somewhere else.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sally-shankland-5202183
Company: http://ubmamericas.com/

Alan Meckler, Indefatigable Entrepreneur, Event Impresario, and Web Shaper

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 19:34:10 +0000

Before there was “The Internet,” there was Alan Meckler, Mecklermedia and Internet World. This trade show and publishing empire enveloped and exploded with the dot-com hysteria that consumed almost everything in the late 90′s. In one of history’s shrewdest examples of “getting out while the getting is good,” $274 million of Penton Media money gave Alan Meckler the fuel he needed to continue playing king-maker to this very day. In the same time period, Penton has gone from new media sweetheart to the Pets.com of print: bankrupt, downsized, merged, and again, and again. I was privileged to see an Internet World P&L in 1999, and the bottom line was staggering. If the dot-com era had lasted 3 more years, the world would be calling Penton CEO Tom Kemp heroically visionary. That’s the breaks. Alan Meckler continues on, as Chairman of the Board and CEO of WebMediaBrands. His twitter feed is symphony of bravado, credit-taking, breathless speculation, and “did he really say that” asides focusing on the highest levels of media. His acquisition of Media Bistro allows him to play the role of real-life media insider. Not to be missed.

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alan-meckler/12/396/30b
Company: http://www.webmediabrands.com/
Blog: http://weblogs.jupitermedia.com/
Twitter: @alanmeckler

Chris Anderson, TED Curator, Entrepreneur, Idea Spreader, Etc.

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 22:43:40 +0000

Few conference programmers can legitimately call themselves “curators.” Chris Anderson can. With a strong background in journalism, publishing and business, Anderson grew Future Publishing in the UK, sold it and moved on to the California tech boom in the 90′s, founding Imagine Media. I remember watching the Imagine empire grow in California during the dot-com boom. They always had great billboards along Highway 101 south of San Francisco. Imagine created Business 2.0 magazine, a seminal journal of the internet explosion, also the popular games website IGN, and over 100 other publications. In 1996, his success allowed him to create the private nonprofit Sapling Foundation, with the goal of tackling tough global issues by leveraging media, technology, entrepreneurship, and ideas. In 2001 got the conference bug, acquired TED and the rest is history. TED is what every business events should be: focused, passionate, and uncompromising about quality content. Plus, it’s mostly free to anyone with a browser. TED’s presenter guidelines, known as the TED commandments, will be useful to anyone recruiting speakers, especially if you’ve got talkers who are burned out or new to the game. There are a lot of ways to follow Chris: On twitter @tedchris, on the TED website, here’s a great interview with Chris on TED.com, here’s his Wikipedia page