Computerworld Media Kit

This week I had a chance to attend the CEMA Summit in Las Vegas.  This event attracted more than 200 event marketing professionals from around the country.  As a speaker in the Peer 2 Peer session on Proprietary Events, I heard a lot of questions around how to successfully produce local or regional events and what secrets there are to attracting Sr. level attendees.

As I explained to those in attendance, the most consistent feedback I hear from CIOs and Sr. IT Managers, when talking about the many invites they get to attend these types of events, is “don’t expect me to attend an event, if the content is nothing more than what I can get by picking up the phone and asking for a meeting with your organization, on my time, and on my agenda.”  In other words, if the value you lead with is about product or appears to be “pitchy,” there’s no reason for them to attend.  While this might seem elementary, Computerworld research conducted in the last year indicated that those in Sr. IT Management positions spend less than 4 hours on average per week with vendors, with the majority of that time being spent with incumbent vendors.  

One of the many advantages to partnering with Computerworld to produce a local or regional event (beyond leveraging the affinity the Sr. IT Management community has for our brand) is that we’re in constant contact with our audience.   As we gain an understanding of what ROI and ROO metrics a vendor organization wants to achieve, we marry this to our deep understanding of the audience you’re trying to appeal to.  The result is a turn-key program with a compelling, peer based agenda that allows our vendor partners to be viewed as thought leaders on topics that identify with a pressing need expressed by our audience, and a promise to attendees that their investment of time will provide them with actionable ideas they can bring back to their own organizations for immediate implementation.  

Coupled with Computerworld’s unparalleled access to the Sr. IT Management community, we’ve successfully produced hundreds of events for a wide variety of IT vendors looking to engage with this difficult to reach audience.