A room full of the right people

The title of this post explains what makes for a great conference - and having the smarts to know who the right people to invite, along with the credibility to persuade them to spend time and money attending is what I believe makes Alphabet Media's events a little bit special.

Yesterday's Asian CCTV Summit was a bit of a humdinger, attracting over 100 CCTV operators and security buyers from around the region. Together with our speakers and four sponsors we had something like 125 bums on seats - and what genuinely surprised me was the fact that delegates stayed around for the whole day at the Grand Hyatt, rather than disappearing off during the middle of the afternoon, as I've seen happen at other conferences I've attended.

In fact I'm beginning to think that events organised by media brands (Asian CCTV Summit was organised by the Asian Security Review team) fare much better in the end-user (ie. buyer) community than those organised by dedicated conference companies and vendors. Why? Simply because we're closer to the market, understand the interest levels of our readers better, and benefit from having an opt-in, content-driven relationship with our magazines readers all year round.

Otherwise I'd have to attribute the success of Alphabet's events to that rather dashing botak moderator we keep using ...