June 2005
Best Practices: In living color

Live edition of Chain Leader magazine generates pages and profits

By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor

Two bugaboos aggravate attendees at food service industry events, according to Chain Leader magazine (www.foodservice411.com) Publisher Ray Hermann: “badges chasing badges” and sponsored food that’s poorly prepared and plated. So when Chain Leader Live launched on Sept. 12–14, 2004, at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside in New Orleans, LA, he made sure the 140 restaurant chain executives who came would be appeased.

“There are too many events with suppliers chasing after the attendees. We didn’t sell registrations to suppliers,” Hermann says. “The only ones who could attend were the sponsors. Limiting sponsor attendance kept down the number of folks trying to make contact with the restaurant operators.”

As for the food service, Hermann hired a culinary expert to concoct recipes using the sponsors’ products and work alongside hotel staff to ensure the dishes were executed as planned. “The idea was, when the operators left, they would say they’d never been to an event that had food as good as this,” he says.

Six months after Chain Leader Live, attendees surveyed rated the event’s performance a 4 on a scale of 1–5.

Produced by Reed Business Information’s Chicago-based Foodservice and Hospitality Group, Chain Leader Live was conceived at a time when the magazine’s advertising pages had risen 41 percent in three years, compared with an industry average decline of 23 percent. Hermann attributes the upward momentum to award-winning content, which has been recognized for editorial excellence by the American Society of Business Publication Editors and Folio Magazine.

Given the already crowded field — TSNN.com lists 107 restaurant and food service trade shows — Hermann planned to differentiate Chain Leader’s show by staging a “live edition” of the magazine.

“Most of our competition goes to the unit-level operators. We go to the top guys, so our focus is case studies on successful strategies,” says Editor in Chief Mary Chapman. “We formatted the conference similarly, with restaurant chain operators in breakout sessions discussing their own success stories.”

Instead of a conference program, Chain Leader Live had a table of contents. Instead of a keynote, it had an editorial. And instead of sessions, it had features and departments, such as “Brand Tactics” and “On the Money.” Moderated by contributing editors, panelists were the chain leaders themselves, sharing first-hand accounts of execution strategies.

Because there was no exhibit hall to distract them, and supplier registrations were restricted to sponsoring company representatives, attendees interacted freely and networked extensively. “The chain operators felt they could talk without being barraged by people wanting to sell them something,” Chapman says.

To make this nontraditional format payoff, Hermann crunched the numbers and came up with a formula based on a scientific wild guess. He priced attendee registrations at $600 per person, with discounts for early birds and multiples. He priced principle sponsor packages at $50,000, including a six-time advertising schedule, two-time product usage at food-and-beverage occasions, and four complimentary registrations for company representatives (two more could pay $850 per person to attend). Senior sponsors would pay $25,000 for six ads, one product usage and two comps (plus one additional paid).

Though selling six sponsorships did generate revenue and 25 previously unscheduled advertising pages for the print edition, landing Land O’ Lakes as a title sponsor made the formula work.

“That gave us the grubstake to find second- and third-level sponsors to fill in the rest of the revenue stream,” he says. “Our goal was to break even. We made better than what Reed Business Information targets for margins on well-established events.”

Hermann asked not to be quoted on the actual figures for profit margin and title sponsorship, but he boasts that Chain Leader Live will generate 15 percent of the brand’s gross revenue within five years. If his scientific wild guess pays off, the live edition will add both pages and profits to the print edition.