Los Angeles-based Evvnt has developed an automated event-marketing calendar that publishers can use to manage events, automating what was once a time-consuming, complex, and expensive task, and funneling revenue from event marketers straight to publishers.
The Web-based tool has been six years in the making. Events Calendar licensing in the US “is a $40-million industry — events, calendars and data — and it doesn’t work,” Evvnt CEO Richard Green told News & Tech. “But newspapers have to have events. Traditionally in the events industry there is zero revenue, and only a cost line.”
The Evvnt platform, he said, aims to take the expense and headache out of local event marketing and gives newspapers the opportunity to generate revenue by capitalizing on technologies including voice search, reverse publishing-to-print, e-newsletters and more. “We can get events into newspapers and fully syndicated across the Web,” Green said. In addition to providing quality event calendars, Green said Evvnt can also help newspapers by reinforcing the idea that local newspapers are still the best place to find and submit events online and in print.
GateHouse Media and Hearst are among the company’s newspaper clients. Hearst began using the platform in December 2016 at the San Francisco Chronicle. “We’re selling event syndication and bundling it with our owned and-operated product suite,” Franc Coleman, director of digital advertising operations for Hearst Digital Media, told N&T. “For us this is filling a void in event marketing, as we’ve never had a hard focus on it before.”
Coleman said Evvnt has been a great fit for the Chronicle and that he believes all newspaper publishers stand to benefit from the platform. “It’s easy to bundle with our current offerings and we’ve seen a decent profit,” he added.
How it works
Organizers submit their events, which are amplified across thousands of sites. Using geo-locational and category-specifc tools, events can be tailored to target to ideal audiences on their preferred platforms. Finally, Evvnt uses trusted search engine publishers and keywords to elevate organic SEO visibility.
Green said he wants his company to be instrumental in reinvigorating local event attendance. In fact, Green is so confident in the platform that he said he believes early adopter newspapers will realize revenues of $100,000 to $1 million in 2019.
The Evvnt platform was displayed at Inland Chicago 2018 and was named as December winner of the News Media Alliance’s “New(s) Ideas” contest –
Watch the presentation to see why we won!
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