The company, with corporate headquarters in Irvine and Woodland Hills, is set to launch Agency at 1105. The new agency will put marketing services the business already offers under a formal title, to help clients with everything from media buying to social media and search engine optimization.
The group will join one of Orange County’s larger media companies. 1105’s portfolio includes a bevy of business-to-business media titles, as well as events and research and analytics that has transformed the company in recent years away from a legacy print publisher generating revenue off advertising and subscriptions through its physical products with its expansion of digital.
Much of 1105 Media’s work is focused on federal government and education IT, infrastructure and data and analytics. Some of the more than 55 brands it operates include publications such as Defense Systems, GCN, Redmond and Washington Technology.
Revenue’s projected to be up this year from 2020’s roughly $40 million, and so is profit. In fact, all five business groups under 1105 are each set to beat their numbers for the first and second quarter, according to President and CEO, Rajeev Kapur.
Central to all of that will be the content the company’s trade journals continue to produce.
“I think at the end of the day, the one thing that’s not going to change is that content is still going to be king,” Kapur said. “Those who continue to put out great content are going to be winners.”
Content is King
The Irvine resident said the company focuses on four pillars or—what he calls the four Cs.
“Content drives the community. Community drives commerce and commerce drives cash, so it’s really about the four Cs,” Kapur said.
To that end, the company will see additional podcast offerings for some of the company’s publications, keeping in line with the reality that, while content will remain king, as Kapur put it, how that content is consumed will continue to change.
About as much could be said on the events and education side of the business.
“I think the webinar, webcast, democast world is here to stay,” Kapur said.
“We’ve got great partners, great solutions. We’re doing a great job there. Email is still going to be here for a while. Email is still one of the best mediums to get your message out in front of your customers. We do a really great job on places like LinkedIn to push out our content. If you look at b-to-b social media, it’s not all that strong. We do really well on Twitter, but Instagram and Facebook, because they’re so broad-, consumer-based solutions – so TikTok, Snapchat—they don’t really work in the b-to-b world.”
Changing Times
The agency and podcasts are the latest in a multi-year journey for 1105 under Kapur, who immediately focused on what the future of the company’s print business would be, how to reduce debt and build the events and digital arms of the business when he took the top spot six years ago.
He took the company from a roughly 30% print business to as low as 5%, trimming costs by launching digital versions of magazines, switching paper stock and also reducing the number of magazine titles.
The segment, he said, is now “extremely profitable.”
Despite the pause on face-to-face events as a result of the pandemic, Kapur sees that portion of the business growing to be a sizable stream of revenue once in-person events come back next year for 1105.
Digital is the company’s fastest-growing business line with offerings such as webinars and webcasts. Kapur said the digital business is projected to grow anywhere from 10% to 15% this year.
The CEO was able to steer the business last year by cutting roughly 10% of the workforce. With management seeing early signs of what COVID could mean prior to the shutdowns, 1105’s executive team made a plan early on for the business, enabling it to move quickly once restrictions to business operations were put in place.
In the end, 2020 was the company’s second-best year after 2019, with some staff having been brought back out of furloughs, the CEO said.
In-Person Events
The one exception to that would be the staff handling in-person events with those still on hold, and the new normal is likely to include a mix when it comes to conferences and workshops.
“The hybrid model is here to stay,” Kapur said of what’s expected moving forward for events. That is, the roughly 20 large, multi-day in-person events the company hosts for anywhere from 500 to 1,000 attendees will likely resume in person once restrictions fully lift. Meantime, smaller, one-day events could likely see more virtual offerings continue even once the country is fully reopened.
“We’re now working with vendors on being able to stream some of those events, so I think we’ll be able to pick and choose what’s the most important [to keep virtual]. I think people will still want to come to face-to-face [events]…. The issue for this year is travel and entertainment budgets on the business side are challenged. Next year, some of that will come back,”
Most of the staff is still working from home until after the Fourth of July holiday when 1105’s offices are expected to reopen for employees to come in on a voluntary basis. About a third of the company’s workforce had already been working from home pre-COVID.
Thoughts on B2B
Ultimately, 1105 is bucking broader challenges for some legacy publications by evolving the way its content is produced, while also finding new forms of revenue for its business-to-business portfolio.
“B2B is not sexy. B2B is 9-to-5, Monday through Friday business, and people don’t realize that,” Kapur said as he spoke to the future of the media business.
“When was the last time someone went to a business website for fun? It doesn’t happen. That’s not a knock; it’s just the way it is. You’re not going to IBM’s website or Dell’s website or Microsoft’s website for fun. So, for us, how you consume the content is going to be really relevant.”
