Earlier this month, Questex announced the creation of a “modern” information services model that leverages audience data to tie content and events closer together to create a year-round customer engagement framework.

The hope that live events would return in the fall is increasingly being replaced with the realization that many (if not most) conferences and trade shows in the U.S. will continue to be virtual or hybrids of online and in-person for the remainder of 2020 (last week Informa saw an 8 percent stock jump when it said select trade shows would resume in Asia but warned that live events in the U.S. won’t return until at least September). 

The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt the U.S and world economies a series of often unprecedented shocks—the “Great Lockdown” as economists refer to it, basically closed a wide-ranging sectors of the economy including service, travel, tourism and entertainment and many more, resulting in unemployment rates in the U.S. of more than 20 percent as of June 2020 and drastic revisions of worldwide economic growth for 2020 and 2021.

MidOcean Partners, which owns B2B media and information companies such as Questex and Hanley Wood|Meyers Research, has created an Employee Support Fund that offers financial assistance to employees of its portfolio companies during the coronavirus pandemic.    

As publisher events originally scheduled for the first and second quarters of 2020 migrate to a fall season already packed with existing conferences and trade shows, preserving original attendee and sponsorship budgets is no sure thing.