In 2018, the Informa Pharma Intelligence editorial and marketing teams collaborated on the release of its annual white paper analyzing the evolution of pharma R&D for the past year. But this wasn't your typical medical or scientific report. It was more music to their audience's ears.

Informa has become an 800-pound gorilla in the business information space, thanks in large part to a two step-strategic plan. Part one was the Growth & Acceleration, in effect from 2014 to 2017, that saw the expansion of Informa through both organic growth and acquisition, including the $1.56 billion purchase of Penton in the U.S. and nearly $6 billion acquisition of UBM in June 2018. Overall reported revenue for 2018 jumped 34.9 percent to about $3 billion, with acquisitions and disposals contributing 35.4% growth (primarily due to the acquisition of UBM). 

Walking out of a sparkling production of The Music Man here last week, I was humming songs like Seventy-Six Trombones and Ya Got Trouble. That's said to be the sign of a memorable musical. It also might be the sign of a memorable, B2B event marketing video.

While the number of deals in the B2B Media & Technology category grew a healthy 27 percent to 80 transactions in the first nine months of 2018, deal value leaped 1,326 percent, thanks to several deals worth more than $1 billion, according the JEGI Q3 2018 M&A Overview. 

Terese Herbig was named president of EnsembleIQ’s The Path to Purchase Institute. Herbig will be tasked with driving the growth of the institute’s community through events and professional development services. She will also continue upholding her existing responsibilities as president of EnsembleIQ’s consultancy platform, Enterprise Solutions. Herbig has over three decades of experience and joined EnsembleIQ in 2014.

Informa’s Infrastructure Intelligence Division has tapped CFE Media’s ContentStream, a SaaS tool that takes existing publisher content and acts as a content feed for advertisers. Twenty-two Informa brands will be using ContentStream to provide news, education and how-to information in areas such as engineering, manufacturing, power, infrastructure How it works: as publishers develops editorial content, it’s stored in a cloud-based content stream database—including text, video, research­—and catalogued by keywords, industries, even performance of the content. CFE sells advertisers a feed to that content which allows them to log in, select topics and preview content, which is initially streamed to the advertiser’s website but can also be repurposed for blogs, newsletters and social media. Publishers can license Content Stream in the same manner for their own markets (more than 40 publications are currently using ContentStream from publishers such as ...

B2B powerhouse Informa has agreed to acquire  exhibitions giant UBM in a deal worth nearly $6 billion, including debt, reports the Financial Times (subscription required). The merger will create the largest operator of business events and exhibitions in the world.

This is the fifth of an ongoing series profiling the 2017 SIPAward winners.

While the number of mergers and acquisitions in the B2B Media & Technology space dipped 5 percent to 88 in 2016, the value of those deals soared 427 percent to $32.6 billion, thanks to a few key blockbuster deals, according to the Jordan, Edmiston Group's 2016 M&A Report.

While the b2b media and technology sector saw just two more deals in the first nine months of 2016 over the same period in 2015 (77 versus 75), deal value is up a whopping 475 percent this year thanks to several mega deals, most notably Microsoft's $29.5 billion purchase of LinkedIn but also Informa's $1.6 billion purchase of Penton in September, according to JEGI's quarterly M&A Update.