Glasgow City Marketing Bureau (GCMB) today (29 November) launched a new service offering for professional conference organisers (PCOs) designed to harness the city’s resources and £4.5m marketing budget to increase income streams for the PCOs and their events.
Launching the ’You 1st’ initiative at meetings tradeshow EIBTM in Barcelona, GCMB Chief Executive Scott Taylor, told a press conference that the approach would, in the future, create for organisers something they´d never had before.
“Like Apple, we’ve put a lot of investment into R&D in order to put organisers at the heart of this business.”
Examples given by Taylor of You 1st at work were medical conferences being helped to spread their diagnostic work to the streets of Glasgow and connect fully with all stakeholders and transferring knowledge, including to the public at large.
The Diabetes UK conference in Glasgow had already helped raise awareness of that particular illness and its staff had referred several dozen newly-diagnosed cases to the NHS for treatment during their event.
Taylor said more conferences would be profitable and new audiences built thanks to You 1st, with many legacies created in the process.
The Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre’s (SECC) Director of Sales Ben Goedegebuure also updated the European trade press on work on the new Hydro arena, currently being built adjacent to the SECC in Glasgow.
He said work was on schedule for a September 2013 opening for the 13,000-capacity live events venue.
Another, fourth hotel would be constructed on site bringing the total rooms available to 450.
Goedegebuure revealed energy company Scottish Hydro had paid £1.5m a year for its 10-year sponsorship deal. He described the deal as “substantial” and the biggest such sponsorship deal in Scotland.
Taylor also said Glasgow was confirming, on average, a conference a day and its meetings and events business for 2012 had already hit £140m for the first seven months, already ahead of the £120m earned in 2011 and heading for a 60 per cent uplift in revenues by year end.
The big investment in the city’s conference business, said Taylor, was proving to be a “smart use” of the community’s money.
Any conference-related news? Email pcolston@mashmedia.net
