A lot goes into the party mix when Canada’s biggest company throws its annual analyst conference: financial communications, hospitality and, of course, a healthy measure of showmanship. It’s BCE Inc’s CEO Business Review – the apotheosis of IR, the standard to aspire to. No detail is left unaccounted for, and there’s no room for error.
Hundreds of analysts and investors descend on Toronto for the day-long briefing, which last year graduated from cavernous hotel ballrooms to the St Lawrence Theater – relieving the audience of the analyst’s triple-curse: eye strain, ear strain and numb-bum.
Susan Herman is in her sixth year as organizer of the event – four years in-house at BCE and two as a consultant with Stylus, a Montreal communications boutique. Venue selection, she says, is the most important first step in organizing any IR event. ‘Are you doing a classroom setting with room to write, or a theater setting? If it’s an all-day session and you’re hosting a meal, are there seating accommodations and visual support for the lunch speaker?’
For BCE, Herman explains, a theater provided a more comfortable setting for the six-hour day. ‘Vision was clear, acoustics were great. The real bonus was that there was an intimacy created – even when the crowd gets over 350.’
The downside is that logistics multiply. A theater accustomed to classical music and political rallies may not have a hotel’s in-house services needed for registration, breakfast and lunch, for example.
Then there are union requirements, such as the proportion of union personnel to staff brought in by the organizers. Herman says pre-event meetings with these pros are needed to make them an integral part of the process. But when it comes down to the wire and everyone is ‘headphoned-in’ to cue the show, it’s her lieutenant who has overall say. ‘We would never select a venue where we cannot bring in our operators and run our own show.’
Location, location, location
Before selecting the venue, choosing the right geographic location can be a quandary. Herman notes that Toronto is the logical choice in Canada, even for Montreal-headquartered companies like BCE. And she makes sure the day’s schedule is set up so busy US-based investment professionals can fly in and out in the same day.
Tim Russell of Investor Relations Support in Boston comments: ‘We now find financial centers around the US getting more and more fragmented. 15-20 years ago, finance was centralized in a downtown location. And in Boston, New York or Chicago, everything is still centrally located. But look at Los Angeles or San Francisco, spread out all over the place. In Philadelphia, a lot of good money is now out in the western suburbs.’
‘You have to know where the money is,’ sums up Russell, who next looks to what kind of audiovisual support is needed to guide the choice of meeting room. Part of the service his company provides is to ‘advance’ the room, making sure it meets the event’s requirements.
Santiago Testa of Financial Roadshow suggests obtaining a floor plan of prospective meeting rooms or even sending someone to check. He recalls one unsuitable space where the audience had to sit in a pit with a raised area on three sides and a huge chandelier. That left nowhere to put a screen. Details such as these need to be checked before Testa can ‘spec out’ the equipment.
Simon Bruxner-Randall of London-based Imagination says he never relies on hotels to supply sound, lights or AV equipment because you can’t be certain they maintain it properly. So he has established relationships with specialist suppliers just about everywhere.
Some small meetings may not need a sound system but, as Russell says, ‘When in doubt, plan to have amplification.’ Moreover, ‘Sound is tricky. Really tricky.’ Wireless lavalière microphones are great for speakers who like to stalk around the stage, but they’re fraught with danger: New York meetings are often marred by the chatter of cab drivers coming over the sound system.
This is where testing the system beforehand is vital, safeguarding against interference or whining feedback. ‘If it’s an investment bank doing the roadshow, they may set up 20 minutes before a lunch meeting. But I guarantee you something’s going to go wrong then: slide projector, battery in the remote control, sound system… Murphy’s law is in force.’
The top priority is getting the right people to attend the meeting, accepts Russell, but you also have to pay a lot of attention to the details or the logistics can overwhelm you. ‘If you bumble around, it looks terrible and reflects badly on your company,’ he says, adding this footnote: ‘Don’t necessarily say everything about the company. That helps generate Q&A – in many respects the most important part of the meeting.’
Adding gloss
All the experts agree that rehearsal is crucial. The problem, sometimes, is convincing over-confident senior executives of the need for preparation. Justine Francis of Pres.co, a London-based communications agency specializing in new media and live events, suggests a dress rehearsal without an audience, then another to brief senior management before the actual live event.
She also advocates objective criticism. ‘If a company is in the spotlight – say acquiring a new business or listing – it should have someone external from the organization involved in communication training. It could be the most important presentation of your life, so you want to make the most of it. Not everyone does it, because they think they’re experienced enough. But you can always be better.’
Francis adds that a key decision in planning a presentation is simply which software to use. ‘If you want a really sexy presentation, use Authorware or Director. But if you want to change things at any moment, use Powerpoint even though it will not be as robust. It comes down to that decision: whether you want all the bells and whistles, singing and dancing, or total flexibility.’
Last July, when a client of Pres.co was doing a roadshow for its spin-off, the priority was flexibility. ‘They wanted to be able to change the presentation at a moment’s notice, all the way around the roadshow, but they also wanted video. With Powerpoint 97, we were able to have video run in the presentation but they could still change the slides at any time.’
Patrick Talamantes, treasurer of Sinclair Broadcasting, opted for Financial Roadshow’s proprietary software to support his CEO and CFO – admittedly not as technically savvy as he is – in their round of investor presentations. ‘Unlike a Powerpoint presentation, where if you push the wrong button all of a sudden you’re in Windows, this is a canned program where you can hit only three keys. As a result you can’t be made to look silly up on stage, and need to get somebody’s help to get back on track. My CEO and CFO loved it.’
Devil in the detail
Sometimes the subtlest element of a movie’s set or soundtrack prompts the thought, ‘Did they plan that?’ In fact, you can be sure they did. And the same attention to detail is routinely demanded by financial presentations. Spotlight or subdued lighting? High stage or low? Or even music at the walk-in: ‘It’s essential,’ says Santiago Testa. ‘You don’t notice it, but it really supports the experience. It’s subtle but of value.’
Interestingly, different audiences react differently to these subtleties. For instance, Pres.co’s Francis has noticed that South Africans love multimedia, and South African clients always have music accompanying their presentations. But when they get to London and do a presentation for the City, the music gets switched off.
Testa has another twist. ‘Nine presentations out of ten, with a good half hour before the start and key people assembling, the only thing up on the screen is a corporate logo. What a golden opportunity to have something on-screen, setting the stage and getting a captive audience focused.’ His solution is animations that ‘get to the essence without being specific. That goes a long way toward creating understanding.’
Report card
After weeks or maybe months of preparation, programming and rehearsal, a presentation is over all too fast. In the case of BCE’s annual analysts’ day, Stylus conducts a follow-up survey, rating everything from visuals and support to the presentation skills and content of each of the seven speakers. ‘Hosting is important on both ends,’ says Herman. ‘It’s important that you greet people well, but also that you send them off well. Thank them for coming, give them their parting gift, and make sure they hand in their survey – sort of an exchange,’ she jokes.
A new element of BCE’s analyst day in 1999 will be a video web-cast, following an audio-only web-cast last year, and after web-casting the annual meeting for the last three years. That means still more preparation. As Financial Roadshow’s Testa comments, ‘There’s more of a risk of failure with broadcast technologies such as web-casts. And the burden of visual support becomes greater.’
For one thing, make sure you have enough ‘stream’, or bandwidth, for a web-cast. Teleglobe, the Canadian telecoms giant, got into trouble this winter with a press conference web-cast that jammed when too many participants tried to sign on.
While web-casts have become widespread in North America, they’re still viewed with some mistrust in the UK and Europe. But Pres.co’s Francis says the status quo is changing fast. Vodafone, for example, recently broadcast its results presentation over the web with great success, paving the way for other companies to try it.
‘It’s a fantastic new way of communicating, enabling IROs to broaden the shareholder base they’re targeting,’ Francis says. ‘But it also changes the presentation, and I don’t think that we are going to see live presentations completely disappearing.’
She explains that as traditionally closed analyst meetings are opened to new audiences, the need for personal, one-on-one contact is going to increase. ‘Analysts are no longer going to feel as comfortable asking certain questions in front of fund managers or the rest of the world. So conference calls and web-casts are going to become more broad and generic, while analysts will want the opportunity to be there in person, to go up to the finance director or CEO and ask their question. They don’t want to ask it in the round, they want to be the one who gets that piece of information that no-one else has.’
Herman believes that live annual meetings may one day be extinct as web-casts and their cost benefits take root. ‘Companies are beginning to realize that a web-cast can increase their audience five-fold, and they don’t have to feed them all.’
But in the meantime, there’s no replacement for face-to-face contact at live IR presentations: ‘That touchy-feely contact, catching someone as they’re walking down the hall, getting an audience with someone who’s impossible to see,’ she concludes. There’s nothing like it.
