ES. Give a brief overview of your background and your role in the company. What were the past experiences, achievement or lessons that shaped your journey as a successful leader in this industry?
Hugh Jones. My background prior to joining RX was already in RELX, running companies that lived and breathed digital and data – the largest being in the compliance space where we would manage huge datasets to help clients make better decisions, primarily in the anti-money laundering sector. In this sector, our purpose was very clear and that was and is to stop criminal behavior and sort out the good guys from the bad guys to make sure that only good guys are in our banking system. As you might expect, my teams came to work every day with a very clear purpose. They understood precisely what their contributions were and why they mattered. Here at RX, we are focusing on our sense of purpose. We build businesses. We bring magic. We bring purpose to others. Whatever happens, we will adapt, we will re-prioritize, we will respond. This is the new nimble culture that we have brought to RX since the pandemic.
It’s important to fail, experience failure and then cherish the learnings that come from it!
ES. Given your extensive experience, in what ways has your experience proven useful for RX in addressing challenges and understanding strategic issues?
Hugh Jones. The pandemic enabled us to fast-track many of our technological systems to complement the RX offering therefore enhancing the visitor and exhibitor experience, I’m well aware that true innovation has occurred at RX during these unstable times, and we continue to re-imagine the exhibition space in this ‘new normal’ – which is revitalising!
Today, technology takes the podium at RX, with its increasing role, we are creating new experience-led, innovation focused experiences for our customers – exhibitors and visitors alike!
In the present era of the evolved customer, I believe hyper personalisation, experiential marketing and multiple showcase options for our exhibitors to showcase their products to our visitors year round, all lead the way in the future of exhibitions but, as we know, as do many other event organisers, from the vast research we all conduct, the visitor experience is heavily influence by the basic, but hugely important, event necessities – these being; ease of registration, the temperature of the event space, catering options and ease of transport – so, as well as working on the latest cutting edge digital technology to aid both visitors and exhibitors alike to help them in building their businesses these items are also at the very top of our agenda at RX! We work with some of the best venues in the world, and it’s important we work closer than ever to ensure the visitor experience
with our digital technology, onsite features, conference programmes or indeed event washrooms is optimum!
In addition, my background at RELX, specifically in digital and data, has enabled RX to tap into a number of existing RELX assets and expertise across our business, in some cases adapting and customizing them for use in the events industry. For example, our revenue generating products lean on the following:
RELX’s screening capabilities for participants and sanction screenings for companies, ensuring in-person safe events while maintaining any necessary sanction compliance.
Our Exhibitor Dashboard delivers exhibitors insights including the performance of their digital assets and sales leads. Exhibitor Dashboard also provides benchmarking data against similar customer groups that drives specific actions for a more effective exhibitor experience. RX reused learnings from similar insight platforms from Lexis Nexus and Elsevier; identifying the key measures to deliver more value to our exhibitors.
ES. What are some major events organised by RX? Could you please share some of the highlights of your recent shows with us?
Hugh Jones. Be our guest – that’s what we are saying every time we open the doors to one of our RX events or encourage a visitor to open their laptop and log in to one of our virtual or hybrid event experiences. We are in the business of building businesses. One of our jobs here at RX, at the very top of the agenda, is to create valuable, memorable and magical ‘experiences’ for our visitors (and exhibitors) year-round, pre-event, onsite and post show. What can be more inspiring than bringing people face to face, supporting livelihoods and ultimately building businesses! That first moment when the doors open! Making something from nothing and seeing the result in real life, is the most magical thing we do. Our launch of the Femtech show in October was a huge success. The goal of the event was to help move us to a society to support women’s health and empowerment and the team at RX Japan delivered that perfectly.
ES. During the past few years, the exhibition industry, like the rest of the world, has undergone a lot of changes. What are the most significant changes you’ve witnessed during your time in the industry?
Hugh Jones. The past two years have seen an explosion of digital innovation across RX, as we have sought to keep our markets virtually connected and informed, and to explore the potential for digital and data to turbo-charge and enhance the power of face to face. Over the past two years we have produced more virtual events and used more online platforms across our portfolio than we have ever done in the past. We have access to more data than ever before, and our mission now is to turn that data into insights and offer customers the products that match their needs most. Our teams responded incredibly well to such massive disruption, and we were quickly able to demonstrate that you can augment face to face events with all sorts of truly impactful products.
To hit the ground running in 2021, we created our Global Digital Centre of Excellence to work as a world class, well-funded, highly skilled group for all show teams to draw upon, led by Gaby Appleton our Chief Digital Product Officer and our ambition is to help clients create the maximum value from face to face events; as well as to create more connections and business opportunities beyond the individual ‘moment’ of the face to face experience, opening up more doors for more customers and in more places, than ever before. We have generated a lot of learnings about what works from a digital event perspective in each of our sectors, and we will build on these insights to run even better virtual events in the future. For example, in Japan, our customers have told us that they would like to see virtual events run intermittently in between F2F events, and so we’re scheduling these accordingly, with support for meetings and matchmaking between buyers and suppliers.
ES. What are your upcoming plans in regards to your shows?
Hugh Jones. There are many opportunities. First and foremost, we have to learn that shows that were successful in the past, may not be successful in the future. For example a car show that shows just combustion engine cars will not be as relevant as a show that focusses on mobility as a whole with various modes of transportation.
In this business we all know that you can never rest on your laurels. It’s important to keep it fresh, place big bets and even more importantly to learn from failure! It’s important to fail, experience failure and then cherish the learnings that come from it! I want the industry and our teams at RX to place the big bets, look outside the box, speak out in confidence about the ideas they have, explore outside of the industries we work in. We should never fear failure but embrace it.
ES. Please share with us more about RELX Cares and its role in supporting employee volunteering and charitable giving.
Hugh Jones. September is Cares month at RX, when we join with our colleagues across RELX to focus on volunteering and fundraising – and to celebrate all those who selflessly devote their time to support our communities throughout the year. As part of RELX Cares, everyone within RX gets two full days paid leave each year to dedicate to their own community work, and many are inspired to get involved
during RELX Cares Month, with a special focus on RELX Cares Day, Thursday 22 September. RELX Cares is our global community programme which supports employee volunteering and charitable giving that makes a positive impact on society. Last year, 32% of RELX employees engaged in volunteering through RELX Cares (compared to an average volunteering rate of 8% for all sectors, according to Business for Societal Impact data). Together we contributed £20.6m to charities, encompassing cash, products, services and employee time but the benefits work both ways. 90% of RELX volunteers surveyed in 2021 said their motivation and pride in the company had increased as a result of volunteering, and 75% said their team spirit had increased as a result.
ES. What is your perspective on the role of sustainability in our industry? What practices can be adopted by the industry at large to promote the cause of sustainability?
Hugh Jones. Sustainability across our company and for our customers a priority. In January last year Helen Sheppard joined us from RELX as our company’s first Global Sustainability Director. In this newly created role, Helen and her team will focus on our commitment to the UFI Net Carbon Zero Event pledge. We’re a founding partner of the pledge, signed in November 2021, and commits the event industry to achieve net zero by 2050, at the latest, and halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, although our goal is to be net zero by 2040, in line with RELX’s objective.
Helen is developing a roadmap on what becoming Net Zero means to us at RX and for all of our show brands. Working closely with our event and operations leaders, and external partners such as the other companies who have signed the pledge, she is identifying and creating best practice for our own offices, the sectors we serve and our show production.
When we surveyed visitors last year, almost 2/3rds of them said sustainability has an important role in deciding whether they attend our shows or not. More and more of the sectors we are serving have a focus on sustainability and have been doing so for a while, this isn’t new. It hasn’t just risen up the agenda in the events industry it has risen up the agenda everywhere. At the beginning of this month we ran Batimat – a significant event in France for the construction industry. Sustainability is a big topic for that industry because it is a carbon intensive industry, and they are very aware of the need to decarbonize. And that realization is the same for many of our shows whether they are in travel, cosmetics, packaging, or manufacturing – we have lots of examples of what our sectors are doing and you should go read our Sustainability Series thought leadership on our website for more of those.
As an industry, we know that we also have to be addressing sustainability in the way we all run our shows, and we’re experimenting at RX with many areas, even small obvious areas such as reducing carpeting or using sustainable alternatives. Exhibitors too are using sustainability in their marketing at our shows. And in doing so, they want to ensure they live and breathe that sustainability messaging. It is important for them to consider their footprint when they exhibit especially if they do have sustainability messages aligned with their marketing. We need to help them with this, with sustainably sourced stands, which we actively pursue.
