Lights, camera, CEO?
In a tiny corner of South Boston, Canada's Thomson Corp. has developed an increasingly lucrative business webcasting presentations for companies that want to communicate yet cut travel costs
With his factories spread out from Mexico to China to Finland, Kemet Corp. chief executive Per-Olof Loof can't assemble all his troops in one place.
Instead, four times a year the head of the South Carolina electronics components maker stands before a group of several hundred employees and has the event webcast to thousands of others worldwide, translated into four languages.
The live webcasts are productions of a Boston division of Thomson Corp., and one reason the Canadian financial information company can afford its pending $17.5 billion purchase of news and data provider Reuters Group PLC. Thomson charges more than $100,000 per event, in some cases, to create live videos of executives and present them online with financial charts, flashy graphics, and music.
Loof said the costs are worth it to explain changes to his troops. "In today's world you need to be honest and clear with your people," Loof said, and fill presentations with substantive material. If workers are going to sit still for a 45-minute presentation, he said, "It can't just be corporate da-da-da stuff."
Such thinking has driven the growth of Thomson's big presence in Boston, which generates about $1 billion in revenue a year, or half of the revenue of its Thomson Financial division. Much of the Web-related work is done by employees housed in a series of renovated brick buildings between Congress Street and Seaport Boulevard, a workforce the company says has grown to about 1,400 people.
Last summer, director Martin Scorsese used the structures as backdrop for several violent scenes in his film "The Departed," a detective story built around tales of old Boston grudges.
But today the buildings house a business that's firmly part of new Boston's economy, with about 4,500 clients, including Boston Scientific Corp. of Natick and PepsiCo Inc.
The roster makes Thomson the largest business webcast provider in the world, according to the company and researchers who follow the area; Thomson counts more than 450 of Fortune 500 companies as clients. It picked up many of those clients when it purchased CCBN Inc. of Boston in 2004. A chief competitor is also in Massachusetts, Shareholder.com of Maynard, part of the Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. of New York.
The popularity of the corporate webcast was underscored when Apple Inc. chief executive Steve Jobs introduced the new iPhone before the cameras in January: the event has been downloaded more than 2 million times, according to Mike Piispanen , a Thomson Financial senior vice president. Thomson didn't handle that event. But since 2001, the company has arranged more than 100,000 other corporate webcasts of events like new product launches or investor presentations. On May 10, for instance, Thomson says it ran online events for more than 400 companies with around 18,000 individual viewers, a typical demand from investors at the peak of corporate earnings season. "If you webcast it, they will come," says Piispanen .
The question now is what role the division might play following the merger, a subject Thomson spokesman Jason Stewart said the company would not address. Reuters representatives did not return messages for this article.
Steve Vonder Haar, research director of Interactive Media Strategies, a Texas consulting company, said the Boston unit's challenge will be to continue to grow as business video becomes as common as memos. The popularity of YouTube.com is another reason executives are more comfortable with the concept, he said, though few companies want to post their internal communications on the freewheeling public site.
"In the wake of YouTube, people are finally recognizing that online video works," Vonder Haar said.
Corporate webcasts look much different than what many expected five years ago, when there was talk of companies making their annual shareholder meetings online-only events to improve public access and lower travel costs. Few wound up doing so, partly for fear they would be seen as shutting off critical comments from shareholders, said Broc Romanek, editor of TheCorporateCounsel.net.
Instead, many hire Thomson to create webcasts as annual meeting supplements. Michael Gallant, a spokesman for data-storage maker EMC Corp. of Hopkinton, for instance, said attendance at the company's annual meeting has fallen from around 2,000 people in 2000 and about 600 in 2002 to around 200 people today. The drop, he said, is probably due in part to shareholders gaining access to the event through Thomson's work.
Thomson executive Mike Cotter said another reason for the company's growth has been public companies seeing webcasts as a way to meet the Securities and Exchange Commission's "Fair Disclosure" regulation barring them from telling only selected individuals details about their business prospects.
A third area is internal communications companies make with their employees, as in the case of Kemet Corp. The business got started in 2002 when Thomson client Sears, Roebuck & Co., hired CCBN to produce a live video of an executive's speech to employees about a re organization.
These live events require more technical skill to produce compared to prerecorded events, Cotter said, and more backup systems to protect against the unexpected power outages or cable breaks. Later this year Thomson will finish up a $2 million operations center downtown with equipment to encode video signals into Web formats, making them easier to post on company networks.
The investment is needed to get to the quality that employees and investors expect from a webcast, Piispanen said. "This business grew up on the live event, and that's hard to do. Anyone can take a tape, go into a lab, encode it, and then host it. That's easy. What's hard is to do that live," he said.
Ross Kerber can be reached at kerber@globe.com. 