In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, Tufts poli-sci professor Daniel Drezner justified his attendance of an in-person conference that will take place this weekend by claiming it will allow him "to see old friends, but also to meet new colleagues."
Despite the health risks posed by attending, Drezner wrote, "my benefits far exceed my risks."
Five thousand of Drezner's colleagues disagree.
The conference he will attend normally attracts 7,500 attendees. But only 2,500 poli-sci professors have registered—and many are cancelling, as opening day approaches.
Live event organizers in every field ought to take notice: poli-sci professors represent the canary in the coal mine.
Poli-sci professors, after all, aren't fools: they're experts in risk-benefit analysis. And two of three have rendered their judgement: the conference simply isn't compelling enough to ignore the dangers.
Vanity costs money and is a long way leading nowhere.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Planners of scientific and medical meetings are captivated by yet another band-aid fix for flagging attendance: vaccine passports.
Vaccine passports will bring back the crowds, they insist.
But one such planner, Ben Hainsworth, has called vaccine passports a "red herring." Planners should instead be focused on their value proposition.
“If we have vaccine passports, but we are still thinking about events in the same way we did in 2019, the recovery will be a big flop," Hainsworth says. "We need to think about the unique value of face-to-face and start re-pitching and redesigning our meetings."
It's no surprise scientific and medical meeting planners love vaccine passports. For daydreamers like them, vaccine passports are the panacea of the month. Naysayers like Hainsworth are simply that—naysayers.
But is he? I think not. When you consider their elements, today's scientific and medical meetings offer attendees little of real value: they draw no leading practitioners, provide no unpublished research, and appeal to practically no one but job-hunters. Why would they recover after the pandemic?
I saw these gatherings lose their value long ago, while working for scientific and medical meeting planners back in the '90s.
A smug bunch, the planners I worked for clung vainly to the status quo, repeating tired formulas and delegating the crucial work of program-design to volunteers. Content to live in the "fairyland" of federally subsidized science and medicine, they denied that meeting attendance was declining—geometrically—and that my research was showing first-world practitioners found their events irrelevant.
Two real-world movements drove the decline and irrelevancy: open science and managed care. But these vain planners would have none of it. They bristled when presented with the fact that their events were subsisting on job-hunters, grad students, and a few third-world practitioners, while pointing with pride to their swelling exhibit halls, a boon to hospitals in search of equipment. But there were hidden economic pressures on equipment-makers, too, thanks both to managed care and the inherently unaccountable nature of tradeshow exhibiting.
Flash forward to 2021 and the chickens have come home to roost. The pandemic has already up-ended meeting planners' reality and experts are predicting that by 2025 the world will be a world of "tele-everything." Practitioners, yearning for safety and convenience, will work from their homes and private offices, travel less frequently, and make few forays into public spaces. Live scientific and medical meetings may be nothing more than a pale memory.
Too bad there's no vaccine for vanity.
HAT TIP: Thanks go to Warwick Davies, principal of The Event Mechanic! for alerting me to Ben Hainsworth's remarks.
A meeting I attend—online, of course—begins every week with an insufferable icebreaker, a long round of introductions the point of which is to clarify everyone's pronouns of choice.
Tell me, who was first responsible for virtue-signalling via pronouns? Because I'd like to murder him. Or her. Or them.
Want the perfect meeting icebreaker? "Everyone please tell us in four or five words what value you add."
Virtue-signalling via "inclusive" pronouns, I can assure, adds no value; in fact, it destroys value. My time's limited. Please don't waste it with pronouns, when you should be telling me how youjustify your existence.I don't care that you might be "gender fluid." And I care less you're a hero of the "wokeing class." I just want to know why are you here?
Recall some grammar: personal pronouns substitute for a specific person or persons. The personal pronouns are: I, we, you, he, she, and they.
Simple.
Recall also, there are indefinite personal pronouns; they substitute for no person specifically. The indefinite personal pronouns are: all, another, anybody, anyone, each, everybody, everyone, few, many, nobody, none, one, several, some, somebody, and someone.
Again, simple.
Virtue-signalling via pronouns—let's call them "PC pronouns"—screws with grammar—and your head.
Worse yet, it promotes what philosopher Martin Heidegger called the "dictatorship of the they" (Diktatur des Man).
Heidegger believed that, when you use indefinite personal pronouns, you unconsciously surrender to what's socially acceptable—to what's PC.
When you refer to yourself as, say, "everybody" ("Everybody knows TikTock is stupid") you are surrendering your authentic self—your individuality—and submitting to an invisible authority, to the "dictatorship of the they."
According to Heidegger, indefinite personal pronouns secretly control the masses.
PC pronouns do, too.
I'm not just my genitals. And I'm not just he or she or they or X.
Luxury retail is dog-eat-dog. Unlike event producers, players in the business must stay ahead of audiences to survive. That's why they're hyper-focused on consumer trends.
To survive in luxury retail, the report says, you must satisfy "individualized and transformative forms of luxury consumption" that deliver a cosmopolitan and existentialist jolt.
"More consumers are becoming aware of the isolating effect of social media ‘echo chambers.'" the report says. "This is accompanied by a growing desire to not only broaden personal horizons, but to find purpose and cultivate empathy for others while doing so."
Consumers' craving for self-actualization manifests itself in these five trends—five trends event producers would do well to acknowledge:
The Quintessential Self.Luxury brands that abet self-discovery are hot. For just $3,500, Maverick Helicopter’s Yoga in the Desert will whirl you by helicopter from Las Vegas to Valley of Fire State Park for a 75-minute yoga class.
No-Frills Chic. Luxury brands that shout "simple" are hot. For just $140,000, Airstream will sell you a camper trailer you can haul into the woods.
Premium Redeemed.Luxury brands that better the planet are hot. For just $2,125, you can stay a night in Nekupe, a posh resort in Nicaragua’s countryside that helps local farmers earn a living without the slash-and-burn technique.
Extravagance on Demand.Luxury brands that harness phones are hot. For just $3, Recharge lets you book a high-end hotel room in New York City by the minute.
Customized. Luxury brands that are personalized are hot. For just $169, DNA Unwrapped lets you plan vacation trips based on your chromosomes.
A body in motion stays in motion; a body at rest stays at rest.
— Isaac Newton
Most B2B events are tired, creaky and ridiculous. And it's no accident. Most event producers are lazy.
Decades of easy money have made them that way.
That's not to say they're the only lazy businesspeople you'll encounter. Laziness surrounds us—and runs rampant in industries where easy money once was made. Banking. Stock trading. Real estate. IT. Retail. Advertising.
Ad exec Mitch Joel—who calls laziness not sloth, but self-approval—laments what he sees in his own industry. "There is no doubt that certain strategies and tactics work, but it's the lazy mentality that has got me down these days," he says.
Folks in advertising, Joel says, are allergic to "long, hard and disruptive work." They're unwilling to wake up in the morning and say, "Today is a great day! We're going to destroy what doesn't work, test more things, tweak others, build newer metrics, and keep at it." You might say they need some woke.
A lot of businesspeople need some woke. Instead, they're imbibing hype.
Hype is particularly dazzling to event producers, says event planner Warwick Davies, who's down on the hype-of-the-month: event tech. Event tech promises panaceas, but really offers little more than quick-fix "gimmicks," Davies observes. Gimmicks won't resurrect a dead event.
"Sure, there are some tools and processes which will make your event more efficient and easier," Davies says, "but none will fix an event which is poorly conceived, researched, and not wanted by your prospective audience."
No silver bullet can substitute for long, hard. disruptive work.
"If your philosophy about how to create a valuable event is wrong, there’s no amount of technology that is going to save you," he says.
The US Census Bureau reports 74 million people belong to Gen Z. In just three years, they'll represent 40% of attendees.
Their intolerance of passivity makes the rest of us look like sheep; so does their penchant for social media activism.
And therein lies both the problem and the solution, says Skift.
No longer can you deliver your grandfather's conference and expect Gen Z to stand for it—or sit through it.
“If it’s not interactive, they’re not going to stay at the meeting,” planner Cindy Lo tells Skift. “They need to be entertained and they’re looking for those Instagramable moments.”
But if you try only to razzle-dazzle Gen Z members, Lo says, you'll fail. You have to razzle-dazzle them authentically. And you have to do it long before they'll even register.
And you have to do it long before they'll even register, because they judge a conference's real values before deciding to engage.
“Gen Z can sniff out fake so fast,” Lo says.
But how do you avoid appearing "fake?"
One way: avoid interruptive calls-to-action like "Tweet this!” in your marketing. Gen Z members understand marketing better than previous generations and abhor tacky commands.
Another: be Instagramable in your marketing. Use tons of imagery to promote your event, keep your copy short, and make both mobile-friendly. You'll not only convert more Gen Z members into attendees, you'll turn them into advocates for your brand.
Events may at long last have the CMO's attention—deservedly so, since they consume up to 60% of the marketing budget at most B2B companies.
That's because event tech is transforming the analog meeting into a full-scale "digital production."
So much so, CMOs now face a formidable "event tech stack," a digital gauntlet comprising CRM systems; email delivery platforms; event websites; online communities; registration systems; event personalization platforms; onsite networks; session scanning and survey tools; audience engagement, second-screen, and polling systems; beacons and sensors; games; event apps; lead retrieval systems; learning management systems; social media suites; analytic suites; and vendor sourcing and travel management systems.
That's a ton of tech to choose from and "B2B marketers sometimes need 12 different tools to run an event," says Alon Alroy, CMO of Bizzabo.
A new conference launches this month to help marketers tackle the stack.
Transform USA promises to help attendees develop a "coherent data and digital strategy," according to its founder, Denzil Rankine.
Geared to event producers, Transform USA offers "practical takeaways for their strategies for their organizations, and for the partnerships that they should be operating," Rankine recently told Convene.
But without a strong business-first philosophy—asking of every piece, "How does this serve our marketing goals?"—a CMO could easily find herself overpowered by the event tech stack.
It's National Etiquette Week—the ideal time to start a midair brawl. Will the surge in incivility on planes and in airports dampen meeting travel?
It doesn't take much to do so. The SARS epidemic clobbered tradeshow attendance in the early 2000s. (I can recall vividly that the epidemic was the sole topic of discussion at UFI's 2003 summer meeting). Unlike SARS, incivility is a uniquely American disease. When it comes to air travel, it seems we have two modes: fight or flight.
If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings."
― Dave Barry
Why must attendees―and the rest of our species―stultify, when great meeting designs abound?
An "elementary" meeting maps a familiar event onto the meeting. The familiar event―for example, a holiday dinner, a wedding, a court trial, an autopsy, a science experiment, or a club outing―functions like a metaphor.
Participant-driven A participant-driven meeting lets attendees pick topics. Post-Its are distributed during breakfast that let attendees "crowdsource" topics. The impromptu approach may feel chaotic, but 25 years of research has shown over half the topics offered at conferences are irrelevant to attendees.
Small niche
The small niche meeting―the opposite of the industry convention―connects 100 people or fewer through a "micro event" where they don't waste a moment's time navigating crowds of strangers, or listening to motivational lectures they won’t remember in a week.
Short plenary
The short plenary is a TED-style or "lightning” talk. The format is doubly effective when paired with a follow-on breakout (or breakouts) with the speaker. Learning and action
Adding a facilitated, end-of-day roundup to a meeting improves outcomes. It lets attendees recap what they learned, deepen connections with others, and find out what they missed. Popular formats include the "personal introspective" (attendees reflect on the changes they want to make as a result of what they learned) and the "group-spective" (attendees publicly evaluate the event's content and discuss next steps).
Sensitive topic
While a large meeting isn't a safe place for confidential discussions, small peer-groups can be convened to explore sensitive professional topics. Everyone must commit up front to the statement, “What we share here stays here,” and agree others have the freedom to ask questions and speak their minds.
Movement
Ten minutes of sitting slows blood-flow to the brain. Letting attendees move around mitigates the bad effects. Meeting facilitators can lead attendees in fast, frequent stand-in-place exercises; or conduct entire sessions standing up; or lead strolls around the room―or, better yet, through a beautiful spot outdoors (provided it's ADA-compliant).
Surprise
A meeting where significant parts of the program surprise attendees will have better outcomes. That's because they're instinctively wary of new formats and may opt out of experiential learning. By surprising them, they'll discover rewarding new ways to learn and connect.
Solution room
A "Solution Room" runs 90 to 120 minutes. After an intro, attendees are asked to describe a personal challenge for which they'd like peer advice. They then gather at small roundtables and mind-map the challenges on paper. Seat swaps allow each attendee to get―and give―advice. At the start of a meeting, Solution Rooms help groups of six to eight people connect, and are good for introducing new attendees into a community. Meeting Design is free―and well worth a look.
Does your meeting need a chief experience officer?
Samantha Whitehorne answers yes in Associations Now, and identifies three roles for the CXO:
Attendee advocate. The exec who spots and fixes "small mistakes that could frustrate attendees."
Listener-in-chief. The exec who studies live audience feedback and recommends adjustments in real time.
Brand guru. The execwho polices branding before, during and after the event.
To Whitehorne's list of duties, I'd add:
Guardian of truth. The exec who goads planners to up their game.
Want the truth?Attendees have zero tolerance for mediocrity. Salesforce.com proves that fact in its new study, State of the Connected Customer:
80% of B2B customers say they expect real-time response
75% say they expect providers to anticipate their wants
70% say technology makes it easy to take their business elsewhere
66% say they'll abandon you if treated like a number
It's easy for planners to pine for yesterday, when the audiences were pliant; the competitors, pipsqueaks; the margins, porcine. But today's audiences want more. "Excellence, quality and good should be earned words, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves," Disney animator Ed Catmull says in Creativity, Inc. The time is now to appoint a CXO for your event.
A trade show can amaze you or afflict you. Most do the latter. Consider how stressful shows are. Exhibitors zip in minutes before opening, travel-worn, ill-prepared, and often resentful of the fact they're being denied time with their customers back home. Attendees arrive in warmer spirits, happy to be away from the boss and harboring notions they'll be entertained. But they quickly discover the exhibit halls are about as navigable and hospitable as downtown Tokyo on a workday. The trade show maze is the full catastrophe—and acutely stressful. Research scientist Esther Sternberg has made a lifetime study of the connection between the built environment and the human brain's stress response. In her latest book, Healing Spaces, Dr. Sternberg distinguishes between mazes and labyrinths. Complexes such as hospitals are mazes, built to accommodate equipment, not alleviate illness. They trigger stress responses in patients' brains that make them sick, instead of well. Complexes such as Disneyland, on the other hand, are labyrinths. They're built to help you walk about calmly and mindfully. They trigger floods of dopamine—the stuff that drives engagement. "Labyrinths are calming," Dr. Sternberg says. "Mazes are stressful." What's your trade show like? A maze that afflicts? Or a labyrinth that amazes?
The investor of today does not profit from yesterday's growth.
— Warren Buffett
Bundled tips. Distilled solutions. Condensed books. Expert panels. Industry roundups. Sound like your conference? You're preparing attendees for the last war. But they need to wage tomorrow's. "Traditional conferences focus on finding solutions to yesterday’s problems," says conference designer Jeff Hurt. Smart attendees (that's redundant; stupid people skip conferences) don't need more packaged information; they need results (remember, the word event comes from the Latin for result.) "People no longer come to your meetings to get information," says planner Holly Duckworth. "They come to make sense of the deluge of information they already have." If you're not transporting attendees to a future world, helping them adapt to new realities, and equipping them to thrive, you're not offering results. To put it another way, if your event isn't eventful, it's just another meeting.
Are mammoth trade shows dropping like flies? That's what AmEx predicts in its new 84-page report, 2017 Global Meetings and Events Forecast. Companies' event marketing spend won't change next year, but where that money's spent will, according to the report. Event marketers' spend will increase by 1% in 2017, while their participation in big North American trade shows will decrease by 20% (the average event marketer will participate in 8 of those shows next year, down from 10). Event marketers will spend the money they would have spent on those big events on small, content-rich ones, instead. Presaging next year's downturn, four flagship shows recently shuttered: ASAE's Springtime, CTIA's Super Mobility Week, FMI's Connect, and NCTA's INTX. Which big fossils will be next to sing a swan song? Event-industry journalist Michael Hart recently observed that, right now, tortoise-like associations are exceedingly vulnerable to their hare-like counterparts, the for-profit organizers, as more money chases fewer events. While associations dither, "Nimble players can swoop in and launch a competing 'pop-up,' worrying little about legacy issues and more about profits," Hart wrote. It's time for associations to give up the ostrich-act and take the bull by the horns. There's simply no time to monkey around. Learn to ape your for-profit competitors!
"Meeting people in real life remains the most effective way to build a successful business," says Inc.columnist Helene Olen.
But how do you build a successful meeting? Olen thinks these three tools are essential:
Influencers. Attendees need to know they'll encounter up-and-comers at your event. Before they'll register, they'll ask, "Is this a network I can reach out to in the future?"
Underprogramming. Elbow-rubbing with influencers won't happen if you overprogram your meeting. Be sure to carve out generous breaks.
Starter packages. If you attract influencers, it's guaranteed: you'll be suitcased by entrepreneurs who believe they can't afford your event—nor afford to skip it. So offer price options for the tight-fisted.
Create "micro experiences" within the experience. Take a page from consumer festvals like SXSW and introduce things like rock climbing walls and Ferris wheels.
Become "one with the destination." Don't go to a killer host city, then lock your attendees in a hotel ballroom. Make your meeting a microcosm entwined with the location. Provide local musicians, performers and food.
Offer a "next-gen environment." Don't just brand the space, tie every part of it to your organization's purpose. Introduce collaboration walls and local artists who custom-make takeaways tied to your product.
Design with courage. Quirky and unexpected moments can go viral. The G2 Conference lets attendees climb above its floor, circus style, and hold meetings while suspended in chairs.
Deliver on your theme.Use a "message map" to assess every aspect of the meeting, to assure they all articulate your theme. Every physical and digital touchpoint should carry the theme. Embrace event tech. Livestreaming, virtual reality, the Internet of Things, audience response, directional audio, and attendee tracking should all be deployed. Cultivate communities. Think beyond "technical support." Your users want to know where their industry and your brand are heading. Offer the sparks needed to launch new communities around new ideas. Provide platforms for continued content creation, conversation and collaboration after your meeting. And be purposeful and exclusive. Learn from startup events. Go back to your roots and original purpose. Experiment with fresh formats. Show users you're listening by treating each one as an early adopter. And, last but not least, spend wisely. Resist the big-name speakers, lavish parties and flashy moments and emphasize instead networking, conversation and opportunities to collaborate.
Once upon a time, a hotel ballroom sufficed to fill the conference producer's need for a space suited to parking 300 butts, and maybe 30 booths, for a day or two.
But Millennial attendees have crabbed so much, for so long, about B2B events' blandness producers are rethinking venue, hoping to provoke a wee more wow. According to Skift, B2B events are now being situated in many privately owned "alternative venues," including factories, warehouses, mansions, museums, boats, restaurants, cocktail lounges, wineries, art studios, work spaces and incubators. (Aside: With my partner producers, I just chose the latter type of venue for a new conference myself).
But blocking the way to wow is convention. For decades, producers have worked cozily with hotels.
"They’ve always met in the same hotel meeting rooms with the same carpet and the same white walls,” says Jan Hoffmann-Keining, CMO of an online matching service named Spacebase.
Producers' cherished comfort comes at a cost—to corporate innovation and creativity.
"People are realizing that if you keep meeting in the same rooms and thinking the same thoughts, then it’s going to be hard to find that innovation and creativity,” Hoffmann-Keening says. Patric Weiler, Head of Strategy for American Express Meetings & Events, thinks more producers will gradually buck tradition.
“The meetings industry is changing, and the classic silos are breaking up about how to plan a meeting,” he says.
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII
As Adrian Segar says in The Power of Participation, given everything we know about active learning—and everything today's attendees crave from a conference—it's "almost unethical" to focus on an event's stage, where speakers control the content.
But how do you shift attention from a handful to many players?
Do your homework. The whole of attendees' perspectives is greater than the sum of speakers' parts. So ask attendees through a pre-event survey what content matters most. And consider using professional telemarketers to conduct the survey. The findings will surprise you!
Demand more. Insist your emcee lets attendees know you expect participation and highlight the opportunities attendees have to participate throughout your event. You can technologize participation by adding a second-screen experience.
Offer carrots. Ignite your audience by building in rewards for participation. Chances to win gift cards and sponsors' swag will bring out attendees’ competitive urges.
Deliver an experience. Provide content in contexts that sensually engage attendees (brands do it all the time). Use A/V, lighting, decor, aromas, and professional talent to boost audience involvement.
Continue the conversation. Extend participation after your event through online forums, hangouts, and social media. Create post-event videos and e-books, send them to attendees, and solicit feedback.
"The comedic team of Key and Peele came on stage with a basket of toy kittens. They started throwing the stuffed animals into the audience, and suddenly, those tired, grouchy journalists were jumping to catch them like a bunch of bridesmaids going after the wedding bouquet.
"A lot of those kittens will end up going to the children of those attendees, but it’s a safe bet that a significant number of them will end up in their offices, too."
If true, you're falling behind, says BrightBull's Ricardo Molina. Worse, you are:
Wasting money on attendance promotion. Like lists and media partnerships, online communities provide a direct road to your target audience. But unlike those roads, communities don't need as much maintenance. "Once built, a community will thrive with just a little care and attention."
Letting competitors poach your attendees. First-movers usually win. "When your competitors start a community first, all they have to do is say that it’s there and people will join because it’s something new."
Forgetting about brand loyalty.Communities provide value added. So members "automatically feel good about your brand."
Failing to lead. "Why would they think of your event as being 'the one' when you don’t run THE online destination for your niche?"
Skipping customer insight. Insights from a community let you read the industry's pulse, and drive product development, marketing and sales.
Leaving money on the table. Exhibitors are eager to brand themselves year-round on communities. Why not offer them yours? One large international bank spends half its marketing budget on content partnerships.
"It’s easy to get lost in the weeds when planning a trade show," says Holly Barker in Event MB. Their focus on killing and controlling costs blinds most planners to the hidden profit streams their shows represent. Barker suggests these simple ways to grow more green:
Pub crawl. Offer a limited number of exhibitors the chance to sponsor a pub crawl through the trade show floor. Make the event a blast by including themed games, besides beer and wine.
Parties. Offer exhibitors exclusive rights to make a big splash at your evening parties.
Logo rights. Offer one exhibitor exclusive rights to project its logo onto your venue's walls at night.
Online campaigns. Offer exhibitors the chance to co-brand content on your website. Also encourage sponsored content.
Matchmaking. Offer exhibitors an online matchmaking service that lets attendees sign up for meetings with them at your show. Link the service with sponsored content. And don't bury it in your website. Make sure people who can't attend can also view the content and get in touch with exhibitors.
