Event Producers: Don't be Junk

Content's the insurance event producers need to avoid attendees' email trash folders, says dmg events' head of marketing John Whitaker.

While flogging registrations is the endgame, delivering content is the play, he says.

Whitaker resists the knee-jerk urge to blast attendees with event invitations, focusing instead on sending attendees offers of well-crafted content.

"We want to be less like junk in their inbox," Whitaker says.

Content not only attracts attendees to an event, but involves them with the producer's brand after the event is history.

"It seems a shame to spend a huge amount of marketing to get them to turn up for two, three or four days, and then not really engage with them until the next event," Whitaker says.

"If we can keep the conversation going and see the event as more of a 365 activity, then that helps us to have better traction, stops suppressions within out database, and creates a better appetite for conversion if we draw them in through content marketing."

Celebrate!

Dylan is a reminder of how America used to talk to itself.

— Lili Loofbourow

"A great poet in the English-speaking tradition," Bob Dylan became a Nobel Laureate yesterday.

Killjoys will kvetch. "Someone who performed in Las Vegas the same day he became a Nobel Laureate doesn't belong to the club of Lewis, O'Neill, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Bellow and Morrison."

I refuse to accept this.

In his Banquet Speech, Faulkner said:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

The Business Girl's Guide to Halloween Parties

Thanks to Jazz Age content marketing, business girls never had to sweat over throwing a nifty Halloween blow. The Bogie Book showed 'em how.

Each October from 1912 and 1926, paper party-goods maker The Dennison Paper Company published The Bogie Book to inspire busy women. (The company skipped a 1918 edition. Halloween was cancelled that year, because the nation was gripped by the Spanish Flu.)

In the 1925 edition, the two-page article, "The Business Girl's Halloween Party," offered all the instructions to plan your blow: 

• Buy a Dennison Halloween "lunch set," complete with a crepe paper tablecloth, paper plates and paper napkins. 
• Buy Dennison crepe paper sashes for the guys, headbands for the dolls.
• Make place cards and a table centerpiece from cardboard and Dennison crepe paper; a chandelier from wire and Dennison crepe paper; and window curtains and valances from Dennison crepe paper.
• Decorate the rest of the room with black cat cardboard cutouts from Dennison. 
• For appetizers, serve pumpkin doughnuts wrapped in Dennison crepe paper; fruit cocktail in a Dennison paper cup wrapped in Dennison crepe paper; candy wrapped in Dennison crepe paper; and apples topped with Dennison crepe paper goblins' hats.
• Keep the main course simple: chicken patties and potato chips. Serve ice cream, cake and coffee for desert. 
• Prepare everything a day in advance, so you can assemble it quickly when you get home from work.

As Dennison was a family-friendly firm, no instructions were included for hiding the hooch (illegal due to the Prohibition).

3 Must-Haves for Every Meeting Planner

"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.

Don't Blame the Media

It isn't the medium that lacks depth, it's the artist.

Andrew Wyeth

Dead artist's and writers' homes intrigue us the way their unfinished works do: both are like ancient ruins asking for completion.

I just had the pleasure of touring one artist's home, Andrew Wyeth's, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Wyeth worked in his studio there for 68 years, completing (and abandoning) thousands of drawings and paintings.

Although he used other media, Wyeth mastered tempera, the favorite of Renaissance artists like Botticelli and Raphael. It's made by mixing dry pigment and egg yoke.

Wyeth preferred tempera because it's durable.

"There is something incredibly lasting about the material, like an Egyptian mummy, a marvelous beehive or hornet's nest," he once told a critic. "The medium itself is a very lasting one, too, because the pure method of the dry pigments and egg yolk is terrifically sticky. Try to rub egg off of a plate when it is dry. It's tough. It takes tempera about six months or more to dry and then you can actually take a scrubbing brush to it and you won't be able to rub off that final hardness."

But Wyeth was careful to distinguish the medium's force from the artist's.

"My temperas are very broadly painted in the beginning. Then I tighten down on them. If you get the design and the shape of the thing you want to paint, you can go on and on. The only limitation is yourself. I have always argued this is true with any medium. I have had people say to me, 'Why do you waste your time with watercolor, it's such a light medium, a fragile medium. It lacks depth.'Well, it isn't the medium that lacks depth, it's the artist. You can never blame the medium."

As in politics, when up against our limits, it's easy in creative pursuits to blame the media. 

I hear blame every week in the drawing class I attend. Charcoal sucks. Conté sucks. Graphite sucks. Ink sucks. This paper sucks.

But the limits are in ourselves.

You don't control your chosen medium.

You surrender to it.