The Outlook for Events is Gloomy

If people don't want to come to the ballpark,

how are you going to stop them?

— Yogi Berra

This week marked the second anniversary of WHO's admission that Covid-19 was a problem.

Perhaps no other segment of the economy, except for the airlines industry, suffered worse from the pandemic than the face-to-face meetings industry.

I've been a Cassandra all this time, I'll readily admit. 

But four decades working in the industry told me the road would be rocky.

It will continue to be so for quite a while. 

As Covid-19 remains a threat to our wellbeing, organizers should expect no more than half the pre-pandemic audience to return to their live events in the coming three years.

That means organizers, if they honestly want to serve their paying customers, have a duty to reimagine their events with only half the customary audience.

Pollyannish thinking won't cut it.

Educating exhibitors in sales and lead-gen is the place to start.

Were I still an organizer, I'd devote an hour a day to learning from my smartest exhibitors precisely what they need to make my event pay off. 

Then I'd use my findings to create simple programs of benefit to every exhibitor—even those who in their unfounded arrogance believe they "know it all."

Yogi was right. 

You can't stop people who don't want to come to the ballpark.

But you can teach the players to up their game.

POSTSCRIPT: A bellwether event, SXSW opened Friday to a "noticeably smaller" audience.

Art is Dangerous

Art is dangerous.

— Picasso

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a digital deed. 

With it, you can prove you own the "original" of a digital asset (as opposed to a copy). 

An NFT is not the original—that's something else; a GIF, for example. 

But by owning the NFT, you hold the key to the kingdom.

By owning an NFT, you have owner's "bragging rights," plus the creator's permission to display his original asset on a screen; and, as importantly, you have a meter that tracks every copy of the asset that's ever existed or will exist.

You can also sell your NFT on the $25 billion secondary market for NFTs, if you want to cash out of it.

A year ago, the Charleston graphic artist Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million, still the record price for an NFT. 

Purchase of the NFT gave the buyer ownership of a digital collage Beeple titled Everydays.

$69 million. 

That's a hell of a lot to pay for the digital key to a GIF—even a GIF by Beeple—considering the danger inherent in an NFT. 

Lose the password and you lose everything. 

NFT owners have already forgotten their passwords; accidentally thrown them away; erased the disks holding them; and been victimized by hackers, who erase the passwords or steal them and hold them for ransom.

You can also lose the "original." 

The website hosting that GIF can disappear for any reason, at any moment. 

The NFT owner is left holding only a 404 message.

Insurance companies think fine-art NFTs are, in fact, extremely dangerous.

They want NFT owners to minimize the danger not only by safeguarding their NFT passwords, but by hosting the digital assets the NFTs unlock on their own servers.

They also want redundant, foolproof backup systems in place.

Insurance companies want owners as well to avoid transactions involving middlemen—art dealers—who could bungle data storage and handling.

I'm no Luddite, but I think owning original artworks on canvas, board, metal, and paper beats owning an NFT hands down.

Art is dangerous; owning it shouldn't be.

Above: Everydays by Beeple. GIF. Ding Dongs by Robert Francis James. Oil on canvas. Originally priced at $69 million, Ding Dongs is on sale for only $580 and comes classically framed.

Handle Me with Care

Been beat up and battered 'round,
Been sent up and been shot down.

— George Harrison

Dependency on a retirement nest egg has turned me into an obsessive market watcher.

That's not a healthy habit. 

Unchecked, it induces stock market stress.

So my usual jitteriness wasn't helped a bit yesterday morning when economist Peter Berezin announced that, with Putin on the rampage, the odds of a "civilization-ending nuclear war" in the coming year have risen to 10 percent.

But not to worry, folks, Berezin said.

"Despite the rising risk of Armageddon, investors should stay bullish on stocks,” he told The  New York Times.

The Times found the economist's prediction of increased earnings somewhat baffling.

"What I wasn’t trying to say," Berezin replied, "was that stocks were going to go up if there is a nuclear war. Obviously, they will go down. 

"The point is that everything else will go down, too."

Somehow, I'm discomfited by Berezin's analysis.

Maybe it's my memories of all those duck-and-cover drills we practiced in grade school; those uncles with mildewed bomb shelters; or Walter Cronkite's live coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I don't know.

But the fact that the prices of all investment vehicles will fall when the world turns into a radioactive ash heap doesn't much ease this market watcher's jitters.

I was tempted to place a sell-everything order with my guy after reading Berezin's analysis, but I resisted the urge.

Instead, I ordered a box of Potassium Iodide on line and spent the rest of the morning painting a picture (my encore career).

The problem with a pronouncement like Berezin's isn't that it's wrong.

The problem is that, when it comes to Boomers, it's tone deaf.

Mr. Berezin—a Gen Xer—clearly doesn't grasp the fact that, as Cold War survivors, we Boomers have to be handled with the utmost care.

Sure, we thought annihilation went out with giant shoulder pads.

But a lot of us have PTSD. 

Post Thermonuclear Shivers Disorder.

We're easily triggered.

Easily.

So, please, handle us with care.

Burning Bridges

We will burn that bridge when we come to it.

— Goethe

Rarely do I remember my dreams. Last night's is an exception.

I dreamed that my wife and I had planned to stay at a B&B during an antique show that was being held inside the Brandywine River Museum. (That's an actual annual event which I ran between 2006 and 2010.) 

The B&B in my dream was owned and operated by the museum (that's purely imaginary).

For some undisclosed reason, we had to scrap our plans to attend the show a day or two out.

Given our late cancellation, the B&B refused to refund us the lavish deposit on our room.

Oh, well, I said to no one in particular, you win some, you lose some.

I swallowed the $800 loss.

About a month later, a second $800 charge by the B&B appeared on my credit card statement. 

I called the front desk immediately.

"What's this other $800 charge for?" I asked. "We didn't even stayed at the inn."

Lloyd Bridges and sons

The concierge was blasé.

"After you cancelled your prepaid room, we gave it for free to a VIP guest, the movie actor Lloyd Bridges," he said. "Unfortunately, Mr. Bridges died in the room."

"That's terrible," I said. "But what's the $800 charge on my card for?"

"The $800 covers the cost to the inn of removing his body."

I asked why Lloyd Bridges' famous sons, Jeff and Beau, weren't asked to pay for the removal of their father's body. 

"They're rich," I said. "They can certainly afford it."

"We asked them and they both refused to pay," the concierge said. "So our only choice was to charge you."

I grew instantly riled, but knew I couldn't say a word.

Maintaining goodwill with the museum was crucial to my career—as what, I was unsure. 

No matter my feelings, I could not burn this bridge. 

Then, I woke up.

Sigmund Freud would have a field day analyzing my dream.

He found that bridges routinely appear in our dreams. 

Bridges symbolize the sex act—naturally. (Hey, it's Freud.)

But bridges also symbolize crossings: the crossing from birth to life; the crossing from life to death; and, for that matter, the crossing from any of life's stages to the next one.

As such, bridges symbolize changes: transitions, passages, returns, and departures.

Changes—whether for good or ill.

You don't want to burn those bridges, unless it's absolutely necessary. And maybe not even then.

You want to take the bridges as they come.

As The Dude said, “Strikes and gutters, ups and downs.”

Love It or Leave It

Most Western multinational companies have paused operations in Russia.

But not McDonalds. 

Junk-food retailers don't always own their stores in Russia (they're franchises out of the parent company's control), but McDonalds does.

The company has yet to make a public statement about the invasion of Ukraine by Putin, because Russia accounts for nearly 10% of its revenue.

I'm not lovin' it.

I'm leavin' it.

Boycott McDonalds. 

Because eating at McDonalds kills kids in Ukraine.

POSTCRIPT: Dump MCD, too.