Archive for November, 2008

There is an accepted principle in the communications business, when it comes to conferences and seminars. The principle is that when one has the opportunity to speak at a conference, under no circumstances is that person to spend time promoting him/herself or his/her company. The person was selected to speak because the expectation was that s/he would have valuable information to pass along to the attendees, who have paid serious money for the privilege to listen to such speakers.

Of course, there is always marketing/PR value to such engagements. For example, any PowerPoint presentation can have the speaker’s company branding on it. The speaker can give examples of the right way to do things and mention that "this is something that happened at my company," etc.

But go much beyond that, and the speaker is likely to be facing an empty room by the end, or worse …

Well, this week I had the privilege of speaking at the first annual "MarcShoret" marketing conference in Jerusalem. My topic was "The Marketing Marriage – Company and Agency Working Together." I think it was well-received, but that’s not the point of this post.

I attended the other sessions as well, and one of them was given in such a self-promotional manner that I felt compelled to leave after about 20 minutes. It was truly a disgrace – as opposed to the rest of the conference, which was quite good.

Who the speaker was and what the topic was is not of importance. What is important is that, as I sat there listening to this running self-advertisement, I thought to myself, "Wow, the only way for a speaker to engage in something like this is for that person to absolutely not care about his/her audience."

Which is interesting, because the whole marketing industry is based on caring about your audience. So why would anyone in this business ever want to work with such a presenter?