By Holly Kozelsky
There’s nothing like a great convention to get you inspired and ready to take on the world.
Convention planners must have lots of tricks to make that happen, too. Some of the aspects of conventions are genuine and useful – the reasons our companies send us to conventions – seminars and classes and lessons that teach us how to be much better in our work and perhaps everything we do.
Some of the aspects of conventions are the adult version of high school spirit week to get us all pumped up and excited.
Let’s start with opening night. We all receive important-looking nametags on fancy lanyards. The names and titles are written big enough that we can almost read who someone else is without even having our glasses on.
The lanyards are so long that the nametags hang down to waist level. We are always having to look down at stomachs to figure out to whom we are talking. Some people figure out to tie up our lanyard in back so that it hangs higher in front. I did that to mine, then kept getting it twisted around to choke me, and it kept getting stuck in my bag handles and notebooks and in the food on my plates.
Between classes and events there is always food. On the first night, the cheese-and-vegetable trays had fancy-colored carrots cut lengthwise. Some were beige, some were whitish with reddish skins, and some were yellow. They were the hit of the reception.
There was a reception after that reception, and again, the trays featured those exciting carrots. Yum! What a fancy convention hall, to serve such exotic root vegetables.
The entrée at lunch was beef, but anyone who had requested a different kind of meal (kosher, vegetarian, halal, Alpha Gal, etc.) received an alternative meal. Guess what was included on the alternative meal plate? You guessed it! Those fancy carrots, this time, cooked …
By the fifth and sixth time of the carrots, they weren’t so fancy anymore, and in fact, everyone probably would have appreciated just plain regular orange carrots.
The food at lunch was all that much more delicious because of the way we were brought into lunch – like superstars.
The cavernous main hall was dark, except for decorative lights high above, messages made of light shining on the walls and glowing red centerpieces. Music, such as “Eye of the Tiger” and the theme song from Rocky, was pumping loud as we walked in ready to conquer the world!
During the lunch periods we had excellent speakers who really hopped around the stage and shouted, but in a good way. It kept us paying attention, and their methods of delivery got their messages across for sure.
Over the course of the 3-day convention, I took away loads of various specific lessons and three major lessons. Of the three major lessons:
- Your cell phones tell the world absolutely everything about you, for all time. There’s not a place you go or a topic you look up that is private. A couple of classes taught us about targeting advertisements to extremely specific criteria. For example, if we want to sell cowboy boots, the digital marketing company can find anyone and everyone who has been to a rodeo or farm or hoedown over the past year (or decade) and, whenever those people are within five miles of our boot store or a competitor’s boot store, it will send them ads for our boots. Furthermore, whenever they use their home’s or work’s wifi, our ads for our boots also will go to the phones, tablets, computers and TVs used by anyone at that place. The whole Big Brother aspect of modern advertising had me freaked out and also laughing at the relative naiveite of the column I wrote last week, which was about how I am constantly getting ads for flower bulbs since I went on a daffodil-bulb shopping spree last week. If I only had known the depth of it!
- The economy is going to hell in a handbasket. The overriding theme of several sessions was how to survive, in ways specific to the topic of the session, a terrible, failing, unpredictable economy. One point a speaker made was that we should do less communicating by email and more by phone, because people are afraid to make plans or spend money, so they delay their decisions, reservations and plans; once they finally make up their mind on something, we have to move quickly before time is up.
- People are people, whether in day care or high school or a convention for professionals. We adults were impressed, motivated, kept compliant and satisfied, sent in the right direction and encouraged to behave through food, music and mood lighting. Whether it’s preschoolers singing “Clean-up, clean-up, everybody do their part!” to pick up toys, high schoolers wearing pajamas on Tuesday for Spirit Week or professionals paying rapt attention to a speaker who came to the stage with flashing lights and “We Are the Champions” by Queen blaring on the speakers, we’re ready to roll!
