3. How it all started
April 1st 1982 the company started as Abbit Video. To be able to start a company you need to be legally adult and in those days one became legally adult at the age of 21. Maarten and his parents had to go to court to turn this under aged boy into an adult man overnight, 3 years ahead of time.
As I'm writing this book, this is 25 years ago and a lot has happened in those twenty-five years. A long road has been travelled and many steps have been taken, turns have been made and some tough nuts have been cracked. I feel that these 25 years have taken me to a point where I'm ready for the next 25. All I have done, also before I started my company seems to have come together. All the pieces of the puzzle are falling into place and this book, my first one, is the medium to put it all down, clarify it and communicate it. It is also the stepping stone into the second half of my professional life.
More than anything else this book aims at starting yet another project. A project that includes all I have done so far and constructs it into one ambitious project, the creation of a brand new profession, Meeting Architecture.
In that sense it may also be steppingstone into a next career phase for many...
This first chapter first takes us through the first 25 years, so you can see and understand why and how this project came to be. A man like me, with no degree or diploma, only has his story and accomplishments to show for.
Video killed the radio star
Panasonic editing equipment
When you are 18, coming straight from school, you don't really know anything about running a business, let alone setting up one.
I did however manage to produce a binder with about 50 pages of hand written plans and calculations: today, I would call that a business plan. The people from the bank, my parents were not that rich, were impressed and agreed to the loan. Maybe the fact that my parents signed with their house as bail may have helped too. A loan of 500.000 Belgian Franks; the equivalent of about 15.000 euros or 20.000 dollars in 2007. Back then that seemed a lot of money to me, but looking back, I know it was not. Certainly not to start a business, especially a video production company in a time that a videocassette costs as much as a video recorder today.
I rented a house just around the corner from the street where I was born, came up with a company name and designed the logo so I could put it on the wall. Abbit was an dreamed up name, based on three criterions:
1 Alphabetically on top of lists, getting A's and B's in the first three letters would help
2 The same number of letters as in video so it would fit long and square places putting Abbit above Video fits nicely because both have 5 letters.
3 Internationally pronounceable, I tested French, Dutch, English and German and decided it would sound good if ever the company would go international.
Than came the more difficult bit: What equipment to buy? If you want to make video productions for educational purposes or other, you need a camera to film and an editing system to put all the good images together and ad sound. In 1982 camera's where a little bigger than today. They also did not have a video recorder built in. The cameras in those days worked with tubes. Cigar sized glass tubes with an image sensor on the tip. Professional camera's had three such tubes; one for each of the RGB colours: Red, Green and Blue. Such a professional Sony Camera (Sony was clearly market leader in the professional arena) costed more than my starting capital so that was no option. I had budgeted for a one tube, Industrial or institutional camera Panasonic had what I could afford. The video recorders that were connected to the camera with a thick cable also came in different types. The professional portables used the U-Matic system that was looked down upon by TV crews that still used film. Slowly however video recorders started to be used for TV and U-Matic was the best you could get. Again, Not me, I had budgeted for a VHS portable recorder and Hitachi had what I needed. Now I only needed a system to edit and Panasonic had "professional" VHS machines for editing: I could afford one player and one recorder of this brand new line of VHS editing machines. Unfortunately these high tech machines were high maintenance and almost every other edit failed. I did one fashion show en two marriages with them and that is about it. The one tube camera was really not ready for the market and one could only conclude I had s invested 80% of my sead money, thrown away almost all of my start capital.
Welcome to the real world...
As an 18 year old boy, you also have no idea about sales and Marketing. I put up my sign, opened my door, sat down by the phone and started waiting; how about that for a marketing campaign!
Anyone can imagine what happened next. Not a lot. But this boy was not going to sit still for long.
Jolly July
With a positive and entrepreneurial spirit I soon jumped up from my chair and started dong stuff. One of the first things I did in summer of '82 was starting a new not for profit project called Jolly July. With some friends and the support form our local CC (cultural centre), we organised weekly creative public activities and events in open air, in otherwise dead quiet summers. This lead to a few things: One of those friends, Hildegard, later became our first employee and Abbit Video would survive in its first critical three years, doing such activities.
One of the activities we did involved a local punk band. When they broke up, they sold me their sound system. An old mixing table with a few cheap microphones, a 100 watt amplifier and two enormous copies of JBL Disco 200 loudspeakers. I rented out those for a few parties and with my video background and a few second hand TV's I started organising video parties, very innovative in those days. I travelled all the way to the Virgin Megastore in London just to buy the latest VHS tapes with popular video clips. Soon I was able to buy a second hand Grundig video projector that was used as a TV by a family that lived in town. The projector was a massive block with three tubes, it took two men to pick it up, and it came with a wooden parabolic shaped silver screen of about 1 meter 20 wide, somewhat bigger that today's 50 inch plasma screens. With a friend from school we were able to buy 9 old TV's and build our first video walls. He took the old button tuners out, connected each of those to a 5 meter long cable and built them into a box next to each other. Using a ruler, we were now able to push nine buttons from 9 TV's at once and switch all TV's at once, from one channel to another. A video switcher "avant la letre" was born. We could play a clip on all nine TV's with one video recorder and than switch to the next clip, playing on a second video recorder. We were real VJ's and did many parties. The summer 1983 we did a tour of the Belgian coast in about 10 different clubs, sponsored by Safari, a new adult beverage. The Belgian Importer of Safari paid us 500.000 Belgian Franks as our sole sponsor; the same amount I had as the total starting capital, only one year earlier. This is probably the right place to thank the person that trusted us back than.
Via Video Nights
The next big thing was our project with a Belgian TV celebrity, Bart Peeters that did a National TV program called Electron that combined educational information with video clips. This guy, Bart Peeters was very popular amongst the younger generation and we thought it would be cool (that word did not yet exist) to have him as part of our video parties. The idea was to have him as a VJ, on a video tape, and if the club could afford it ha could also come for a live performance. We called it the Via Video Nights. We invited him and he agreed to what he felt was an innovative project. We spent one Friday filming scenes in our ware house during the day and at night in a local club, the rap time. Bart was playing the records as a DJ during one hour. We recorded permanently with one camera filming the TV star and the dancing youth. Later we inserted some of the images filmed in the ware house and also some clip images that corresponded to the songs he had played. The result was a dynamic one hour video with stereo dance music. We toured the country with it with mixed degrees of success.
Another TV celebrity and farmers:
Based on that project, an event agency Culturama found us or should I say found me, because I was still a one man band. This, also one man, agency was connected to an agricultural magazine called Agra Magazine that organised events for its readers, the farmer community. They hired a TV personality, called Walter Capiau that did the number one Daily TV quiz at that time: called "Higher - Lower": a simple game with large playing cards.
Bringing that to the local ballrooms or party rooms combined with sponsored cheese and snacks proved to be a real hit. I was the whole crew for set building, sound, light and video. The set was composed out of 4 self made wooden monumental pillars and front elements on top, plus a number of backdrop curtains. The sound was the ex-punk band equipment and the lights were four self made wooden boxes with each ten household spots in one colour. We played promotional clips for the sponsors and some other images on the Grundig with Parabolic screen. I did the transportation and the set-up, I operated the whole show and I disassembled everything on my own. After every show I drove back home since there was no money for hotels. Sometimes this could be a three hour drive and some of those rides were the only ones ever I had to stop for a nap in order not to fall asleep driving. Good I was only a teenager with tons of energy.
During the day, I still had my company and step by step it evolved into a small AV company.
Hildegart was hired and a few years later Paul, who is still with the company today, celebrating his twentieth year with the company.
The company hired its first staff, the turnover grew year by year and like any AV company we sold AV equipment, rented AV equipment and did video productions for everyone that needed anything for any kind of activity.
Abbit Video was a BARCO dealer and sold video and data projectors to the Belgian army and Janssen Pharmaceutica (a Johnson & Johnson company) amongst others. We rented video monitors for tradeshows in Paris, and VHS camcorders to local individuals. We produced more and more video', but most of the 80's we worked with a dear friend, Gerrit Steensen, who did all the filming and editing fur us. He had a 3 tube camera and a u-matic editing system.
Tour de France
An other highlight arrives in 1988, our sixth year of existence: The Tour de France. Promobus, a Brussels based company had won a contract to set up a big open air dance club in the city or village where the Tour de France arrived. Abbit Video Was contracted for the video part, a contract Of 2.000.000 Belgian Franks, about € 50.000,- in 2007. This contract was as big as the turnover of our whole first year.
6 screens of 4 by 3 meters and 6 Barco Video-600 projectors were our display system. 2 cameras , a video switching installation and a VJ system allowed us to play clips and advertising and show camera images. The massive truss construction stood on 12 Legs of 7 meter high and covered an area big enough for 2.000 party goers. Hundreds of spots and dozens of loudspeakers turned any French square into a discothèque, be it the parking on Alpe Duez or a fancy square with antique fountains in Nice. Two sleep-busses (we started with only one) served for combined sleeping and travel. No time for real sleep, that was how tight the schedule was. Wake up call at eight in the morning, A self made shower and a meal form the catering truck later it is nine and the 30 technicians start to unload the 4 trailers. By 8 in the evening everything is ready to roll and the show starts with a TV celebrity doing some interviews and a quiz for the national French radio. Around 10 in the evening it is dark enough for the lights and video projector to start the party. And two hours later the music stops and the working lights swith on. All partygoers that are still there kindly are asked to leave and the de-rigging starts. 4 in the morning, it all is loaded and all technicians can "go to bed" in the sleep busses that drive in a caravan with the four trailers, the catering bus and the technical bus for the next Tour de France arrival place. Most of the time guided by the French Gendarmerie on motorcycles. After four hours "sleep" in a riding Bus it starts all over again. 21 days in a row with only one free day in between. And that is the day when the technical bus breaks down so our team spends all day and night to move all equipment to the replacing bus. What an event! It only took place once because most cyclists go to bed early during the Tour and loud music until midnight is just not compatible with an early good night sleep. The tour organisers probably got a few complaints from the yellow shirt.
From AV to business focus:
In those same years that these events take place, Abbit Video also grows more and more into corporate work. Video productions, av support for tradeshows, opening events, and some meetings become more and more evident. Most of the events we did like the ones for the Farmers are a, in a way, lot like meetings and conferences. A large group of people, some presentations, some sound, light, projection etc.
One clear stepping stone for Abbit into the Meeting activity was a call from Paul Van Steenbergen.... He was organising the national sales meeting for Janssen Cilag Belgium in the 80's. He invited me to talk about some equipment and we concluded that Abbit Video could do all their AV needs for their sales national meeting. We combined sound, light, projection, presentation, video production, photography etc. The first real meeting support moment had arrived.
The club scene had one big disadvantage: it paid late, and sometimes not at all, and it was always working at night.
Abbit Video in those days starts using a tag line "Industrial Professionals" and later "Business communication" to express its growing focus on the corporate market. Corporate clients are better clients and the added value we could provide in meetings was much more of an intellectual challenge than what we could do in the party and event world.
We said goodbye to the night scene around 1987 and it would lead to many similar decisions in the years to come. The next one was the closing of our doors. This meant we stopped renting things like TV's and video cameras to individual consumers. Some of them were not reliable and did not return the rented, and we did this also because our decision to go for professional work for corporate was firm.
The next big decision was to stop selling equipment in 1992. Selling equipment is a very different business and requires a different service model, different staff with different skills and even a different business model as a whole. If we really wanted to focus on meetings, we had to organise ourselves completely towards the specific needs and requirements of meetings. Our vision of our market became more and more focused.
One of the last major decisions in that evolution was the end of dry hire. This means a hotel or a company could no longer knock on our door to rent a flipchart and a microphone or a TV and a video. We made the crucial decision to totally go for projects, meetings and conferences more specifically.
Two main factors made this possible. Number one is the simple fact we are not based in a big city. Big cities have many meeting venues and these would provide us with so much business in dry hire that we would probably have evolved into a normal AV company running around with many small vans and technicians delivering one LCD projector and a laptop, or two loudspeakers and a screen. Being literally far a way from that market, we could afford to exclude that from our scope of activities and go for projects.
The second major reason was the closeness of Janssen Pharmaceutica, a large pharmaceutical multinational where a few people were organising meeting in a way that today still is seen as a best practice case. We were lucky to be hired and challenged in a way that opened our eyes for the real potential of meetings.
Abbit was no longer a typical AV company anymore because it offered a wide range of integrated services for a narrow market. It is not a production company either because it has in house equipment. Most production companies have no in house equipment so they choose the kind of equipment they need for any kind of event they produce. We were focussing on Meetings and we felt we needed specialised equipment and our own control over equipment to guarantee quality.
The Dirk Reyn meetings
One of the most inspiring clients I have ever worked with is Dirk Reyn Form Janssen Pharmaceutica. Janssen Pharmaceutica is based in Beerse, a village 5 minutes outside Turnhout. It is Belgium's largest pharmaceutical company that operates on a global scale. Founded by Dr Paul Jansen in 1953 it produced hundreds of medicines of which dozens are globally well know like Imodium and Motilium. In the early nineties, Dirk Reyn was the international product manager for Prepulsid; a product with an active component for stomach and intestines. It was a potential success product in 1990, when he invited us, based on what he heard from Paul Vansteenberghen who had worked with us for his national sales meetings.
Dirk was, from day one, challenging us to come up with new and innovative ideas to make his meetings more successful. Like no one I ever met before, he understood the potential of meetings. He saw the potential in education, networking and motivation and for the About 100 participants, all national product managers and marketing managers, he wanted to create an experience that would stick. In order to do so, he stimulated us to open up all our registers, to dig deep into our potential and to think out of the box. This is exactly what made us perform at our best with all available creative, technical and early technological tools. Eight years in a row from 1991 to 1998 we innovated as much as possible at every meeting. The concept of meeting support, or meeting architecture (see later in this book) did not exist yet, but Dirk in fact was a true meeting architect, spending lots of time and resources in analysing, designing and executing the meetings on the content side. For the travel and hospitality side, he worked with a travel agency from the UK and for the content side with a medical communication agency from the UK and Abbit. The travel, the hotel, the receptions and dinners were all taken care of so we could fully focus on the meeting itself and creating that educational, networking and motivational experience for the participants. Fist of all we got the basics right: Good sound, good light, a good stage and set and good quality presentations. A team of 5 to 6 qualified and specialised technicians. Dirk was the first to ask us if we also could do PowerPoint presentations besides 35mm Slides. After that meeting is went straight to the computer shop and bought our first ever PowerPoint, version 2.0.
Besides taking good care of those basics, we did lots of creative and innovative things. Long before the digital camera existed, we produced personalised certificates of attendance on site, with the picture of the participants included. In those days we made pictures with a 35mm reflex camera and took them to a developer in town. The pictures were printed and than rushed back to the hotel. There we scanned them, cropped them and added them to the certificates in Corel-draw before printing them on sophisticated paper ready to designed by the meeting organisers. At the end of the closing meeting the certificates were put on a few tables and all participants were very excited with this certificate. Most of them would have it on their wall in their office for at least a whole year.
An other idea we executed for Dirk was the welcome tapes in Barcelona. A sound cassette with a welcome word from Dirk and the theme music was played during the taxi ride from the airport to the hotel. A simple and low cost tool, but what an impact. Not only were the participants surprised to get a message halfway their taxi ride, but also did they arrive prepared and excited, having heard, the meeting host introduce the key issues of that meeting. An exciting (motivational) en informative (educational) experience.
Once video editing on site became an option, we started making closing videos. Interviews with participants were part of it from the first one. And soon we did a daily news bulleting in the morning, about the day before, a great way to wake up and start the day. An other application of on site editing was for every country to make a 30 second promotional video that would promote that country's marketing materials as models for other countries. This co-creation and educating each-other was exceptional in those days where the average speaker with slides gave the audience a 3 minute Q&A and that was it for interactivity. Not in these Prepulsid meetings in the 90's. When voting systems or Audience Response Systems (ARS) did not yet exist, this group frequently used the red and green cards for gathering opinions and surveying the group. The Prepulsid Promotion Club was another great way of involving and motivating the audience; stimulate peer to peer learning and driving the networking. This Promotion club Gave each country a small table and a panel to display it's promotional material. The country name and flag was displayed on the panel and power plus AV support was provided for those with a computer or a video. Half the group was exhibiting and half was walking around, visiting stands. Halfway that activity, the groups switched position and the exhibitors became visitors and vice versa. In a short time everyone was able to discover some great and clever ideas of the other countries and meet the people from that country. All key objectives were taken care of by this activity,
learning: seeing good ideas from other countries and discussing about them,
networking: meeting peers form other countries
motivation: allowing individuals to show their creations, to share and be listened to,
making it one of the most valuable moments of the meeting.
These and many more intense and creative ideas were all presented under a meeting logo that evolved only slightly each year and repeated the colours and basic shapes, turning it into a recognisable sequel. The main goal was a certain budget in sales by the year 2000 and since the first meeting was held in Cyprus, the meetings were called the Olympus 2000 meetings after the Greek god and mountain.
The key messages remained the same all those years and were called the Four C's. Culture, Creativity, Consistency and Commitment. These four C words were always present and served as an umbrella for every topic that was addressed.
This brings us to the more strategic level behind the meetings. Dirk had organised these meetings as a series, I simply call that serial meetings. There was an end goal, and even an end date of this series. Each meeting was reporting on the progress and kept clearly focussed on the end goal. Each meeting was a stepping stone towards the next meeting and incremental progress was made. That kind of a real long term vision in serial meetings is even today a rare case. Obviously, long term collaboration with suppliers and buy in from management were crucial.
Dirk Reyn hit the target before the planned date and we are proud that we were part of the process where meetings really were the driving force and the glue that kept it all together and focussed. He accomplished a paradigm shift in my mind, although I only woke up to it a few years later. It is the focus, the drive and creativity of Dirk that planted the seed of the concept of Meeting Support, the Meeting Content Matrix (r) and eventually Meeting Architecture. If any one ever was a true meeting content architect, it was Dirk. Today it is still rare that a meeting owner, the meeting initiator, the meeting host is so much involved in such a holistic way in analysing, designing and executing the meeting.
Let's focus on meetings
In May 1998 Abbit organised its first own internal meeting called X-tra themed 'Let's focus on Meetings'. This was the year we officially decided to fully focus on the market of meetings and conferences. This was because we had great value to ad, we liked the product and we felt there was a healthy market.
In 1995 I decided to visit some agencies in the Brussels area that were listed as conference organisers in the yellow pages. One of them was Nikitra and as I was waiting in their lobby I browsed through a few local magazines about meetings and events. I had no idea there were magazines about meetings so I immediately subscribed and soon was invited by the magazine owner, Eric De Ridder for a focus group meeting about the content, direction and future of the magazine. Since I was so convinced meetings were our company's' future, I went without hesitating. There I bumped into Herve Bosquet, at that time a full time PCO (Professional Conference Organiser) and President of the Belgian Chapter of MPI. MPI is Meeting Professionals International, an association with at that time around 16.000 and currently (2007) about 22.000 members. I immediately signed as a member, became part of the board and just three years later became president of the Belgian chapter. Today I am an internationally active member and a regular supporter and sponsor of the Belgian Chapter. MPI is the biggest global association in a wonderful industry, a young industry. MPI exists about 40 years now and the industry has grown a lot in those year, it became, in a way, truly professional.
From than onwards things really started to kick off. In 1999 Abbit grew with 72% and in 2000 with more than 40%. I checked the details of this growth was completely thanks to MPI through which I could network with meeting planners that became clients. Some of them big ones a lot from the US and organising meetings mostly in a European country.
As a host sponsor of MPI's European conference for five years in a row, our company was able to really understand and connect to a group of meeting professionals and learned a lot in doing so.
In 2002 we were looking for a good way to describe our activities. By then we provided almost everything there was available to support meetings in their key objectives. We had no name for our activity which did not really exist. We were not a normal AV company, we were not a production company, we were not a PCO nor an Event agency. After an internal meeting, one of our team came up with the term "Meeting Support" which since than we adopted and so now we call our company Abbit Meeting Support. We provide meetingsupport to our clients and we have meeting support managers.
MPI and later also other industry events also offered me the opportunity to talk to a lot of professionals and also speak to audiences up to 2.000 participants. This made me think, discus, prepare presentations, write and rethink my ideas around this industry. A great sound board to bounce off ideas and concepts that helped me stay focussed and really develop our company's strategy and the content of this book.
The CMM course (Certification in Meeting Management) was another MPI breakthrough moment where I was pushed to thinking and organising my professional life in a strategic way. It also made me write the business plan for what today is the Meeting Support Institute (see later in this book).
In the 25 years we really evolved a lot. The last few years I kept on working and thinking about what it is we do and where our true value lies. It did not stop at meeting support; it kept on going and with the critical comments of some highly appreciated industry friends we kept on going until we now think the pinnacle is in sight. This next big thing on the horizon is Meeting Architecture and I look forward to be part of making that happen in the coming 25 years. The next few chapters will address this path step by step.
CONCLUSIONS: How it all started
The evolution towards the writing of this book all started with an 18 year old boy starting his own video production company in 1982. 5 years of surviving, 10 years of focussing and 10 years of innovation is what made me realise the time is right to take the next step. Moving this industry from the shell for meetings to the shell and the substance of meetings is a dream. I will be proud if I can take a small part in that dream.
NEXT CHAPTERS
The next chapters I will share my vision on the meetings industry from the outside in, than what I observe to be clearly missing, than how we could develop and support that underdeveloped side of meetings and in the final 3 chapters about how meeting architecture as a profession could be the catalyst to make it all happen.
|
4. The meeting industry
What do we have
In 1998 I also started to go to tradeshows in our industry and that is was a real eye opener. I only saw meeting venues (conference centres, hotels and hotel chains) and meeting destinations (Countries, Regions and cities). I thought I was part of the meetings industry but I saw nothing that related to my world in this gigantic global Meeting Industry tradeshow in Geneva. No Educators, no AV companies, no production companies, no presentation specialists, meeting photographers,... nothing about education, networking or motivation. I felt strangely awkward in the middle of the biggest event of the industry I had become part of. I felt sort of different. I felt like the little boy in the emperors new clothes and wanted to shout "The emperor is Naked!" I did not understand how this could be called the meeting industry by a whole community although there clearly was no direct connection to meetings. This was just the environment in which the meeting could take place, an empty shell, and I was looking for the substance.
This was my big wake up call. This industry of meeting professionals has totally shifted
into one direction: the direction of the Hospitality/business tourism. Or did just a part of the tourism industry adopt that name "meeting industry", to be taken more seriously?
However it came to be, this industry was not mine so a quest started. Where did I belong? Where did my company belong? I started a long journey, looking for a place I would feel professionally home, a place with peers; people with an interest in the core of meetings, the content side of meetings.
Today I have found the words to describe what I only instinctively felt in the late nineties. The fact I came to a good understanding of the industry, with the big question, lingering in the back of my mind, made me see things, and come to some critical conclusions. This story I want to share with one goal: to help the meeting industry come to maturity, grow and prosper.
"The 2007 meeting industry is proficient in creating the shell, in which meetings take place. The only thing we have to do is look inside that shell, put in a grain of sand and after a few years, harvest the pearl."
Magazines
Getting more and more into the meetings industry, I got more and more magazines. Today I know about 30 different magazines of which I get about 10 on a monthly basis. Magazines from Europe, North America, and Asia, called CIM Conference Industry Magazine, Conference Valderen, Convegni, QM Quality in Meetings, The Meeting Professional.
On a warm summer evening in 2005 I was in New York with Lori Cioffi, the chief editor of the worlds largest magazine in this industry; MC (Meetings and Conventions). Lori Is a smart woman and a great personality. I met her, like so many great people at one of the two annual International MPI conferences that take place in the US. Lori has a few Belgian friends so it is probably through the Belgian CVB (Conference and Visitors Buro). We were on our way to a restaurant and just when we were going in, a young couple with a bugaboo with babie walked out. I overheard them speak Belgian Dutch and we started talking. After a few minutes the woman that worked in the NY banking industry in asked, "so what industry do you work in?" and without any hesitation, Lori said 'the travel industry'. Later that night I ask Lori why she said that, and not the meeting industry. And she explained that this was the easiest way to make people understand without to much explanation. But surely it also demonstrates how the meeting industry and its media lean towards the "tourism" side of this industry.
In 2006 I made an analysis of a series of magazines. To see where the real business in this industry lies, I thought it could be a good exercise to count and analyse the advertising. Advertising costs a lot of money so it shows where the money is, and where the real players of the industry are. And guess what? 98,5% of all advertising was about destinations (Countries, States, Regions, Cities) and Venues (mostly hotel chains).
No explanation needed to understand that the meeting industry exists only through the hospitality industry. Also looking at the magazine content, most of it talks about the hospitality side and the other big group of articles talk about general topics for personal and professional development. General in the sense of time management, leadership, risk management, entrepreneurial skills, work life balance, stress management, conflict management etc. Topics not directly connected to the meeting industry, but generally applicable, for personal, work or business life.
Only very seldom one finds an article that addresses the substance of meetings.
Topics like how to innovate presentations, increase interactivity?
What kind of education methods can be applied at meetings and which to use when?
What to do or not to do to harvest the wisdom of all meeting participants?
What methods or tools can a meeting planner use at a corporate meeting to increase cross divisional collaboration?
How to create teams and start taskforces at a meeting?
Multi billion dollar industry
Is the meeting Industry part of the business travel / tourism / hospitality industry?
I guess it is, for many reasons very natural that the MICE 1industry is so strongly connected to and influenced by the tourism / hospitality industry.
Looking at the globalisation of companies and associations alike, the number for international meetings and conferences has been growing a lot in the last few decades.
If we organise a Global conference for the sales managers in a multinational, only one of them can come by car; the one that lives in the host country. All other participants fly in or come by train. If the Global Conference for diabetes takes place on a different continent every year, it enables doctors of all continents to participate once in a while in the top educational event in their field. This IDF conference also brings together about 20.000 doctors that all have to fly in and stay a few nights in a hotel. This kind of conferences generates millions of seats in airplanes and room nights in hotels. The airline industry has 40% of her business thanks to meetings. The Hotel industry runs for 56% on business travellers of which 75% travel for a meeting or a conference.
When one realises that a conference participant that takes part in a residential conference (stays the night in a hotel) spends on an average € 250,- per day in the city the conference takes place. The industry may be not well know, but its total turnover in travel, hotel, etc. Was 122,31 billion US$ in 2004, making it 29th biggest industry in the US.
Revenue portion for MICE
airlines 131,5 Billion 17,39 13,2%
hotel industry 113,7 Bilion 36,8 Bilion 32,4%
(CIC, 2005)
The companies that operate here are large companies like hotel chains and airlines. Companies with thousands of employees, global brands and multi million dollar marketing budgets. In contrast to the companies that work in the substance side of meetings, the content side of meetings. These usually are small or even one man companies like moderators, speaker trainers, presentation designers, meeting designers up to small or medium size companies like meeting focussed AV and production companies, or sections of PCO's, parts of event agencies and sometimes a department in a marketing and communication agency.
In most cases, there is only a partial focus towards meetings. Companies or people doing many things, and also meetings. Real meeting focussed companies are rare to find. So on this side also it comes natural that this part of the meetings industry is no where to be seen. Totally fragmented, to small to even have a marketing budget, let alone a brand.
So yes, the meetings industry is currently part of the hospitality (travel and tourism) industry. That is my conclusion, as an observer, looking from the outside. I see an opportunity and whether that opportunity will develop is entirely up to the industry.
The little brother
The Economic Impact Study 2004 of the CIC (Convention industry Council) shows a breakdown by Expenditure in Conventions exhibitions direct spending. In travel hotel and F&B (Food and Beverage) we see about 85% of total spending. 15% goe's to Business services (12%), Technoloy (0,2%) and other (3%). In there we must look for what is spent on the content side.
CIC defines Direct Spending: All expenditures associated with an event that flow into the host destination's local economy. Direct spending includes attendee spending, exhibitor spending and event organizer spending.
This means in fact that we do not have numbers on how much is spent on the content side.
The table on p 28 shows one corporate example where 10% is spent on production and AV and 90% on Logistics. Is this exemplary of how meetings are budgeted? Or are we missing information to see the complete picture?
I would dear to assume that the meeting industry's spending on the actual meeting objectives is relatively small or even insignificant. Is this the industry's catch-22?
Degrees for this industry.
Conference management studies or a degree in meeting management are in most cases a section of tourism departments. Professor Rob Davidson who I met at the annual conference of MPI the Netherlands, is Senior Lecturer in Business Travel and Tourism at the Westminster University in London. He teaches a course in Meeting management. He had read some of my articles and he joined my session about the content side of meetings and how this currently is not or under-developed. The session also touched briefly on the focus of current meeting management education and what it could be or what should be added to make it complete.
After the presentation he came to me and explained enthusiastically about how he now realised there was a gigantic opportunity for the meeting management courses and degrees and also for the global Meetings industry as a whole. He agreed that the current curriculum is mainly geared towards the tourism and hospitality side of the meetings industry and does not teach on the real reasons why people organise meetings: the content side of meetings. The 'what to achieve in the minds of participants' part is not addressed. Nothing is taught about how the meeting objectives for Learning, Networking or Motivation amongst meeting participants can be designed, supported, met or measured. It's all about the shell, and nothing about the substance.
The geographical connection
Besides the big global players; the airlines and large hotel chains, there are also big local players. Every country, many regions and most cities have an office that promotes that destination for incentives, conferences and meetings. These are called the CVB's, short for Conference Visitors Bureau. Most of the time these offices are part of the tourism departments for obvious reasons: The city sees conference participants as tourists because they generate, for the city, an income in the local tourism industry: besides venues and Hotels a lot of other spending like in restaurants and shopping takes place. The Economic Impact Study 2004 (CIC, 2005) shows a figure of about $ 128 Bilion for the US alone.
The real reason why meetings are organized generates earnings (no numbers available) elsewhere, not in the destination. What people learn at a conference in Denver may be applied and therefore generate an income in South-Africa and dozens of other countries. So for Denver, the stakes are totally in the tourism and hospitality side of the meeting, not in the meeting objectives. These bureau's are governmental and politically connected and supported because a city that has 100.000 two day visits for conferences generates about € 50.000.000 turnover for Hotels, Restaurants, Gifts, Souvenirs, Entertainment, ... for that city, generating two to three million in taxes for the city alone and much more in labour taxes, other taxes 2and VAT for the country. Part of that is used to fund the CVB and where else can we position a CVB, but in the tourism department of a city or region?
This explains why the meeting industry is part of the tourism industry. And because it is part of the tourism industry, it cultivates its tourism side. This makes it less concerned in the things what meetings are really about. Because it is less knowledgeable in the content side of meetings, it remains part of the tourism industry which is a catch 22.
Figure 1: "The tourism catch 22" that chains the meeting industry to the tourism industry
At tradeshows in the meeting industry we can see lots of large stands from countries, regions and cities. They occupy about 90% of the space at such tradeshows. Their presence and their activities to win meeting planners for their destination, emphasises the tourism/hospitality side of the meetings industry.
Example The members of the Antwerp CVB
Province of Antwerp
Horeca section hotels
De Lijn (Public busses)
University of Antwerp
Unizo (organisation for SME's)
City of Antwerp
City Region Antwerp - venues
NMBS (Railroad)
(GOM) Regional Development Agency for Antwerp
Voka - chamber of Commerce
City Mechelen
Green Region Kempen (venues)
SN Brussels Airlines
High Council for Diamond
Toerism dept of the Province of Antwerp
City Region Mechelen (venues)
VLM Airlines
Provincial Museums
Table 1 This Table shows the natural leading position of Travel / Tourism / hospitality entities in CVB's.
Complexity of meeting planning
Meeting planners are the ones that get a degree in meeting management, visit those tradeshows and read the magazines. They are the target audience and the Hotel and destination industry is targeting them to get their groups in their city or hotel.
Meeting planners have challenging jobs. On an average they are extremely busy, they travel a lot and they work under constant pressure of absolute and sometimes extreme deadlines on one hand and budgetary restraints on the other.
75% of meeting planners in the Pharmaceutical industry say they have no or limited impact on the content side of the meetings. They do have a big say in the hospitality side of the meetings. Meeting planners search an appropriate venue, book and contract meeting space and bedrooms, arrange travel, arrange busses for transfers, organise meals and coffee breaks, find and book special venues for the closing dinner, book restaurants for the free evening, etc. And all of that for a diverse group with all kinds of special dietary and other individual needs. Invitation, registration, payments, badges, hostesses, welcome desks, etc.
On an international scale this job requires a lot of knowledge about Cultural differences in areas like food, habits, time, etiquette, safety, shipping, customs, finance, etc.
Many meeting planners organise multiple meetings in a row for their company, association or clients. They travel around the world for site inspections and to assist at the meetings they organise. Travelling is what many meeting planners get so much of that a free trip to Beijing does not excite them a lot.
Meeting planners have absolute deadlines which means that they can not postpone the opening reception with a day for whatever reason. The deadline for the construction of a new building is not absolute. If the building is ready one year late, we still have a building. If the meeting starts one day late everything is lost. On top of that mostly they don't get enough lead time from the people they work for: the meeting owners. Finding and contracting a venue and planning all that needs to be planned is seriously underestimated in many cases. This is why meeting planners are hardworking, task switching, stress resistant and well organised professionals. Almost 3/4 of them are female as membership numbers in MPI show. All their time, attention and energy is needed to organise the travel and hospitality side for one meeting or conference after another. With such a workload, it seems quit normal that these meeting professionals are not looking for extra work by getting involved in the content side of the meeting.
WAAR MOET DIT?
1) .
Presentation Judith Miller Montreal
2) strategic meetings management is all about procurement, finance, Budget. The next step now should be, now we spend financially sound, how about the results? Do we spend it smart in a sense of analysing objectives, designing executing and measuring on objectives.
3) Honywel procurement tool : meetings insteken en only than bills get payd. How about providing a methodology for analysing the objectives, designing execurting the meetning and measuring the results based on objectives.
4) the bigger meetings are not in sisco's system and hard to get on board. The ADEM methodology.
Options for senior meeting planners:
1 stay in that job
2 lead a team of planners
3 Procurement, finance
4 meeting architecture, ADEM methodology.
Most meeting planners are glad that they can focus on the hospitality for meetings, others would like to move into the content side and become more involved in the substance and driving the objectives of the meeting.
This later category has the potential to become what this book is all about; meeting architects.
Most meeting planners have skills and maybe even more important their hart anchored in hospitality. This is what they love to do: getting people together and make sure every one has a good time and feels well looked after: the true hospitality mindset.
Cables and buttons
Most meeting planners are not so much skilled and educated into technical matters like AV and ICT. Many meeting planers are asked to book the AV for the meeting and they do so because it is part of their job. Not because they get all excited about offers with mixing tables, microphones, light dimmers, LCD screens, internet connections, groupware, networking technology, etc.
In these circumstances, it is also challenging for an AV or production company to work. A client that does not really understand the technical things and puts his hart and sole in the five course dinner rather than the closing Presentation. It is a tough sell with a product that is an intangible service and hard to demonstrate, unlike a venue, a meeting room and even a dinner. Showing how the closing video will look like is just not possible until it is time for the closing session.
In those circumstances it is quit normal and acceptable that the content, the objectives of the meeting are left untouched by the meeting planner. The meeting owner, who is a marketing director or sales manager, is on his own for meeting content, in some cases supported by a marketing or communication person. Manny core elements of meetings are not addressed at all: the need for designing the program, selecting the right formats, training the speakers, involving facilitators, investigating and selecting the right networking tools, maximizing the before and after potential of a meeting. Only a few meeting owners really spend time on these key issues and even less have the fully informed and specialized people to rely on.
WHERE DO WE FIND THE MEETING OWNER? There is no meeting owner association.
How do we call a meeting owner? Meeting Initiator. Meeting holder we don't even have a name for it...
BBBBB
This is how we get to see some strange and extreme spending behaviour.
Comparing two cases I witnessed personally:
One group is 950 participants high ranking military personnel and the other group is 120 product managers and marketing people in a pharmaceutical company.
One meeting planner for the 950 group spends € 5 per person per day on all the AV, Production, ICT etc.
The meeting owner of the smaller group spends 250,- per person per day including a big set, opening video, perfect AV, the best presentation technology, spectacular light, great speaker support, facilitation etc. a massive spending difference of 4900 percent.
The interesting observation in this case is that both groups use 5 star hotels and spend 3 to 400,- per person per day on conference package, meals and a room night.
Both parties understand the value of good hospitality in meetings, but they clearly differ in their approach towards the investment in the meeting objectives.
Looking at the cost per person per day is not done on the meeting content side. The opening video costs 5.000 and it is not common practice to divide that by the 120 participants. The hospitality side is calculated, offered and budgeted per person. The cost for a room night per person remains the same irrespective of group size, as is with flights and meals etc.
If we call the meeting content side the brain side of meetings: learning, networking and motivation takes mainly part in the brain, and we call the hospitality side the body side travelling sleeping, and meals are mainly body support functions, than one could analyse the resources allocated to Body and Brain in a meeting. For a certain meeting, or for a certain company or association, a balance will be reached at a certain level that is appropriate for that meeting and that organisation.
This is what we cal the Budgetary Balance Between Body and Brain.
Comparing different meetings, we will see that one meeting spends no attention to the brain side with a 90/10 ratio and another reaches an almost 50/50 balance. Can we call a meeting that spends 90% of its budget in hospitality a meeting? Or should we call it an incentive? What is your acceptable budgetary balance between body and brain? What is a good balance to maximise the meeting's potential?
Figure 2: The balance between the two crucial sides of meetings must be addressed in order to get productive meetings.
Of course it is not as black and white as I present this body and brain difference. Great hospitality of course also influences the learning, networking and motivation.
It is clear that good hospitality is fundamental. Literally we can not build a meeting without that foundation. It needs to be good or participants start in a bad mood and all else is a waste of time. On the other side, one should not forget to construct an equally great meeting on top of that great foundation. Both should be appropriately addressed and resources should be spent in a balanced way in order to get the best results.
Best of both worlds
I consider a meeting or conference the most complete type of activity in the MICE3 industry. MICE stands for Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Events. (Many English language people don'tlike the term because mice is the plural of mouse. )
I believe a good meeting contains all of the above. The incentive and the event elements are both part of a good meeting. An incentive as in a motivational trip to stimulate people's performance. An incentive trip contains a nice destination, a great venue, fun activities, entertainment and great catering. In many cases it also includes travelling to exotic places and impressive hotel accommodation. This are purely travel and hospitality elements combined in a great experience. Any good conference spends lots of attention, with the help from a planner, to make all those elements optimally support the participants wellbeing. A good meeting is in that sense partially an incentive, and motivation is one of the three key objectives in meetings (education, networking, motivation) In a meeting, motivation can be supported in many more ways than the travel hospitality elements.
An event usually is a non residential stage focussed activity. A group, usually national, so without much travel, gets together in a venue for a show, entertainment and some product presentation. The staging and production are the main focal point in an event. Any good conference will also have those elements combined in an opening and or closing session. A performance on stage, a spectacular opening show or video, a big production are some of the elements that overlap in events and great meetings. Motivation is again the most important key objective combined with some limited networking.
As a real Meeting and conference person, I tend to think that an Incentive or an event, are in fact meetings that lack a few things.
An incentive is a meeting that lacks education.
An event is a short meeting that invests highly in entertainment.
This doesn't mean that incentives or events should become meetings but they all contain elements of meetings. Meetings and conferences also need to pay attention to their incentive and event side in order to be complete and better.
On top of the incentive elements and the event elements, a meeting ads some unique features that make it a meeting. These elements are mainly educational and networking, but also in a very specific way motivational. An opening video, an impressive set, a great key note speech, good AV and production all are such motivational elements.
The budgetary balance should be taken into consideration to analyse whether a meeting is a meeting or an incentive. A meeting that spends all its budget on the hospitality side may considered an incentive rather than a meeting.
AV companies
An important basic component for executing meetings is AV: Audio Visual material. Many AV companies in the classic sense are first level in the value chain.
They take the order and bring whatever a meeting planner asks for.
The second level in the value chain is when an AV company aks questions like "How many people do we expect in what room?" in order to decide how many loudspeakers we best install. This is when an AV company ads some value.
The final level takes us into the key objectives of the meeting and once those are analyzed and know, the AV company may advise to use a voting system or Audience Response System because they understand that gathering the opinions or creating more active participation is an objective.
Very few AV companies do that because of a different interests and a lack of focus on meetings and conferences.
Most AV companies do it all for everyone. They sell equipment and install it in meeting rooms, café's, theatres, etc. They rent equipment to individual users like a DJ or someone that organises a birthday party or some one that needs a plasma screen for a tradeshow or a hotel that needs two flipcharts.
Thirdly they work for projects like an event, a tradeshow booth, a party, a theatre show, a concert, and yes, once in a while also a meeting.
The average AV company combines all kinds of service in al kinds of markets and has no real focus.
The kind of service we need to give clients when we sell equipment is very different form the service we provide in projects like meetings. When selling equipment there is a deadline, but the value of the sold good is still there when delivered a few days or weeks later. A meeting has an absolute deadline. This means that it has to be delivered on the planned day or its value is gone and damages of a manifold of the cost arise immediately. A product launch for a new medicine failed because of serious problems with the sound equipment. The launch had to be re scheduled to the next year costing a critical year of advantage on competition, and also permanently damaging the brand. We also can not postpone the opening session of a conference with even one day. The international participants won't be able to stay for the, also postponed closing session because their flights are booked.
After the meeting took place, the work is finished and next year's file can be can be started. In sales we have a permanent service and we have to go whenever there is a problem. Very different type of service from a meeting where there is one big peek moment and everything happens at the same time.
The microphones we need for speech at meetings are very different from the Microphone a DJ or a singer needs. If the average AV company does a meeting, it should buy the appropriate meeting microphones, but usually the DJ microphone is used for the speaker desk leading to all sorts of problems. The AV technician than blames the speaker for not having a good microphone technique while we all know the speaker is not a professional performer. He AV company has different equipment and different people than a Meeting Support company
Most AV companies never grow bigger than a small, hardworking little unit that in many cases hardly survives and will do anything for anyone competing with its neighbouring AV companies.
There is no diploma or certificate needed, so anyone can start an AV company.
This makes most AV companies perform sub-optimally for meetings. If on top, meeting planners change their AV supplier every time they have a meeting, it becomes hard to even get the basics right. In such circumstances it is hard to make meetings improve over time on the content side.
Meetings need and deserve a focussed and innovative AV supplier that has all the special kit a meeting needs. A supplier that combines all the skills and competences a meeting needs like AV, IT, presentation, video, signage, photograpy, etc.
A meeting also needs a long term relation with such a supplier to build year after year one the last meeting and keep participants involved.
Only with focus on meetings and innovation in place combined with a long term relation, a meeting can grow and prosper on the AV, and that is part of the content side of meetings where we so urgently need to improve performance.
Production companies
Some meeting planners will work with a production company or creative agency that in its turn hires an AV company and other suppliers.
Such production companies are creating stage performances and will create a great experience for, let's say, an opening session.
They will create a theme and design and produce creative elements based on the meeting theme. Usually they combine artists like dancers with Audio Visual production like music and video, a light and laser show with a set / stage. Great opening shows have been made for meetings by wonderful creative directors. When impressing the audience (Motivation) is the number one key objective of the conference, this is certainly a good way to spend the money. If however a conference as mainly Educational, secondly networking and only thirdly aims for motivation, one may think twice and relocate some of the 200.000 that goes into the opening show.
Of course it is very gratifying to create a big wow effect and one could almost say it is 'cheap' to spend so much money on a big spectacular show. Cheap in a way that it is easy success, like it is a guaranteed success to book the best hotel and give the best champagne and the best food. Every one knows that is going to be much more difficult to create a wow with substance than with show. It's a big challenge to have les lobster to leverage the learning. The industry today knows how the wow can be made through exquisite hospitality and a big show. In a way that makes it vulnerable because this only takes meetings to the first of five measuring levels towards ROI. See Return on investment on page 29
Roughly we can say that the meeting industry is geared towards the Hospitality side and the two main partners that could help to develop the Content side are not able to help because of a lack of professionalism and a lack of focus.
What do we need
As an industry, it is needless to say the meeting industry wants to prosper. It wants to grow, do well, increase its importance and decrease its vulnerability. To prosper as an industry, the number one focus is clients. What do they want? They want to meet their objectives and satisfy their clients, the meeting owners. Meeting owners have reasons why they organise meetings: the meeting's key objectives. Who-ever can satisfy those needs or meet these objectives, holds the key to success in this industry. If we ask meeting planners the WHY question they will tell us why they organise meetings. The main groups of key objectives of meetings are always the same: Learning, Networking and motivation of participants. This industry can start to address those and become more than the creator of the environment ( the shell) in which someone else addresses the meeting objectives. If this industry expands it horizons to that arena, it may find itself much more wanted in the executive room. Meetings will become more of strategic importance if they can address the real needs, the real key objectives. If the meeting department knows how to analyse, design, execute and measure meetings based on the key objectives, they will be seen as crucial to the process. Today, still, in many cases the marketing managers assistant will plan the logistics for the marketing meetings. Since it's just about booking a hotel and a few rooms. Becoming a strategic partner with a real focus and understanding of the objectives and how to reach them is a very different game. Offering meetings as a strategic revenue generator based on a professional methodology also will reduce the "assistant scenario" and increase the influence of the industry.
Innovation
With its current assets and people, the mice industry has become truly professional in the hospitality end of the business. The need for new companies, knowledge, tools and people to address the key objectives is clear. Professionals in adult education at meetings, some behavioural psychology for motivation, and tools to improve the networking will become instrumental to this industry's next level of success. These companies and individuals are different from the current population in the MICE industry. These companies will also be new to this industry. The meeting industry will have to invite them, welcome them and support them to make sure they are successful and become real players in this industry and see it as their market.
I have seen many come and go in the last 5 years and we need to stop that process and turn that into a positive spiral.
An example of how serious it is shows this story. The winner of the technology award for EIBTM in 2004 was a company that specialises in organising and structuring the networking at meetings and events. As far as most meeting planners say, networking is the number two key objective in meetings. One would therefore think that meeting planners would be interested in such an innovation. The winner gets a free stand on the tradeshow only to conclude at the end of 3 days that 'these people (the meeting planners) are not interested in our product. They have no influence or buying power so this is not our market. Meeting planners are only looking for and maybe deciding on the destination and the venue to have their meeting, not for tools to improve the networking at their meetings.'
This is just one story of many disappointed companies with tools or services that impact the learning, networking or motivation at meetings. If we talk to companies that look at the meeting industry as a market for their product, they tell us how frustrated they are when talking to meeting planners. How confusing it is to those newcomers that the meeting planner, actually does not plan the meeting, but only organises the environment in which the meeting takes place.
If the industry could open itself to the content side of meetings and make those companies more welcome, it would change a lot, for the better.
Trends that support and drive change in the meeting industry
Where is the magazine that talks about the content side of meetings? We see just the od article on technology or learning in the Business travel or meeting magazine.
Where is the tradeshow that gathers all players on the meetings content side? We get a few stands at the meetings tradeshow where hotels and destinations take 99% of the space. Or maybe a general marketing tradeshow with a few stands that also address meetings.
CORPORATE MEETING SPENDING
Hotel
4.8
hospitality
Air transportation
6.0
hospitality
F&B
4.4
hospitality
Production AV
2.0
Meeting Support
10%
Miscellaneous
1.8
Hospitality
Ground
1.0
Hospitality
Total
20.0 Milion US$
100%
Table 2 Annual spending by a corporate meeting department shows a 10% spending on the content side and 90% on logistics/hospitality.
Where is the university where we can get a degree in meeting content management? Not an optional Event management in the marketing and communication school. Not 5% of the curriculum in Meeting Management degrees? These and many other things are clearly missing. An industry that calls itself the meeting industry is actually like the tire industry calling itself the car industry, or the wood industry calling itself the furniture industry. But what's in a name...
There are a few tendencies that may help the industry to become more complete and ultimately more rightfully claimant of the term Meeting Industry.
Procurement
Business tourism, a cost?
One of the new trends putting pressure on meetings is procurement. Purchasing departments in large corporations have discovered meetings, events and incentives. In some companies the total spend is known and in many cases procurement start cutting costs. In many cases they see a large portion of the meeting spend goes to travel and
accommodation. Their simplified conclusion is that that is probably not necessary. They see meetings as a cost, not as a revenue generator.
Table 3 This is an example of a real budget from an existing organisation.
Since nothing in this budget shows the educational effort, this budget looks like an incentive trip rather than a meeting.
Procurement people think in terms of consolidation, standardisation, commoditising. And corporate travel managers have been working with procurement since many years. In travel and hotel booking a lot of consolidation took place. Many corporations now know how much they spend on individual travel: 5 star hotels and individual flights. They use that to leverage their buying power.
If a travel manager consolidates al flights from a multinational, and he can negotiate about 100.000 tickets, he surely gets some good deals.
Travel executives have the travel spending well under control since a few years now. Their logic next field of action is meetings and events. This puts additional pressure on the planners. The challenge here is that meeting budgets like the one above indicate a lot can be saved on the travel and hospitality. Meeting owners and meeting planners both come under increasing pressure to cut cost. Which I believe in some cases makes a lot of sense in other cases is the wrong approach and in most cases a missed opportunity; the opportunity to re-organise the way meetings and conferences are held and being able to turn them into profit centres rather than costs.
We now see smaller teams doing more with less, resulting in even less time for working on the content.
Return on investment
In 2005 I was part of a focus group for a Belgian Magazine called Rendevenement. In the focus group we had event agencies, pco's, venue owners, exhibition centres and hotels and a few corporate meeting planners. The goal was to identify some trends in the MICE industry. One of the topics that was discussed was the return on investment (ROI) of meetings and events. How can we keep spending corporate money and not show the value of what we do? We will be looked upon as a pure cost that can be cut whenever someone needs to, if we can not prove the link between cost and income. Between meeting or event budget and the companies successes.
After the meetings and as is appropriate in this industry, we had a standing reception with some wonderful finger food. And than it happened. Standing at one of the tables, the discussion kept going and in the presence of a corporate planner from Daikin Air-conditioning, a man from an event agency said "We only make sure the event runs smoothly. It is not our job to get the message across or generate Return On Investment." I was stunned. How can he say that? So bluntly and in the presence of a corporate planner. For me one + one = two. If one is not interested in the financial result of an event, in the effect it creates, one should not be doing any. And of course I'm not talking about the survey that asks about how good people found the event or meeting. That is the lowest level (1) of measuring results.
ROI evaluation levels
If we have any interest in this industry we at least must know the 5 levels of ROI measurement by hart. Based on The European Event ROI Institute, and Jack Philipse's 4measuring methodology, there are 5 levels of measuring. Knowing those and accepting those as true may be one of the most powerful influences on this industry in the next decade.
1
SATISFACTION
The lowest level of measuring that most meeting and event planners will do. Asking the basic question about how good people found the event. Was it impressive? Was it professional? did we have good food? Did you like the key note speaker? Etc. In short, are you satisfied with the event.
2
LEARNING
The second level is a bit more chalanging to measure. It is however the next step. Without this step you can not go to the next one. In order to be succesfull, people need to go away with some new knowledge. As far as I'm concerned this can be pure knowledge, but also having met new people that are potential clients, suppliers or peers with whom I will do business or improve my network.
3
APPLICATION
The third level of measuring is all about applying what came out of the meeting. Do participants use the techniques, use communicate the knowledge, work differently etc. Do they work or communicate with the people thy met.
4
IMPACT
Once a participant applies what he learned, there must be an impact. Is sales growing as a result? Do we increase our quality? Do we have better inter departmental collaboration? Are we getting a higher succesrate? Do we have less fallout?
5
ROI
The last step one can measure is financial. Every impact on sales or other matters, must have a financial impact. Generating more income or saving cost.When I heard this for the first time in 2004 at MPI's one day track on ROI with Jack Philips in Denver Colorado I was thinking this was impossible. Like me, many may think it is impossible to do and yes, it is difficult. Not impossible, but difficult, and at a cost. If you want to learn more about ROI, I can recommend, as a first and practical book, the MPI book on ROI "Proving the Value of Meetings and Events" (Edited by Jack J. Phillips).
But in short, we can measure ROI in any event, but we should only do it ones in a while and for the most important events we organise.
Figure 3 The five levels to measure ROI in meetings
In short I see these levels of measuring as a flow: We must have happy (level 1) participants in order to make them open to learning (Level 2) so that after the meeting they can apply what they learned (3) and thus have an impact (4) on the business that ultimately generates more income or decreases cost (5). We can not have Impact without the step before; Application. And We can not aptly anything without the step before; Learning. All steps need to be taken, in that sequence. Skipping one step is going to decrease any potential ROI. In that sense it is not just 5 levels of measuring, it is also a chain of action in the participant population, to be observed ore even impacted, influenced. Especially the satisfaction (Motivation) and the learning are area's in which we can increase influence a lot at meetings. This is a open opportunity.
Roi all the way?
Today the industry is stretching itself to prove ROI and in doing so create counter arguments to the cost cutting movement. Especially 911 demonstrated the vulnerability of this industry. Large companies in the meeting industry saw their annual turnover decrease with 30%, 40% and more.
This crisis made ROI appear and no one will dispute its value. If organising an event does not generate more money that is put into it, one should take a closer look. If an incentive only cost money and does not have any financial impact, one should consider investing the money elsewhere; in something that generates better (financial) results.
Calculating ROI and proving it convincingly is a complicated and time consuming matter that most meeting planners and meeting owners will leave to others.
My question in Denver at the end of the day was, "Should we not focus on step two, not just to measure it, but to improve and increase education? Make this industry better and more influential in the learning at the second level, before going all the way op to (just) measuring level 3, 4 and 5?"
The answer I got was the sense of urgency the industry felt to measure ROI and not time to waste.
ROI driving improvement
Today, I believe ROI measuring methodology is the best thing that happened in a long time. It is one of the key drivers that will steer this industry to its next level.
How will that happen?
Let's assume a meeting owner or meeting planner is able to convincingly prove ROI to his board of directors.
What will the CFO ask?
As an alternative to cutting the budget with 10%, the Financial people now have an alternative: they can now ask the meeting planners to increase the ROI! That is the kind of change many meeting planners can only dream of. In stead of decreasing budgets, they now can ask for more money, just by showing that this will generate more ROI. Meetings suddenly have become profit centres in corporations. Not just a cost that can be cut in any crisis but a real opportunity to invest and a strategically important vehicle for corporate success.
Once that change has established itself, the meeting owner or planner now is faced with the challenge to increase ROI. To increase ROI, one needs to enlarge the impact (4) that is based on the application (3) of what participants learned (2) because they were in the right mood (1)
From measuring to action
If we take a closer look at the 5 levels of measuring ROI, there are actually a few levels where meeting professionals can increase their impact. Making the participant more satisfied (1) and making the learning (2) better are things we can do, not just measure. And that is obviously the next thing that will have to happen.
1
SATISFACTION
DIRECT IMPACT BY THE MEETING ORGANISER
actionable
2
LEARNING
3
APPLICATION
SECONDARY IMPACT
4
IMPACT
NO IMPACT
measurable
5
ROI
Simply put: More satisfied participants will learn more so will be able to apply more and have more impact so generate more ROI.
Level one and two are actionable: we can impact those in many ways at meetings and events. There are hundreds of things one can do to improve the learning at conferences. And if asked, groups of meeting planners will say that learning, in all it's forms and shapes, is the number one reason for organising meetings.
Measuring ROI is good.
Increasing ROI is great.
One level up
The MICE 5 industry can move from being a cost into a profit centre of strategic relevance. As an industry, it needs to make some bold and strategic decisions. It needs to open up its horizon and move for some radical innovation. It will require some out of the box thinking and some drastic innovation. Moving the industry one level up from where it resides today will require a mind shift in thousands of individuals, a paradigm shift in many established institutions.
The conferences in the meeting industry itself should not just educate about planning meetings but educate about improving education in meetings. In short a conference about conferences, that educates about education. Magazines should not just have an article on how I can better network at meetings but also on how I can help all participants in a meeting to get more effective networking. Meeting planners should be able to design and execute elements in meetings that establish exactly that specific kind of networking that this meeting needs.
MICE events should not just have an award on the marketing used for an event but also an award on how events support the marketing objectives of a meeting owner, of an organisation.
Based on this industry's current strength in hospitality, it will require the hospitality players to support and maybe even drive that process which will ultimately improve the industry as a whole.
Comwell, A hotel chain in Denmark is a pioneer in that field. Lotte Marie Roesgaard is the Comwell HR manager and she is one of the driving forces. She spoke at MPI's PEC-Europe in 2007 and is quoted in the MPI White paper "Mappig the future of on site learning." Comwell currently trains it staff in meeting design and wants them to understand and be involved in the design side of meetings.
Comwell Meeting Designer is a trademark they use and the goal is to make teach their conference managers how to approach meetings and meeting planning differently. Rather than only executing what a meeting planner asks they will now also ask questions on the content side and offer different solutions in designing the meeting for their clients. Hotel conference managers have always been service minded people that tend to say yes to every request of clients, no questions asked. The internal course helps the hotel conference managers to reach a level of confidence so these professionals now dear to ask some important questions about the purpose of the meeting. Rather than only focussing on the logistical support a hotel can give, they now try to help by looking at, learning about and offering help for what happens inside meetings. The Internal Comwell courses teach about facilitation, meeting formats like open space and the Learning Meeting. They keep Comwell conference coordinators up to speed on the newest tools and methods that can be answers to a customer's question on how to activate the participants. Scandinavian countries have always had a strong sense of democracy and the younger generation wants more of that in meetings as well. Comwell staff will offer guidance to customers and bases a lot of its knowledge on school education. Concepts like physical activity to support education is based on research from schools
In the early stages it was somewhat challenging to approach customer with that concept. Many found these questions awkward and strange. But with the development of flowcharts for phone conversations and other tools, they managed to find the approach that leads to success. The main result is that clients come back and their numbers show a growth in a time that the market was declining. Lotte Marrie sais "
"In 2006 our turnover in Sweden went up with 4% on a marked that in general was going down. Our Swedish hotelmanagers contributes this to our MeetingDesigner concept. In Denmark it is not so easy to contribute progress primarily to the concept. However we see that our costumer reviews have improved and costumers regularly comment on how we have helped them improve their meetings..."
Visit denmark, project on training meeting sta Lars Bligga Hanssen
Via Roger kellerman : "Swedish meetings" (naast Danish Meetings from Lars Blicher-Hansen lbh@visitdenmark.com) is a marketing organisation and they have many formats for meetings involving the content side.
Nordic hotels with concept called Nordic meetings Nordiclighthotels.com or .se
Danish comwell group. Comwell hotels HR manager, Rosegard did MV meet her at PEC-E? ...
CONCLUSION about the MICE industry
The meeting industry today is in a very natural way emerged in, developed by and controlled by the tourism industry. This travel and hospitality side of meeting industry (aka the shell) is professional, global, well organised and has a number of large multinational players. This is a good thing and its strength allows the current industry to choose to take ownership of meeting content too (aka the substance) and develop the industry further. This second leg is clearly important to meeting owners but also under developed and not organised. With the potential of completing the meeting industry with its second leg, it can make the industry run to its thriving future. Rather than just measuring ROI, the meeting professionals objective should be about driving, creating, increast-ing ROI: This takes us to the real core of the business: learning and motivation.
This is probably the biggest opportunity this industry faces since many years.
Give us your comments and ideas on the wiki : http://meetingarchitecture.pbwiki.com
Check out the blog for more and up to date information http://meetingarchitecture.blogspot.com
E-mail the author at maarten.vanneste@abbit.eu
|
5. Meeting Content
Definition
Meeting content is everything that happens at a meeting based on the meeting's objectives.
Meeting content is not only the educational content of presentations it is much more! The presentation content based on the experts knowledge is part of the conference main topic and as such is certainly part of meeting content. Selecting the topics and speakers is a task that meeting planners and in some cases professional development (PD) specialists are covering. Meeting content however covers a much wider range of things, in educational goals, but also in networking goals and in motivational goals. Meeting content is based on a well analyzed list of potential meeting objectives for any meeting. (Everything that supports those objectives is meeting support, be it formats, processes, concepts, methods, techniques, activities, tools, technology etc.)
In that sense, meeting content is the raison d'être of meetings. Meeting content is why meetings are organised in the first place so meeting content is critical to the meeting industry; without meeting content, there is no need for meetings. No logistics necessary, no venues needed, no travel to go to a destination and therefore no ground for a meeting industry to exist. Lucky for all of us these reasons of existence are present, at least in the minds of a number of people that keep organising meetings... It would seem logical to get a grip on the reasons of existence of an industry to understand, improve or even just protect it. It's like the oil industry and the car industry: no need for oil if cars don't use it. Cars are the reason of existence of the oil industry. It is safe to say that the oil industry is well connected to the car industry and in that way has more influence on its own existence. In the same way, the meeting hospitality industry would be smart to get well connected to the meeting content industry. The challenge is that there is no such industry. The opportunity is that we can create it.
Why meetings
When asking meeting planners what they consider the key objectives of meetings, I pose this simple question: Why do you or your clients organise meetings? These are the kind of words we get:
Brainstorming, Education, learning, refresh knowledge, training, Communicate message, Product launch, Planning, change behaviour, Information gathering, crisis solving, create new strategy, promotion, advocacy, publishing procedures, problem solving, strategy development, innovate. Networking, visibility, exchange ideas, meet new clients, Meet new suppliers, make industry friends, complete my network of partners, interact, Fun, celebrate, incentive, award, motivation, involve people, team building, team spirit, sense of community, experience, ...
At the moment I have gathered about 200 distinct words that meeting planners consider key objectives for their clients that organise meetings. Many of those words mean the same or something similar. Some are broad and some very specific. It's a list, a long one, and it demonstrates the wealth of good reasons to organise meetings or conferences. Interestingly enough almost never any hospitality is given as a reason. Nobody says they organises meetings so they can travel, although travelling is unavoidable for international conferences. Nobody says they organise meetings to be able to organise nice lunches and dinners for a group, although we all know these things are fundamental.
After gathering the real reasons behind meetings a few times, with the similar groups of planners, we started to see that there are actually three distinct groups in the list. Groups that I would call 'terrains of action'. Each terrain needs our distinct attention and allows for a different set of actions a meeting organiser could deploy in order to reach his objectives.
These three terrains are Learning, Networking and Motivation. And when we sort the earlier list of words, the list of key objectives, all of them should fit at least one of these terrains. Some have an overlap and some partially fit in each but every meeting objective fits at least in one.
1. Learning
Brainstorming, Education, learning, refresh knowledge, training, exchange ideas communicate message, Product launch, Planning, information gathering, crisis solving, create new strategy, promotion, advocacy, publishing procedures, problem solving, strategy development, innovate.
2. Networking
meet new clients, Meet new suppliers, make industry friends, start a network, visibility, complete my network of partners, interact,
3. Motivation
Fun, celebrate, incentive, award, motivation, involve people, team building, team spirit, change behaviour, sense of community, experience, ...
These three cover everything and are the first step in a holistic approach to meeting content management. Some organisations or individuals will focus on learning and include networking as a way of learning. I think that learning is the most important part but it is not the whole picture.
Some books and speakers will defend Networking as the unique aspect of meetings and a agree, but again this is not the only thing. Other companies will emphasise totally on the wow experience which fits the Motivational terrain, and again, spending all our money and attention there is in most cases a mistake. When motivation is the key objective, a wow experience clearly is a good thing.
Paying attention to all three and finding the right balance for our conference is what is crucial.
Learning, Networking and Motivation connected to ROI methodology:
If we look back to the 5 levels in measuring ROI we see some similarities. The motivation as in motivational is the level one: Satisfaction. Satisfaction is a state of mind. It is a rather dry way of saying that people are in a good mood. Motivation is more result oriented. Being motivated to be open to the content of the presentation, but also leaving the conference motivated for action, for change in behaviour, etc. So that is our level one, but here it is a terrain of activities, a part of the meeting to focus on.
The level two is clear: Education is learning = level two. This is in meetings and conferences clearly the most important objective and the one where we are able gain the most impact since it is such an underdeveloped terrain.
In between the two levels from the ROI measuring model, Motivation and Learning, we added networking. Networking clearly appeared as the number two key objective in meetings and conferences. Networking is a distinct terrain where different tools and methods apply, where meeting organisers could invest in specific networking support. Networking also fits very nicely in between Motivation and Education because is influences both and overlaps with both motivation and education. For example learning from and sharing with other participants (Peer to peer learning) as a way of netwrking that is fun (roi level 1) and educational (roi level 2)
From the ROI measuring model
Three action terrains in meetings.
ROI level 2
Learning
Inserted terrain
?
Networking
ROI level 1
Motivation
Figure 4: The list of meeting objectives (P34) indicates that Networking like Motivation and Learning is an action terrain for meetings.
In this chapter, these three groups of key objectives will be further developed, analysed and finally result in a basic tool for analysing meeting content called the Meeting Content Matrix (r). This is useful material for anyone that is involved in analysing the goals and objectives for meetings. It provides a simple structure and an comprehensive checklist that brings guidance and clearness in an otherwise chaotic and incomplete process.
Learning:
The first thing that comes to mind when we talk about learning at meetings are presentations. Many conferences are built around experts that present their knowledge. This of course is important but there is so much more in learning. In 'the learning conference' a book from Ib Ravn, you will find that such presentations are part of any meeting, but in many cases should be shorter and create space for more reflection, discussion and interaction around the presented topic. Presentations should be short, to the point and provide discussion material. Ib's research shows that meeting participants learn so much more from each other when given the opportunity. This gives us two learning dimensions: Learning from the expert and learning from other participants. Top down and horizontal education. I would ad a third learning dimension: bottom up education. This is when the organisation, the company learns from their conference participants. The book Wisdom of crowds from James Surowiecky talks about the power and the importance of groups and how smart and surprisingly accurate predictors that groups of individuals can be. This book was advised to me by Elling Hamsö a dear friend I met through MPI. It is a 'must read' for any one involved in organising meetings. The book uses different old and contemporary stories, cases and research to demonstrate something that is very applicable in meetings. Some exciting stories about how a group of people could pin point a sunken submarine in the vast ocean, and how not harvesting the wisdom of crowds made the challenger explode upon its return into the earth's atmosphere. Learning as a group or as an organisation from the meeting participants is in most meetings an untapped resource. It is a simple and fun thing to do and when done well can provide information that can mean the difference between good and great for organisations.
Think, a meeting always brings together all experts in one area, what an immense concentration of knowledge in one room... How powerful would it be if we could connect all those brains into one physical network. Connected with cables that downloads, sorts, analyses, summarises and shares the knowledge of all participants. If we imagine a user software group, how valuable would it be if we could quickly and efficiently get all the comments, good and bad, listed and sorted in one session at our meeting... This is possible. It is just not done a lot and most meeting organisers don't know the methods to apply, the tools or technology to use or the companies and facilitators that do that for a living. Many meeting organisers do not even consider it, because they have never heard of it. They don't look for it, because don't know what they don't know.
The third bottom up dimension makes the educational scope complete:
FULL CIRCLE EDUCATION
Top down education
Lecture, presentation from an expert or panel of experts to the audience.
The classic format. Every conference has a lot of that. Most conferences have just that.
Horizontal education
Also peer to peer education. Participant learning from each other, sharing best practices etc.
In most meetings this is just a short Q&A and the rest happens during random networking at coffee or lunch breaks.
Bottom Up education
collecting the participants ideas, comments for the group or the organiser
This is probably the most powerful educational stream but almost no-one uses it accept for voting systems (ARS) that don't provide rich, text based information.
Table 4 Full circle Education at meetings enables for a rich and full educational experience keeping adults awake and involved.
These are different learning directions that can take place on their own, but we combine all in one learning experience, this is also the good order:
First have an expert speak on new or controversial issues
Secondly have the group discuss amongst themselves
Thirdly collect the feedback from the group
We add a repeat of the horizontal before going to the next presentation to complete the circle.
Figure 5 The 360° learning cycle starts with presentation (top down) than group discussions (Peer to Peer) followed by feedback (bottom up) etc.
About education, more specifically adult education and even more specifically adult education at meetings and conferences, a lot of books have been published. One on meetings and learner objectives is "Objectives to Outcomes: Your Contract With the Learner" (Glen C. Ramsborg, 1995) certainly a book worth reading. Similar books can be found in the on line knowledge base from the Meeting Support Institute (See page 59).The Meeting Support Institute
One of the bigger challenges in learning and meetings is that we have a hard time to remember where we learned something, where we heard it for the first time. In other words it is difficult to demonstrate the connection between one individual going to conferences, a session or the learning moment and his knowledge acquired there. In some cases it only thanks to getting the same information repeated, maybe at different conferences, that makes it sink in, stick and ultimately change behaviour. Much easier is it to remember e few impressive visual moments we connect to a destination or a hotel and the conference. Of course I do remember the palm tree swinging madly during a hurricane in Miami at the last MPI conference there. I even remember one or two people I was standing at the bar with drinking a cocktail. I have no recollection whatsoever about what sessions I went to at that conference let alone about what I learned there. However lot of information and even things I do today are learned at that conference. I just can not tell you what they are. That is a big challenge for the industry and measuring level two (learning) and three (applying) in the ROI measurement method (See Return on investment on Page 29) will help us to understand the educational results.
I do remember some sessions I went to and I do remember some of the learning from these sessions and even apply them. I remember the speaker, the topic, what I learned there, but I can't tell you at which conference this was.
I remember for example a session with Robin Lokerman from MCI about a window/mirror metaphor. He explained in a session about working with staff that credit for successes needs to be shared, through the window, with the team and failure needs to be seen as the leader's own doing; looking in the mirror. I'm trying to remember where this session was, but I can't decide which of the 15 potential conferences it was. The good thing is I do remember this was a session at a conference, the sad thing is that I don't have recollection of the source of a lot of other things I know and do. There for I can not make a good estimation of the educational value of all those conferences I once went to.
Research in that field and a method to examine and demonstrate the educational output in individual participants would clearly be a leveraged for the meeting industry.
Even if we don't measure or don't know the exact educational impact of conferences, we know that education is a steppingstone to ROI, so improving it, will improve ROI. And there is a lot we can do to improve education at conferences or even before and after. Some concepts and ideas are just free of charge or you could rent services from companies that for example provide computers, software and facilitation to really impact the horizontal and bottom up learning. There are a few hundred little and big things we could apply to our conference in order to make participants learn more, share more, remember more.
Besides the Down, horizontal and upwards education, there is also the activity differentiation: Passive, Reactive, Active, Interactive, Collaborative, Co-creative. Since a few years the interactive buzz has been a round. Most of us will understand what this means. Interactivity in meetings is hot mainly because most meetings are boring. As a solution, interactivity just sounds right. Most meeting owners are in favour of more interactivity and any solution will do, as long as the audience does not fall asleep anymore. A lot of interactivity is generated by including a Q&A (Question and answer) moment of a few minutes after each presentation. But is Q&A really interactivity? I would argue it is clearly not passive; a question from the audience is at least a reaction to the presentation. And since there is an answer from the speaker, we may call it active too. Interactive however is for many of the Q&A's an overstatement. Interactivity in meetings would mean to me that both the audience and the speaker or panel get involved in reflection, and discussion. The same with voting systems which are a great tool, but I would prefer to call them reactive: the audience reacts to a question by clicking a button on their keypads. Voting systems generate a lot of valuable information for the speaker and the meeting owner and it clearly involves the audience or even gives it some decision power depending on the kind of questions. If applied for example to decide where the next meeting will take place or who the audience prefers as the next key note speaker, than it obviously becomes an interactive tool. In most cases meeting owners don't go that far so it remains more a reactive model.
The new Buzz words are co-creation and collaboration. This is about working with the group of participants to create something new at the meeting. In this way the participants learn from each other, and the organisation also learns form the group. This is based on the current success of Blogs and wikki's where many individuals create one result via online communities. I would like to call a meeting that focuses totally on this aspect of co-creation a Wikkimeeting. A Wikkimeeting could start on line with a selection of the participants using on line using software like Synthetron (SYNTHETRON, 2007) to create a list of topics for the conference. During the meeting, open space as described in the book Open Space Technology (Harrison, 1977) could be the format to use for co-creation and a wikki or an online community could be used to keep the co-creation going after the meeting.
Networking
Call DR Emsens
A large medical conference of about 8.000 participants takes place in South Africa. A whole group of participants becomes sick and since it is contagious, they have to stay in their hotel rooms. The conference goers are stuck for a few days but two of them accidentally meet in the lobby and start talking; a random encounter. They never met before, but they seem to be interested in the same topic and the conversation continues in the elevator where they decide to have a drink in the room of one of them.
The medical field they work on is the same, but their disciplines and skills seem complementary. They end up lunching and dining in each others rooms and spending the whole conference sharing ideas and discussing, just the two of them. Back home they stay in touch and soon start a scientific research project together. This project's results are now published widely and recognised as one of the biggest and most important studies in the field of Diabetes ever. About 50 other research projects have started based on their research.
Remember, two individuals only met because they were both sick and both stayed in the same hotel.
They spend some intense and long networking time together because they had nothing else to do. A lot of unplanned things created this connection that today influences or even saves the lives of thousands. I call that the power of random encounters. This is one of the most powerful results of conferences and that is precisely why meetings will never be replaced by video conferencing or virtual meetings.
With videoconferencing, we will usually have small groups of people that know each other so the chance of a random encounter is limited. Building a trusting relation takes more than seeing a face on a screen and hearing a voice. It needs some bonding practices lake sharing food and sets of a neurological process that generates a powerful substances in the old part of the brain, making the bonding process stronger.
I also believe that people meeting people and especially specialists meeting specialists always lies on the basis of any innovation. Einstein would never have developed his relativity theory without having met other scientists that understood, challenged and fueled every steppingstone Einstein took to get to his E= M C². Einstein met Marie currie at this conference in Brussles, organised by Solvay in 1946 FOTO???
Of course they spoke and had lunch or dinner together and who knows what learning and motivation took place during that conference we will never know, but it is safe to say some of it made the young Ei |