Is our industry sexy enough? It’s a question I never contemplated hearing until I was at an event just before Christmas. Perhaps the person calling our sexiness into question was drunk, perhaps mad or, perhaps, had a valid point.
Trying to make things sexy can be a slippery slope, especially as it seems everywhere these days feels the need to reinvigorate itself. Honda did it with the Civic, and Ski Sunday tried it by replacing David Vine with a brace of stoned snowboarders. But the biggest have-a-go-sexy-hero has to be the Met Office.
Even up to the 1990s, the weather reports on TV were a fairly dry affair; a veritable blizzard of drizzle and low pressure sweeping in from the Atlantic conveyed through the dulcet and steady tones of Michael Fish and Ian McCaskill.
Fish and the late McCaskill have become cult heroes since coming off the air, and it’s hardly surprising. Warm sunny days and killer typhoons were delivered to us both with an equal measure of English reserve and modest caution. It was staid. It was not sexy. But did it need to be?
In order to make the weather interesting, we’ve seen over the last 15 years or so a campaign which has not only seen the weather staff getting better looking – and younger – with their tailored suits and visible cleavage, but we now also have a raft of multi-coloured warnings that lead you to believe every isobar will bring with it the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and boiling seas.
No longer does a dull man in glasses remind you to take your brolly with you, but a chirpy young lady in a hugging dress rather issues a Red Flood Warning and of instant death for anyone living within 40 miles of Barnby in the Willows.
The following day there’s no chance of drizzle, but rather carcinogenic UV rays beaming down from the Sun disintegrating all in their path and forcing gingers underground into the sewers.
The weather is just the weather; making it sexy by dressing it up with fancy warnings and adopting a bonkers syntax you hope will fool us into buying storm bunkers is nonsensical. It’s all so hysterical, especially as it is always either sunny, raining, or neither.
So with this as our reference, we return our focus to the conference and meetings industry. The industry has, as far as I have been told, adapted to change rather well over the years– both economically and socially.
In our predictions piece in the January issue of CN, a lot of industry thinkers believe that the mental health and wellbeing of eventprofs and delegates will be the big focus in 2018. Indeed, we’ve already seen campaigns like EventWell and initiatives by the mia give the subject decent air time.
The industry is also leaning more towards technology as, thankfully, the technology is getting easier to use. No longer do you need a mainframe the size of Colossus and a team from Cape Canaveral to sign your delegates in, but a simple application.
The industry is making itself sleeker by virtue of the fact it is evolving to suit the times. It doesn’t need to make itself ‘sexy’ because that is unnecessary flim-flam. Unlike the weather service, the industry should not forget its purpose and not get side-tracked by nonsensical trends which don’t appeal to the vast majority of its clients.
No one under 30 watches the weather on TV anymore; so don’t bother with the scaremongering of killer cumulous clouds rampaging in from the Arctic. No one needs sexy meetings either. Do what you do best.
