At our most recent Conference News Agency Awards, an appalling incident took place involving our guest speaker and a member of the audience.
At the event the speaker made some deplorable statements which caused well-warranted offence from the affected party and many of those in the room.
At the time of writing, it’s 24 hours since the Agency Awards closed, in that time members of the Conference News team have reached out to the affected delegate to offer our support. We’ve also contacted the speaker’s team to voice our disgust at their conduct on stage, and have requested a meeting to demand a formal apology from the speaker directly to the affected party.
These actions were the speaker’s own, their crass attempt at a joke was unscripted and Conference News wholeheartedly disavows the words themselves, the sentiment behind them and the outdated mentality that they represent.
However, we must do better. Which is why in future we will improve our speaker recruitment process by using trusted industry speaker bureaus, and adopt a more thorough vetting and briefing process with our speakers to ensure this incident does not repeat itself.
Conference News offers its sincerest apologies to the affected audience member, as well as anyone else who may have been impacted by our speaker’s actions.
If you’d like speak with a member of the team about this incident please contact Cameron Roberts (croberts@mashmedia.net) or Jack Newey (jnewey@mashmedia.net).
Update 06/03/2023: The Conference News team has been made aware that the best course of action would have been to remove the speaker from the event. Looking back, we accept we did not take appropriate action at the time and will be putting safeguards in place to ensure we do better in future.
