When you sponsor an event you do not buy the right to bore or offend the audience!

At many events, an organisation paying to be a sponsor has an opportunity to give a presentation as part of the package. For event organisers, this is often a necessity, if the tickets are not to be even more expensive and if the organisation can’t draw on member funds. The chance to speak at an event should be an opportunity to impress the audience and ideally set the stage to win business. However, in many cases, the company that has paid for the slot uses it as an opportunity to bore and/or offend the audience and, IMHO, quite often reduces its chance of winning new business. What do I mean by bore and offend? The most common problem is when a sponsor simply talks about their product or service, using the slot as a sales pitch. If the product or service is amazingly innovative, or engagingly funny, this can work (e.g. the first time I saw Google Glass pitched I did not mind hearing about the service). But, in most cases, people get irritated when confronted with a sales pitch, or a boring presentation, or the perfect storm of a sales pitch delivered in a boring way. Other ways of […]