In this month’s “The Biz” column, FOH reader and guest contributor Floyd Dilman pens a piece titled “Who Will Speak For the Live Event Industry?” It’s a good question and one that becomes more crucial to find an answer to by the day.
If you do any work at all with corporate events (especially in or around Las Vegas or other “destination” cities) you already know how much impact one ill-considered comment can make on your business. Case in point: When news reports surfaced that a certain bank that had been on the receiving end of the whole bailout thing was proceeding with a planned employee recognition event in Las Vegas, President Obama made a snappy sound-bite perfect quip about such companies not spending money on “junkets to the Super Bowl and Las Vegas.”
Understood. People are rightfully pissed about the prospect of bailing out banks and financial companies to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and then see those companies not changing the behavior that many perceive got them in trouble in the first place. And the bank in question cancelled the event. That’s fine as far as it goes except that the fallout went way past that.
Given the current political climate, no corporate CEO or PR type wants to be seen as spending on unnecessary luxuries. And when it comes to what qualifies as unnecessary and a luxury, well, perception IS reality. So as a result of that one comment, three other companies—none of whom had taken any bailout money—cancelled large events in Las Vegas. Actually two cancelled and one relocated to a less baggage-laden location.
Chief among the cancellations was the annual State Farm Insurance corporate event. In terms of impact on the local economy, that cancellation alone was a huge blow. It accounted for 11,000 room-nights. To put it in terms for those of us in the live production trades, load-in for the event started a week prior, the event lasted a week and load out was another week. Bottom line is that hundreds of live event pros lost thousands of hours of paid work because of one remark at the wrong time.
No one is condoning waste, but an employee recognition event is not a “junket.” A junket is when politicians spend a week in Hawaii or the Bahamas (or even Las Vegas) on the taxpayers’ dime conducting “team building” sessions — something that both major political parties do regularly including in the time since the economy started to melt down.
As Dilman points out, these corporate meetings are largely places where real business gets done. And when they are cancelled the impact on our industry is huge. However, unlike the banking ad financial industries and auto makers and certain others, we are not heard because we do not speak in a single voice. We don’t have lobbyists to explain to politicians who care for nothing except their own re-election how their actions affect our industry. We don’t have a trade organization representing us and our interests. But it might be time to think about starting one.
We got our butts kicked in the wireless debate. Our events have become symbols of corporate excess and how many sound company owners who file taxes as sole proprietorships will get bunched in with the “wealthy” because they bring in more than $250K in a year and see their taxes go up substantially despite the fact that they are just scraping by from month to month??
A lot of us do what we do because it was a way to not have to don a suit and tie and become just like everyone else. In some ways our industry is the last refuge for privateers and gunslingers and other mavericks who want to make a living without having to really conform. But that non-conformist streak means we speak with individual voice and not as an industry. It will likely not change.
I can’t help thinking about that Jimmy Buffett tune, “A Pirate Looks At 40,” where he sings, “yes, I am a pirate, 200 years too late.” Maybe this is just the price we pay for avoiding that suit and tie and sterile cubicle. Or maybe we need to start thinking about speaking in a single voice.
