Introduce the speaker during dessert. Pie in your face opens your eyes/ears. By helping the speaker’s first few jokes to fall flat, you are setting the mood for the remainder of the presentation. Another way a meeting planner can help a speaker is to do the intro while the tables are being cleared. God only knows why a busboy is more interesting to watch than a $25,000 speaker.
DO NOT suggest the audience take a restroom break before the speaker begins. This will INSURE that during the talk, people will be squirming, and exiting and entering the room. Men only go one at a time, but women are particularly disruptive because they go in groups of two or three – and sometimes entire herds will migrate to the powder room.
Serve a lot of liquor. Ideally, have an hour-long OPEN bar before the meal, accompanied with free-flowing wine throughout dinner. As a final genius idea, leave the bar open while the speaker is talking! The only thing more interesting to an audience than a bumbling busboy is a drunk stumbling out for another shot.
Make sure the audience is NOT seated close to each other or near the speaker. Create an expansive “no man’s land” between the speaker and the first row of chairs or tables. This gap helps destroy any sense of intimacy. NEVER, NEVER use “reserved” signs or tape along the aisles to block off the back rows. This would cause people to move to the front where they would feel more a part of the program.
Make sure the podium is POORLY LIT. Speakers utilize a great deal of non-verbal communication, so keep them in the shadows. NEVER make use of spotlights. It is effective to display large bouquets of flowers and giant potted plants around the lectern. This keeps the speaker from being accentuated, and assures proper camouflage.
Book a hotel where there will be loud and energetic groups meeting simultaneously. Most effective are religious denominations that speak in tongues. Make sure your facility has one of those wonderful accordion-shaped “sound proof” movable walls. This way your audience gets to listen to several speeches at the same time…sort of like a “Three-Ring-Speaker’s Circus.”
Let your meeting run late. Introduce your speaker when you were supposed to adjourn. Have a lot of amateur speakers’ address the audience before you bring on the pro. Your audience will be thoroughly bored when your “pro” is introduced. Remember, your job is to make sure that professional speakers really earn their money. DON’T make it easy for them.
We know that this would not be the situation with one of our clients, but we thought that it was a perspective that you could appreciate. This was a DV mangled Michael Broome article that or staff ran across. Hopefully we will book him soon to make up for it. As always, we look forward to working with you soon.
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