Nearly one thousand energetic Gold Canyon top sales demonstrators were entertained in Phoenix during a high-energy show produced by Hot on Broadway. The customized event celebrated new sales records and “starred” the owners/founders of the company who were “revealed” on stage dancing and singing popular songs from the ’50s and ’60s together with the cast. Photo courtesy of Hot on Broadway

 

By Derek Reveron

What’s a planner to do? Faced with an unprecedented economic crisis that isn’t going away anytime soon, planners still must perform. Just like the performances produced by Jeffrey Finn’s Hot on Broadway corporate entertainment division, the show must go on. The Tony Award-nominated Broadway producer who, in 1992, started the corporate entertainment division of his highly successful, New York-based production company, shares the planner’s pain. Finn said recently, “the sad truth is that the planner must still deliver the wow factor and raise the bar” when it comes to arranging premium, memorable entertainment.

Finn, who notes that his company can meet most budget requirements, recommends that planners explore new ways to entertain and find more direct ways to connect with their audiences. For instance, a Broadway musical filled with familiar tunes can make an immediate connection with corporate groups. After all, these songs are the cultural fabric of our society and can help soothe and comfort in difficult times.

In addition, Finn advises planners to do their homework. Know thy audience: demographics, interests, corporate philosophy, marketing plans and any other data. Only then can planners begin their quest for the ideal entertainment experience.

Starting from scratch, meeting planner Barbara Edwards did just that. She created a unique activity that entertained a technology company’s 300 sales executives from around the world while simultaneously educating them about sales themes and San Francisco sites.

Tailoring entertainment to engage and educate groups at meetings and events is nothing new for Edwards, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based California Host, a DMC specializing in corporate meeting and event planning. She came up with an innovative program for the three-day meeting held last April at San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Hotel.

Edwards organized attendees into groups of eight people to visit famous sites throughout the city to hunt for clues to the company’s five new sales themes. Each site provided a clue to the themes, and each clue was intrinsically connected to the location. For example, the height of the Transamerica building related to the idea of setting high goals. Other sites such as Knob Hill and Fisherman’s Wharf had their own unique clues. At each location, one of Edwards’ staffers provided a clue to the next site that team members would visit.

Edwards hired a technical writer to help create the script for the clues the teams received. She and the writer worked with the company’s sales and marketing executives to create the final version of the day-long “challenge.”

It was a smash hit. “We didn’t expect more than half of the participants to actually complete it. But every attendee participated in the event and finished it, and they had nothing but good things to say about it afterwards,” Edwards said.

On the final night of the meeting, after dinner in the ballroom, the vice president of sales took the stage to comment on the challenge. “He said, ‘I don’t want to say it was a home run. I want to call it a grand slam,’?” Edwards said. The executive asked the team captains to take the stage to explain how they accomplished their mission. The leaders revealed that they took the challenge very seriously, even calling their home offices for research help from coworkers.

The challenge informed and entertained in several ways. “It was fun for attendees. It gave them a San Francisco experience and taught them something about the city. It reinforced the sales themes of the meeting. And it gave them a chance to bond with people from around the world, learn from them and form new relationships,” Edwards said.

Broadmoor Hall was transformed into a Broadway theater for an entertaining corporate event produced by Hot on Broadway, a NYC-based production company, for the Bayer Company last year at The Broadmoor, Colorado Springs, CO. Photos courtesy of  Hot on Broadway

New Coping Strategies

More than ever, meeting planners are seeking innovative ways to combine entertainment and education to engage employees, motivate them to learn and stay within budget. Every meeting planner interviewed for this story said that companies are cutting entertainment and education budgets and steering away from the glitz and frills of big-budget productions. Some organizations are looking for ways to make their

Learning in an entertaining environment: Attendees at the Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom in Orlando, FL, can take tours of onstage and behind-the-scenes locations that help participants understand how Disney management philosophy becomes standard operating procedure. Photo courtesy of Walt Disney World Resort

presentations appear expensive while spending less money.

But business is still flowing, said Dina Jacobson, principal and founder of Eventech, a Los Altos, CA-based event planning and marketing company. “I’m still getting calls, although not as many as in the past and companies don’t want to pay as much. There aren’t as many projects out there right now. Company budgets are tight and entertainment is becoming more extraneous.”

At California Host, “We have had cancellations of educational and entertainment events, including a lot of holiday events,” Edwards said. “Part of the reason is financial and part is perception. Companies feel that if they are laying off people, then they need to be cutting things that aren’t as crucial,” she added.

Like many meeting planners, Edwards has a strategy for coping with the downturn to keep business humming. “We make sure we are lean. Normally we would be adding new employees in the fall. But we are more cautious in spending. And we are trying to generate more business by reaching out to companies in industries that are less affected by the economy like biotech and pharmaceuticals,” Edwards said.

Jacobson has a similar strategy. She also notes that entertainment and educational events are such a staple of corporate America that there is a limit to how much companies will reduce them. “People are still having events and going to shows and that will continue, but they are making do with what they can afford,” Jacobson said. She predicts that more companies will turn to technology to replace or complement face-to-face events. “We will be seeing a lot of virtual technology to do meetings because you can save money and don’t have to have people get on an airplane to have the same experience,” Jacobson said.

Business As Usual

Some companies have no plans to cut budgets for its events, entertainment and education. According to Winmark Corporation, a Minneapolis-based retail franchisor with 800 retail stores in North America, the number of attendees at some of this year’s events have fallen by up to 20 percent compared to last year. “We won’t change what we are doing as a corporation in terms of meeting because our businesses continue to do well. But the decrease in attendance is based on the economy because fewer people can afford to come,” said Winmark Event Manager Pam Soules, who plans about seven meetings and conferences each year with up to 500 attendees apiece.

The bottom line: Don’t expect companies to abandon entertainment altogether or revert to bare-bones basics such as a lone speaker with a PowerPoint presentation. Business success depends partly on using entertainment and educational events to train employees and promote company brands, slogans and ideas in memorable ways. Blending in at least some form of entertainment during or after education and training — even if only for a few minutes — makes attendees more receptive to information and helps them remember it better.

Many companies are likely to take the practical and thoughtful approach suggested by Bruce MacMillan, president and CEO of Meeting Professionals International, in a recent op-ed letter: “The unprecedented shift in marketplace fundamentals means that business leaders must evaluate the ROI of every investment decision. But even in these tough times, or maybe especially now, to remove meetings and events from the business strategy playbook is short-sighted and ignores the role meetings, events and incentives play in business and community success.”

Elevate The Mundane

Innovative and memorable entertainment doesn’t have to occur on a grand scale with a big budget. Nor does it have to last for several minutes or hours. The right budget-conscious entertainment touch can make attendees receptive to an otherwise mundane education session.

Here’s a worthy example: Jacobson wanted to include some kind of entertainment in a series of one-day meetings she organized last year in six cities for Adobe Systems Incorporated, the San Jose, CA-based software company. Adobe used the meetings to introduce its latest office software to business executives, hoping they would purchase multiple licenses for the product.

Jacobson didn’t have a big budget for an entertainment segment in the meetings. However, in brainstorming sessions with company executives, they mentioned a series of filmed skits that Adobe had produced over the years depicting actors trying to run offices prior to the invention of the company’s software. “I dug them out and they were hilarious. They were spoofs on offices in disarray using old technology like copy machines, typewriters and old computers,” Jacobson said.

She decided to show all the skits back-to-back at each education session, held in the conference

Planners can tap into built-in entertainment at Universal Orlando Resort, such as Harbor Nights at Loews Portofino Bay Hotel at Universal Orlando: The event features more than a dozen wines, gourmet food samples from the hotel’s award-winning restaurants, live jazz and an opera performance under the twinkling lights of the Harbor Piazza. Photo courtesy of Universal Orlando Resort

rooms of various hotels in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, New York, Anaheim and Toronto. Jacobson promoted the meetings via e-mail blasts, a Web site and telemarketing.

More than 300 executives from a variety of large and small companies attended the six meetings. Each session opened with the five-minute series of film skits and left attendees in stitches. “They laughed and laughed. Oh my God, it was funny. It was like a short version of the TV show ‘The Office,’ but without modern technology,” Jacobson said.

Jacobson believes that the short entertainment bit inserted into an otherwise lackluster presentation was effective because: “It softens the meeting. It makes people more receptive. It lets barriers down. It functions on so many levels. People who didn’t know each other talked about it after the meeting and came away with a good impression of Adobe and its product,” Jacobson said. She added that Adobe executives were satisfied with the sales result of the six meetings.

Some meetings simultaneously mix entertainment and education, while others provide the fun as a reward after the workshops, sessions and learning ends. Example: Airport Revenue News, an industry publication of Armbrust Aviation Group, a Palm Beach Gardens, FL-based aviation fuel business and publisher, held its annual conference and exhibition in February. The event, held at the Gaylord Texan Hotel & Convention Center in Dallas, included daily educational sessions on topics such as RFPs, specialty retail, industry benchmarking and retailing trends. Attendees included airport managers and executives, and a variety of retailers and their suppliers who do business with airports.

On the last night of the conference, retail chain Airport Wireless organized an entertainment extravaganza for its suppliers and other attendees. Airport Wireless, which owns and operates retail stores that sell electronic products in airports nationwide, held the event in the hotel’s new 39,000-square-foot, two-level Glass Cactus nightclub. The purpose of the event was to entertain and build goodwill with suppliers and customers and allow them to relax after three days of educational sessions and trade shows, said Airport Wireless CEO Iris Goldschmidt, who plans the event every year along with five other employees.

The entertainment kicked off after dinner as Goldschmidt took the stage and introduced the “Energizer bunny” (modeled after the popular television commercials), who marched across the stage as she shouted, “Let’s get energized.” On the lower level of the ballroom, the 1970s band War played as a woman dressed as an angel distributed wristbands to attendees to obtain drinks. On the upper level, attendees gambled with play money in a casino and won prizes donated by Airport Wireless suppliers. A balloon artist created offbeat shapes of hats, animals and more, among many other amusements.

Goldschmidt, who planned this event before the economy soured, plans to continue such events, but she isn’t sure whether she will spend quite as much on them in the near future. “I have people all over the country... and bring them to events and meetings. I don’t know about next year,” she said.

Innovative FAM Events

When it comes to finding new entertainment ideas to fit budgets, don’t underestimate the importance of familiarization (FAM) trips. They can provide practical tips large and small. For example, the Las Vegas Educational Experience is the Las Vegas Meetings by Harrah’s Entertainment company’s annual, three-day FAM trip to educate meeting planners about the hotel brand and offers practical ideas via special events, speakers, workshops and networking. Last fall, more than 1,000 meeting planners attended the event.

The Las Vegas Educational Experience adopted a theme from the James Bond movie “Diamonds are Forever.” Entertainment during and after dinner on the final night at Caesars Palace included an R&B band, a European group who played amplified violins; and the Barrel Twins, acrobats and contortionists. Speakers included motivational speaker Larry Winget who proposed a number of methods on how to keep employees engaged at meetings and events.

Meeting planners arrived home filled with innovative, creative ideas that they later implemented in their own meetings and events. Heidi Hages, CMP, is manager of community relations at Stewart Enterprises, a New Orleans-based company with more than 5,000 employees that owns and operates funeral homes nationwide. Every year, Hages plans several regional and national meetings.

Hages attended Harrah’s FAM in February 2007. Last April, for the first time, she held Stewart’s annual incentive event in Las Vegas. Why Las Vegas? “We decided to bring the meeting out of New Orleans for the first time and Vegas seemed like the ideal fit for this group to have fun,” Hages said.

Stewart’s incentive event at Harrah’s Paris Las Vegas included entertainment that Hages first learned about at the Harrah’s FAM — the Barrel Twins and an “imitation” Rat Pack of Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra. “Before the FAM trip, we didn’t know that such entertainment was affordable and available for meetings our size,” Hages said. “The Harrah’s FAM did a good job of introducing us to several different types of themed events that made you say, ‘That could really work for me,’?” Hages said.

Winmark Event Manager Pam Soules attended the Harrah’s FAM in 2006 and returned this year. She gleaned some entertainment ideas that she later incorporated into Winmark events, such as a go-go dancer on a raised platform and blackjack gambling as part of after-dinner entertainment.

More important, Soules learned to seek speakers who educate while entertaining. That’s because at the Harrah’s FAM, Soules heard a variety of speakers use humor to discuss serious topics such as the differences in communication and learning styles, and various ways to motivate employees. Soules was so entertained, educated and inspired, that she decided to use speakers who created a similar impact on her attendees.

Soules plans to invite a top-notch expert to give a humorous presentation on the characteristics of Generation Y at the annual conference for employees of Winmark’s retail franchise Plato’s Closet, which targets Gen Y consumers. Next May, Soules expects up to 300 attendees for the event at the Loews Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Orlando. “We want the managers and employees of Plato’s to learn about the characteristics of their customers, but not in a dry way,” Soules said.

Final Thoughts

Whether you start from scratch as Barbara Edwards did when planning her “grand-slam” San Francisco challenge or use the ready-made entertainment and resources available from major entertainment experts such as Las Vegas Meetings by Harrah’s Entertainment, Walt Disney World Resort or Universal Orlando Resort, the message is clear: Planners, despite considerable budgetary woes during these unprecedented times, have a world of opportunities at their fingertips to engage and motivate attendees through valuable entertaining experiences — all at the right price.    C&IT