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Posted Under: Authority & Expertise
Having developed an interest in the conference/guru/expertise industry lately, I was not surprised by this, but interested to see it get an airing in public on PSFK:
Apparently payola is a common practice in the conference business — a sponsor pays, a sponsor gets to speak. And we thought the whole conference business was a big scam already. I suppose we were naive to think that conference organizers were curators of the best content available for the attendees. Turns out, that attendees are being charged a lot of money to listen to the speakers who pay the most sponsorship money.
There are many variations on this out there in the conference world. On the other hand, it’s not particularly clear to me what the motives and expectations of conference attendees are. Are they interested in hearing from famous names? Are they interested in hearing things that confirm their existing biases and points of view? Are they interested in things that challenge their existing biases? Are they actually more interested in the other attendees than the presenters?
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Kim Fellner's book 
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Reader Comments
We’ve run a marketing conference for the last three years and tried to answer all the questions you highlight above. The answer is that every attendee is looking for something different. However, the common theme we find is that people are looking for really good personal stories. Stories about company start ups, new ways of thinking about brands or things people, rather than corporations, really did. The more personal and the less “canned” or processed, the better. Overall, since time and attention these days are valuable, we want attendees to leave feeling charged and inspired- feeling like they have gained some new insight and ideas and hopefuly met some interesting people. Networking is the REASON the conference industry continues to thirve, despite webcasting and info overload.