Wake Up! The Speech Is Over!

TV Has Conquered Short Attention Span
Read How Business Conferences Can Achieve That, Too!

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Ask any teacher: Attention span is not what it used to be. "Attention deficit disorder" is so widespread among young people that drugs have been developed to treat the problem.

Shorter attention span is a problem affecting the adult population, too, but what affect has this problem had on the design of business conferences?

SOME...but not enough.

'Shortened attention span' means 'changing audience expectations.' The masters at addressing this change are the people who bring us the entertainment programming and continuity methods of the television industry. Some say television is to blame for the attention span problem, but in any event television certainly knows how to deal with it: TV entices the average short-attention-span American to spend 5 hours a day parked on the sofa, watching with interest.

How does TV do it? And what lessons can business conferences learn from TV's success?

Tightening, Dazzle, and Flow

Television faces the same challenge faced by business conferences: How to hold the attention and interest of a seated audience. The TV industry has three techniques for addressing this challenge:

Tightening
Year after year, the broadcasting industry has progressively shortened or 'tightened' the duration of all informational segments. The programs may be longer overall: Two and three hour news magazines fill whole evenings of the network schedule and of course there are entire channels devoted to the delivery of information in news programs that never end. What has shortened is not program length, but program SEGMENT length.

Also much reduced are the audio and visual 'cuts' within individual program presentations. When I started with ABC News the network had a :50-second limit on the length of radio news reports. By the time I left ABC News nine years later, the maximum length of a radio news report was down to :24 seconds, and today (some years later), the average length of a soundbite on commercial radio news is less than 6 seconds and the length of the newscast as a whole (where newscasts still exist at all) has often been reduced by 90 percent or even more.

This type of change is in every instance based on audience research that reveals again and again how quickly people's minds are wandering and how the length of time available to 'make your point' is growing shorter and shorter. The print media face a similar challenge, and we see USA Today overtly directing its writers to use 'broadcast style' in their sentence construction, as well as an overall curtailing of the length of most nespaper items.

Radio and television quite literally 'set the pace' for all the media, and that must include business conferences as well - that is unless we want our audiences to fall asleep. Every event developer knows that this is no joke: it is not unusual to see a conference attendee fall asleep particularly after lunch. But it is wrong of us to 'blame lunch. It is the conference format that must bear responsibility for having failed to meet the attention-holding standard set by television.

It is not unusual for an event developer facing a 90-minute hole in their program to simply declare a topic, name four speakers, tell them each to speak for 20 minutes, and voila! 90-minutes down. TV channels that hope to attract viewers do not broadcast 20-minute speeches: They know viewers will not sit still for that. Business conferences, of course, do it all the time. Our captive audiences may sit, but they don't like it as much as they would like something more dynamic and interactive.

At business conferences the problem is actually growing worse, as program segments are becoming longer, not shorter. In many cases event development teams have been reduced in size, so there are fewer people available to approach and book speakers. As a result, a speaker who is assigned, say, 45 minutes (already much too long) will get a phone call asking if they can do a full hour, simply because the overworked event developer has not had an opportunity to find the requisite number of speakers for the event. In this way sessions grow in length, despite the fact that this is directly contradictory to conference attendees' demonstrated preference for shorter segments and greater variety.

But can a business conference hold the attendee's attention through the techniques of television without 'dumbing down' the content of the meeting? Yes, it can, as described in the case study below. But first let's look at techniques other than tightening used by television to hold the attention.

Dazzle
Another successful television technique is called "dazzle." TV broadcasters have built fabulous eye catching sets and populated them with fabulously eye-catching people who not only look good, but who also have great voices and flawlessly present every word spoken. All these factors fit together to create 'dazzle.'

Event developers have invested heavily in a limited form of dazzle: Staging. Beautiful sets, Broadway lighting, huge screens, image magnification systems, high-luminescence projection, dramatic sound reproduction systems with megabass air vibration systems and expensive corporate video productions. Many business conferences have become almost as thrilling as an amusement park ride -- at least until the speaker steps to the lectern. At that moment, inevitably, the excitement ratio takes a plunge.

Executive speaking ability is a known problem, and there are many consultancies that seek to address the challenge. For some executives, the counseling and practice ($$$, time...) can work, but for many their lack of charisma cannot be addressed through training. Not everyone can be a great presenter, and in fact there may be a negative correllation between heads-down business management ability and the onstage skills of performing artists. In the field of presentation it is the artistic types of who set the standards, and it is not fair to ask business executives to try to meet that standard. Persons who cannot speak like professionals should not be forced to try to do so, as it is an utterly unavoidable fact that anyone on any stage in today's television-saturated society will be compared to the best on-camera presenters in the world.

So what to do? Event developers successfully address the challenge of professionalism onstage during the keynote portions of their conferences by booking the services of motivational and motivational style business orators who do have the ability to hold audience attention for extended periods. We also often hire former politicians and other persons seen on television (!) to give our audiences that 'sense of moment,' and the thrill of being in the presence of greatness, or at least fame.

But here again, all bets are off when it is time for the management portions of the meeting. The executives of the industry or company who are there to deliver the real 'meat' of the conference almost inevitably will not measure up to the presentational quality of the hired pros, and so once again, the business conference is failing to meet the interest-holding standard set by television, despite the keynoter and staging investments.

There is a way to address this problem -- and we will discuss then in the case study following.

Flow
A third area where television excels in holding audience is in its expert 'flow.' This is the 'continuity' of programming which presents itself as an effortless smoothness of presentation. This presents itself at every level: The word-to-word smoothness of a presenter's speech, the cut-to-cut smoothness of every iota of edited video, the segment-to-segment smoothness and the use of the 'tease' to encourage viewers to stay tuned, and the program-to-program smoothness that holds the viewers through minute after minute of commercial announcements by simply never letting go of the viewer's attention. Love it or hate it, television's achievements in this sphere are extremely impressive.

Event developers have in general given less attention to 'flow' than to any of the other factors. Instead of the seamless continuity of television, the average business conference suffers from extreme discontinuity. The conference agenda may appear to offer a very compelling rational topical flow, as the subject of one session leads directly to the next, but in the onstage presentation this connection is often lost. Speakers frequently finish and then stand awkwardly onstage, not quite sure where to go or what to do. Often the master-of-ceremonies (if there is any) is too far away to step briskly onstage to definitively wrap things up or ask for questions, and the audience drifts to conversation before continuity can be reestablished. Awkward pauses are frequent, requests for questions are weak and often carry an implicit sense of resistance: "Well, if anyone still has any questions I guess we have a few minutes...").

Excellence in flow requires a quasi-theatrical approach rarely seen at a business event. Heavy planning of the interstitial portions of the meeting is a must. Some meetings do invest in this...but execution often fails to meet expectations, simply because of the fact that the plans are written by staging professionals -- but implemented by non-professional executive presenters who don't have the elán to deliver the presentation in the way it was intended.

As a result of tightening, dazzle, and flow, popular appreciation of television remains high, with the average person watching more than five hours per day. How can business events fully respond to the quality challenged posed by television?

A Case Study: VF Corporation

VF, the former Vanity Fair, is the world's largest manufacturer of clothing. Besides making all the uniforms worn at K-Mart and other retailers, VF's brands include Tommy Hilfiger, Lee, Rustler, and Wrangler jeans, Bestform intimates, and the full line of Jantzen and Jansport bathing and sports attire.

CEO Macky McDonald is young, good-looking, has a great voice, and does a fine job at the lectern. But even so fine an executive presenter as Macky realized that the same thing year after year - a speech to the troops at their annual spring getaway - could become 'old.'

To change and update this presentation, VF's event developer Great Communications (division of Grey Advertising) proposed that Macky open the meeting with very brief comments, and then sit down with me for an onstage interview . I immersed myself in the challenges facing clothing manufacture, had a few discussions with senior figures at VF, met Macky the afternoon before our joint appearance, and then stepped onstage to interview him in front of VF's 180 top executives. The session met all expectations, as Macky was able to behave a completely 'normal' manner -- not 'speaking,' just 'chatting' in normal conversation. There was plenty of interactivity, as questions and comments poured from the audience. Later I did the same thing with a number of VF executive vice presidents in the same setting. The discussion-driven format worked extremely well.

A Case Study: Lawson "Cue"
A similar approach has been used at "CUE" the cleverly named "Conference and User Exchange" of Lawson Software. At CUE Lawson has put me onstage with as many as 11 of the company's top executives all at the same time -- a long row of chairs seating everyone from the CEO, chairman and CFO through EVPs of marketing, software development and industry-segment leaders .

We enjoy two or more hours of discussion surrounding the company's trajectory and challenges, welcoming audience questions all the way through. The executives all appear very accessible and the company as a whole presents itself as extremely open and approachable, human rather than corporate.

The Solution Is Discussion-Driven

The management sessions of business conferences can be far more compelling than television: They are focused on topics of immense personal concern to their audience, and they have a potential for interactivity (question/answer, comments from the floor) that television ‹ and lectern based speeches ‹ lack:

Executives have the opportunity to say absolutely everything that would have been said in a speech, but to do so in the far more natural setting of a conversation;

Executives onstage are positioned before their audiences as approachable, accessible, at ease with their responsibilities;

Executives being interviewd are presented as the center of attention, the 'respected authority,' a 'star.'

The format itself, evocative of so many news programs and conducted by a journalist, conveys credibility and power.

Sitting onstage to be interviewed live, in front of an entire audience also conveys a very high level of personal confidence, even bravery. The audience appreciates that there is no script and that 'anything can happen' onstage right in front of their eyes. It's 'live.

If a Q&A session is included in the format (optional) the discussion-driven format can also deliver that most elusive of mass media techniques, interactivity and 'two-way' communication.

Event developers who continue to address every session only and solely through lectern-based, one-way presentations are fighting a losing battle against the standard set by TV. Through the entire broadcasting era of the 20th century, events in general maintained a 19th century lectern-based speaking format. Now that it's the 21st century, it's time to leap ahead of TV, and make of the business conference all that it can be: An interactive meeting place where executives truly engage with their audience.