Are the bland, rehashed, overcooked scrambled eggs they serve at breakfast buffets a metaphor for the monotony of the American corporate conference? I’ll let you decide.
But the answer is yes.
Do you even remember what conferences were like? Remember
collecting your name tag at a rickety reception desk and getting the
all-important Wi-Fi password at 8:30 a.m., in a windowless hotel basement? The $325 billion corporate events industry has been hit hard by Covid
and 2020 saw essentially all conferences go virtual. Though covering conferences
as a reporter was a real chore, month after month of Corona-Zoom drudgery has
reminded me that I somehow actually miss them. I miss horsing down those dry scrambled
eggs in the mezzanine of some characterless Hilton that looks like a
hollowed-out casino, commiserating with Bob from Tallahassee about the pungency
of the air at Penn Station on a July afternoon. The bumbling routine of the
corporate conference punctuated the urban work-lives we’ve since forfeited –
lives we had taken for granted. Let’s remember those mundane constants that
Covid stole from us.
Up until recently, I covered the energy sector for a financial
trade journal in New York City, so I ended up going to an industry event every
couple of months. In my first job, as a writer for Forbes Magazine in Mumbai,
I’d be invited to one every couple weeks. I went to over 50 conferences in my
reporting days and the experiences across the US and India were not so
different: there are the bustling subterranean convention centers, the manic
event producers scrambling around making sure the seat covers have the right
sponsors’ logos, the service staff that usually come from two rungs below the
attendees in their respective country’s ethno-racial hierarchy, and of course the
‘Plenary, Panel, Break’ program format. Whether it’s the glitzy Association
of Indian Merchant Shippers Annual Summit or the more stoic 7th North America Power and Gas Infrastructure Finance Forum, the attendees were mostly
men knee-deep in their 40s. The women and millennials in the room were mostly
either event organizers or reporters like me. For some reason, you’d have to
wear a suit, whether it's 38°C outside the Oberoi Hotel in South Bombay or 38°F
inside the Crowne Plaza in midtown Manhattan.
I wonder what it would be like to attend as a guest – to actually be
excited about going to a conference? I know a lot of business gets done at
conferences since they’re the only time everyone in the industry is in one
place. My friends in academia, for instance, tell me they quite enjoy traveling
to these things. For me, conferences are where I had to be at my sharpest
because it’s where I could talk to sources without their PR and/or corporate
communications chaperones censoring my questions. They were a chance to meet
executives face to face, to show them you’re a real human and that you won’t
screw them over by quoting them out of context. Conferences are a gold mine of
market-moving information, if you know how to work the room – how to matter-of-factly
glide your way over to a Merlot’d CFO before your rival at another publication
can get him a refill.
My conferences would usually start with collecting my name tag
from someone on the conference production team. It was always nice when they
would spell my name right and always funny when they would put an extra sticker
on my name tag that said “PRESS”, so people knew to steer clear
of me. The receptionists would wave me off quickly, eager to welcome the paying
attendees who’d flown in from Topeka or Tokyo and to serenade the revered
Platinum-level sponsors who had brought along a litter of junior analysts.
The opening remarks of the conference are usually from a head of a
trade association saying how great things are for the industry, followed up a
“fireside chat” with the highest profile CEO in the room. For events in big
cities, it is important that speakers start strong and come out all guns
blazing, because they know their audience can get up and leave any time they
want. Everyone is listening; many are taking notes. If there’s a particularly
good slide, everyone lifts up their phones to take pictures as a sacred mark of
respect to the PowerPoint Gods.
10:30 a.m. is the first coffee break and it’s where the great
reporters stand out from the rest. It’s that 30-minute slot between sessions
where attendees are restless enough to talk to strangers—even the press. Now, I
must waltz with them. You’ll never see people do mental math faster than you
will at a conference coffee break. There’s a silent dance that everyone does,
where they decide who to talk to. Attendees walk slowly through the crowd
looking for a conversation and as soon as we make eye contact with each other,
we each quickly glance down at each other’s name tags and decide whether to
stop in our tracks and reach out for a handshake or keep walking. You have a
split second to decide if someone else is worth your time. You have to
calculate whether this is someone who can help you or not. It’s primal; it’s
instinctive. I can see the decision-making process in their eyes: “Do I really
want to talk to a goddamn reporter?” Many attendees look at my name tag and
turn away. Sometimes I’d say hello and they’d pretend not to have heard me. The
awkward air is so heavy you can drink it through a straw. You see other
journalists getting ghosted in real time. It’s theater.
But rejection is a constant for journalists and if you don’t have
a thick skin, you’re in the wrong business. By the time I’m five feet from
someone, my algorithms are whirring away: Don’t I already have a good source at
their company? Avoid. Is this lady simply another reporter? Keeping walking.
Oh, this is the guy who never answers my call? Attack mode. I wonder if
he’s a vendor or a spender?
You see, there are two types of people at conferences: vendors and
spenders. The vendors have paid good money to be here; they want to sell their
products to spenders and their brand to reporters. The spenders have paid even
better money to be here and they want their logo to be the biggest on the stage
and the first in the news report. The spenders hold the upper hand over the
vendors in this power dynamic, but there are sales to be made and everyone
knows it.
Sometimes, as a journalist, you chance upon a freshly minted Senior
Vice President, eager to show off his industry insight. Delicious. But
mostly, it’s a media-trained Managing Director, who is counting
down the seconds till he can leave the conversation and find someone he can
speak with freely. He’s looking at other people as I’m trying desperately to
say something interesting. They can sense the power imbalance a mile away and
it disgusts them. Once in a while, I’ll strike up a truly equal conversation
with someone, who has absolutely nothing to gain from me and vice versa. You
just talk because it feels normal. There’s a subtle art to knowing how to exit
those conversations with grace and tact, because that’s not who your editor is
waiting to hear about. The reluctant time bell rings, signaling the end of
networking and the finale of the ballet, where business cards are exchanged or
lies are told how about they just gave their last card to someone else.
The first full panel discussion is next, where each speaker takes
four minutes to introduce themselves before using each question as a segue into
how their company is the best in the business. Sometimes you get a rogue CEO
who actually says what’s on his/her mind and you can feel people’s eyes looking
momentarily up from their iPads. Maybe you’re even lucky enough to see
panelists disagree. Not all panels are boring, only the overwhelming
majority. The volume and quality of the audience Q&A is always a good
barometer for how engaged the room is. I wonder if audiences were more
‘present’ before the electronic era?
The lunch buffet line is the conference’s great leveler. Vendors
and spenders fly out of the main room and line up for scalloped potatoes like
hungry schoolboys. The smell of beef bourguignon quickly masks the hierarchy in
the air. As a twentysomething reporter, I was generally near the bottom of the
food chain but I could win the heart of a grizzled executive behind me by
passing up that last piece of duck. Maybe I could even waltz my way into his
lunch table and talk about sports. I think conference buffet lunch food is generally
great, by the way—it’s hotels doing what they do best. It’s those giant,
circular conference lunch tables I cannot stand.
The event organizers seat you ten to a table, so you can talk
comfortably to your immediate neighbors for a few precious minutes before
everyone is reaching over everyone else, their ugly ties dipping in each
other’s clam chowders as they exchange cards. The conversation is chaos. You
can sense a newcomer to the circular table is waiting eagerly to join in and
you have to find a way to let them enter the discussion. I find the best
strategy is to plonk myself down next to someone senior that I respect and talk
about anything other than the topic of the conference. I miss the pageantry of
the conference lunch—it’s fashionable to complain about food even though
everyone secretly loves it.
The post-lunch panels are the graveyard shift. Reporters with full
bellies are busy filing articles for their hungry editors while the real
decision-makers at the event have found high tables on the sidelines to quietly
hammer out term-sheets. Conference afternoons for a journalist on a deadline
are literally a write-off. In the main room, eyes are mostly on phones and
laptops now. There are emails to be answered. Desperate panelists do their best
to provoke weary listeners. If the speakers are lucky, they’re presenting in
break-out sessions in smaller rooms with industrial-sized espresso machines. If
everyone in that 300-seater main room could curl up under those tables and take
a nap, they’d be asleep before the panelists were mic’d up.
The 3 p.m. networking interval arrives like the Berlin Airlift.
The audience surfaces, staggering out of the auditorium, gasping for caffeine.
For the journalist, it’s another chance to tango with the reluctant. But if
you’ve filed enough good copy for the day, you can skip the schmoozing and head
straight for the hors d'oeuvres.
We’re in the home stretch. People will hang around for the final
talk of the day because there’s that sweet, spender-sponsored sangria on the
other side. It’s when the conference producers can finally sit down and chug a
cold one. It’s when jackets and ties come off and XM Satellite Radio jazz comes
on. For a reporter looking to get a scoop, it’s the golden hour. It’s when even
the media-trained Managing Directors will start bad-mouthing their
competitors—all off the record, of course. Sure enough at 5 o’clock, the
men leave the conference hall for the day. Some go to the airport, some to
their rooms but many stay to chat to the dainty blonde reporter they’ve been
stealing glances at all afternoon. The group has made it through the day and
there’s a sense of camaraderie. Name tags don’t matter so much. Everyone’s a
vendor now.
I hope Coronavirus goes away soon so we can go back to our bland
conferences, to petty complaints about delicious food, to stalking new spenders
and avoiding old journalists.
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