Having Sessions Sponsored
I’ve never been comfortable offering individual conference sessions to be sponsored. I’m not sure what a company would get for sponsoring a session but it would seem there would be pressure to put one of their representatives on the panel. I think attendees would then wonder if the information they are getting is skewed toward the sponsor. Also, the other panelists might feel uncomfortable talking about the sponsors product in a negative way and might hold back - not something you want in an open forum.
But what you definitely don’t want is to have the session panel sponsored by a company - and then offer the webcast of that panel in the format of the sponsors competitor. In this case, the panel is sponsored by Real, but the stream of the panel is in Windows Media - anyone else find that odd?
Screenshot below in case it gets changed before you read this post.
November 15th, 2006 at 2:56 pm |
[...] Tim Bourquin, my favorite tradeshow startup blogger, has been busy lately with some great posts. Like this one on why you should be very, very careful with sponsored sessions. And this great rant about the cost of high-speed Internet at hotels and convention centers: I’ve continually complained about the cost of high-speed Internet at convention centers and hotels since the first day I saw the convention center order form back in 1998. The trouble is, back then I could somewhat see the justification because centers and hotels were spending a lot of money to build the infrastructure. It was expensive to offer so it was expensive to buy. [...]
November 16th, 2006 at 9:38 am |
‘Media pass’ moochers…
If your association 1) deals with consumer products and 2) has a large trade show, I can bet that there’s a headache over media registrations — not the legitimate media, but the sketchy hangers-on who are more than likely just moochers after a free ….