Now I’m not particularly shy when it comes to speaking on matters many and divers (well, digital marketing, eCommerce etc) and I’m happy to speak where I like the people, the event and it seems ‘real’. We all get spammed to death with ‘expert conferences’ or ‘captive sales sessions’ (where "decision-makers" are locked on a ship and get free food/drink in return for meeting with suppliers. Yuk) so I try and avoid these.
One pet hate is the "Blue Chip Frottage" event, where you don’t really care who the speakers are so long as they’re from suitably large companies. I was asked to speak on one event this summer – The Marketing Directors Strategy Forum in June, run by a company called Inverin.
When asked I mentioned that I was leaving Littlewoods, and were they interested in me or in the company. It was the latter and so I gave them some other names who would (I hoped!) still be there. It was all very amicable, if a tad inept. The aim was clearly to create a haze of ‘top company’ logos and then trap gullible middle managers who would then become intimate chums with the BigCo Speakers.
Imagine my surprise then when a friend emailed me the marketing PDF for the Inverin conference, noting that there would be a ‘contribution from’ one Ian Jindall (sic):
Honestly. When you see the PDF you realise that for a given session there are four keynote speakers, 6-8 headline contributors and then ‘contributions from’ another dozen… Is there room for anyone not contributing?
I rang Inverin to query this and they’re still "looking into it". How can people be expected to credit anything they say?
I was going to link to their site, but at inverin.co.uk this is all you could see:
Great – that cheers me up! I wonder if I’ll ever hear from them about why my name’s there (not that I’d expect people to be deciding to go just based on my mispelled presence).
If you’re one of the select, "C-level" lucky people to have been spammed with this, let me know your thoughts. Even better if you’re a "contributor" taken by surprise!
