Location, Location, Location: Not Worth A Thousand Words
Stay in enough conference hotels and déjà vu sets in. Ice machine down the hallway – or was it two lefts and then right before the elevator bank? Was this the location with the tropical themed bar, or the revolving rooftop lounge? What's the signature dish at the breakfast buffet, vulcanized eggs or leathery pancakes?
One has the same experience paging through convention planning magazines, looking at advertisements for various sites. Most of the ads are full-page, photo-intensive affairs with a little cookie-cutter text, offering vague promises of exhibit space, wireless connections and surrounding shopping opportunities, tucked at the bottom as an afterthought.
It could be there's a law I don't know about requiring that all conference locations trumpet their golf course offerings. Yes, golf is a draw, but at this point a golf course seems to be the price of admission for a conference site, not a differentiator. Touting it above offerings that could make a meeting planner's life easier is a mistake.
Meeting planners need a lot of practical information, and the industry standard of text-light ads works against the advertisers. Ditch the descriptions of the ubiquitous golf courses, or the sterile shots of the buildings. Instead, reassure the meeting planner that there will be adequate on-site staff, especially in low-unemployment areas; appropriate exhibit hall space, which can be configured so exhibitors feel neither claustrophobic nor lost in a canyon; and audiovisual techs who a) are available three minutes before a speaker goes on when the PowerPoint projector isn't working and b) know their way around the end of a screwdriver.
If conference centers are dead-set against offering scads of information in their ads, they could at least make their calls to action audience relevant. But the URLs in these pages are the standard ones for the properties. Are all of these locations incapable of setting up a dedicated site – or even a microsite – that address conference planner concerns?
Failure to do so says something about these facilities' ability to anticipate this audience's requirements, and what it says ain't good.
Among the ads reviewed, Hyatt alone came closest to the ideal of providing practical information. One of its ads offered "Your complete online planning tool," which includes detailed floor plans, capacity charts and planning resources and incentive checklists, among other necessary, if unsexy, tools for its audience. It was one of the few ads that addressed the audience – a harried conference planner who probably doesn't have time for 18 holes of golf, or even a few shots from the driving range.
It was also a mere one-third of a page, compared with the lush full-page efforts that offered palm trees, swimming pools and tee times.
Another convention within these convention-site ads is a truly baffling one. On the rare occasions when people are depicted, art directors steadfastly avoid showing full-face shots of one of the property's business-to-business management staff. Instead, their ads range from offering two-thirds of a face, or perhaps a lapel pin bearing the property's name, to a poorly conceived shot of CEOs holding cameras to their faces and squinting (yes, I mean you, you, Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino.)
Has nobody in the convention advertising design space read Dale Carnegie? Where's the eye contact with the welcoming on-staff conference manager who will make conference planners lives' easier? Could it be they're all lost on the back nine of the golf course?
For an industry that calls itself "hospitality," its advertisements sure aren't very welcoming.
