Loose Cannon: Bring on the Snotnose Brigade
A quick look at my high school and college transcripts shows that I didn’t exactly embrace academia: As someone once said about an entirely different set of circumstances, I had other priorities.
Priorities change. From my present vantage point of advanced age and wisdom, I’d love to see academia play a larger role in the direct marketing industry’s conferences. This would include both professors as lecturers, and students as attendees.
The benefit of hosting professors is fairly obvious: doing so provides the opportunity to offer cutting-edge research from an outside source, one hopefully more objective than sessions designed by vendors. But conferences also stand to benefit from admitting current students.
Exposing young ‘uns to the industry will help create future generations of direct marketing analysts, copywriters and, for lack of a better term, DM drones. On the more mercenary – and therefore, undoubtedly more appealing – side, bringing in students would expose them early on to the vendors whose products they someday will be using.
Some of these students will undoubtedly be tomorrow’s purchase influencers. When they are ready to spend, they will be more likely to think of the one company that sponsored their introduction to a DM conference than the 20 that have sent them sales literature.
To further reinforce the idea of student/industry relationships, conference administrators could give the highest-level conference participants – the “gold” and “platinum” level sponsors – a dozen student registration spaces apiece. These freebie registrations could be offered by these companies to students as a way of strengthening relationships with academic institutions.
There are some counterarguments to this scheme. The first, in one simple word, is money. Students are not in a position to open a checkbook for exhibitors, and are likely years away from even influencing spending. Do on-the-exhibit-floor salespeople want their time tied up by these folks?
Second, their presence in sessions may cause some presenters to change the focus of their lectures to a more elementary level.
But I don’t think the later holds up. Conferences will still be for industry attendees. The purpose of inviting students would be to expose them to higher-level thinking. Their presence, both in sessions and on the exhibit floor, will add a certain amount of energy to the whole affair.
Yes, some will show up wearing “Co-ed Naked Lacrosse” t-shirts, despite the admonition that appropriate attire is business casual. They should not be discouraged from doing so: Those wearing such items may help potential employers judge which students are serious about exploring the industry, and which – barring another dot-com revolution – aren’t quite ready for the corporate world.
I’d like to hear from all facets of the conference population – attendees, exhibitors and lecturers – of the wisdom (or lack thereof) of these ideas.
To respond to the opinions in this column, please contact [email protected]
