The heart of what’s wrong with our industry can be found beating at our industry conferences. This is where we stand on stages; beat our chests as self-anointed media pioneers celebrating our own kind, while missing the entire big picture.
The damage is structural — not in the location or timing of these formal acronymic gatherings, but rather within the structure of the pecking order of whose needs need to be met first, the consumer or the advertiser. In the purest form of the relationship between content, consumers and advertisers, the consumer must sit atop the pedestal — and that’s where these conferences turn its attendees into human mannequins, placed neatly in chairs below the raised stages where the advertiser sits.
