notes from another planet

We walk among parallel worlds in the same universe.

Listen to AM radio. Watch certain religious television programs. Attend a marketing conference on sponsorships in Chicago for three days.

While I have not done the first two in a while, I just got back from a powerful conference bringing together sponsors (companies) and properties (venues, other companies, nonprofits). I ended up filling in for a colleague, and while I found much of it quite useful and helpful to my work, and I applaud the seriousness and effort to provide the sponsorship industry (which includes the nonprofit where I work) a lot of useful stuff, I must admit I was a visitor dropping in.

It felt a bit like going to a very large high school. There were jocks -- sports marketing is a very big business in this country. MasterCard, for example, lists as its sponsorships the NFL, NHL, MBL, NBA, PGA and a couple of others. Priceless.

An Olympics sponsorship cost $60 million dollars. I heard a lot about these sponsorships as an example, one that doesn't fit into my own work, but as somebody who watches the Olympics, a somewhat interesting fact.

There were cool folk -- the fellow from Jane's Addiction (a 90s band, I am told) who founded the Lollapalooza concerts and lots of Europeans dressed in ways that look cool on them but would be considered too silly for Americans.

Smart, brainy folk -- the kind who probably always answer hard questions before the teacher can finish her or his sentence. The fellow who heads up marketing research for NASCAR is very, very smart, as is a psychologist who does market research by watching people and recording their actions, who asks folk to pick images to create collages reflecting what they think, and who pairs the names of celebrities with certain concepts to chart the connected path between these concepts and the celebrities, telling us something about our images of celebrities, but also segmenting us into specific camps (the group who see certain celebrities the same way).

No. There are not only two kinds of people in the world.

A lot of stuff. A lot of hotel air in conference rooms. A lot of watching people networking, that speed-dating exercise where one uses less and less words to quickly come to the point about her or his work, watching the moment when the eye of the other person wanders to find a more appropriate or attractive (in a marketing sense a better connected) person.

Hearing the rush of all these voices in those networking moments, all that hotel air brought back out of their lungs with these terse This is who I am pleas, looking for the brilliant moment when, like winning the lottery, a marketing executive will fall in love with a property executive, and sponsorships will be made. Hearing the rush, rush of those voices in those moments, one of those human sounds in a hotel ballroom that we rarely recognize because our brain in automatic self defense tries to mute it out, it is a moment of awe, terrible awe. Hear it a lot, hear it swarm up into a great sound, and you will think of Las Vegas, where the rush of sound comes from electronic slot machines, but these are human sounds, made by people, in a big room, lips moving, sound coming out, my property provides one of a kind ....

There was jargon. Companies must activate a sponsorship. Properties must offer sponsorships that differentiate, differentiate, differentiate. We must understand the emotional connections between customers and sponsors, and we must make them, while providing pass-through rights and 360 degree activation for the sponsors. We must also inspire the community and the sponsors employees, called associates. We must provide more with less. We must overprovide. We must understand the platform and build on it.

I met some very nice folk, and learned some important information, so I if am mocking anybody, then I include myself.

And while there wasn't really any hippy contingency (part of my high school experience), I did meet a fellow who represented the Woodstock Tatoo and Body Art Festival.

This conference was held in the Chicago Hilton, and among my memories of my youth is the 1968 Democratic Convention. Political junkie that I was, I watched all the presidential conventions, as much as possible, and that hotel, and Grant Park, always remind me of one of the moments when America was coming unhinged. Tear gas got into the hotel. It was Humphrey's headquarter hotel and there had been a big protest in the park across the street. Mayhem. Of course, I saw this on a black and white television some 36 years ago.

Nice hotel. Midwestern baroque.