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Other Duties as Assigned Other Duties as

Other Duties as Assigned

Rush to Judgment Elisa Perodin, CMP, CEM Vice President, Coulter / Managing Director, Coulter Events

When I was at the National Association of Broadcast- ers [NAB], we had our Radio Show scheduled to be in Philadelphia in September of 2003. NAB is no stranger to dealing with protesters, largely because of all of the lobby- ing they do on Capitol Hill. So we dealt with that for every show that we did. At this particular event, Rush Limbaugh was going to

be our opening keynote speaker. It was just a couple of days before the show, and he decided to make those com- ments about Donovan McNabb, the Philadelphia Eagles’ quarterback, on ESPN — that McNabb was treated with kid gloves by sportswriters because he was African-Amer- ican, or something like that. A perfect storm was brewing: We had Rush as our keynoter, McNabb comments, and our event just happened to be in Philadelphia! Once he made those comments, we knew what to ex-

pect — that we were in trouble. We were met with a lot of protesters, not necessarily of NAB but against Rush — some activists, and a lot of Eagles fans. I mean, anyone you could think of was out in front of the convention cen-

120 pcma convene March 2012

ter. Thank goodness we had a great chief of security at the time that did a superb job mobilizing his security team and controlling the crowds. There was a lot of press coverage. You know the say-

ing “any press coverage is good press coverage” — we claimed this on that day. The Radio Show doesn’t usual- ly garner much press coverage because it’s the smaller of the two NAB shows. But that year it was on every major news channel, which was great to see. And selfishly, as the events professional, I loved seeing my stage set on the big screen. Even though it was a last-minute thing that happened,

we were able to collect ourselves and come up with a plan of action and execute it on site. That’s a good lesson in it- self. A lot of times in the events industry, you’re not going to get a heads-up on what’s happening. You just have to be able to react to things quickly and efficiently. But probably the real moral of the story is don’t tick off

Eagles fans. That is a good moral. — As told to Christopher Durso

www.pcma.org

ILLUSTRATION BY EDEL RODRIQUEZ

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