Because the client lives
culture of this company, he knew what kind of music would speak to this audience.
was happy to do. As a music fanatic I love to put together playlists for events (I guess it’s my inner DJ), so I spent a couple of hours one day compiling a playlist of some of the most popular high energy rock songs from the requested era. My inner DJ would say, “Rockin’ the house from AC/DC to ZZ Top!” OK, maybe not. During rehearsals the producer asked if we could go over the playlist. As I began going over each song I soon realized that he didn’t know very much about 80s and 90s rock music because he had never heard of the majority of the songs that I had compiled. This was surprising because I wasn’t using a bunch of obscure art- ists. In fact, most of the songs on my playlist had hit the top 40 during these two decades. In the producer’s defense, he was a little older and probably grew up in the 70s so he wasn’t very familiar with much of this music. I grew up in the 80s and 90s so I have intimate knowledge of this musical genre. The problem was that he didn’t recognize this fact, and chose not to defer to my experience as a contemporary of the requested time period. Instead he shot down almost every song I brought and left us with only about 30 minutes of music. When the client arrived I could tell he was disappointed by the lack of songs and he probably thought we had not taken his request seriously when, in fact, I had spent quite a bit of time on the proj- ect. So he said he would bring his iPad and we could use one of his playlists for the music. When he gave me the iPad, his playlist contained almost every song the producer had cut from mine. Even though my inner DJ felt both vindicated and annoyed, I recognized this as a teachable moment.
When the attendees arrived I soon realized that most of them were around my age and a little younger. I would say the average age in the room was early to middle 30s - a good 20 years younger than the producer. We ended up using my playlist after all and you could tell that it was a big hit. The client really wanted to bring up the energy in the room and 80s and 90s rock music did that
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in a big way. Because the client lives every day within the culture of this company, he knew what kind of music would speak to this audience. The producer was just being too conservative for that particular crowd.
In contrast, a few weeks before this meeting I managed a confer- ence for bond dealers. Most of these attendees were men in their late 50s and early 60s. For that event it was easy listening jazz from beginning to end. Even though that isn’t my kind of music I recog- nized what many of these people listen to because most of them fell into the same demographic group as my father. Even the attend- ees that didn’t like soft jazz work in a fairly conservative culture dominated by people who may not be into Lenny Kravitz so they wouldn’t be fazed by the conservative music selections. It would, for the most part, only be background noise.
I am using music for these examples of cultural relevance be- cause musical taste is one of the most obvious differences between various cultures. But this should only be an illustration of a concept that is applied to all areas of your meetings and events; from cater- ing to networking activities or even how much fl ash goes into the audio visual elements.
The simple fact is that people communicate differently based on their life experiences and this can often be a direct result of time spent in a particular organization’s culture. It is our job as meeting and event professionals to spend time researching the culture of an organization or group, and apply the fi ndings to every part of their event while doing our best to avoid our own prejudices. This is not always easy… especially when it comes to music.
Jay Ward, CTS Principal at Genesis Technical Production & Design, is committed to helping organizations in the event production industry thrive in such a competitive environment through an array of resources and services ranging from production management and operations to staging and digital content design.
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