Distraction galore

Hi Everyone,
It would seem that all I blog about is events, but this time I won't be talking about the event processes, but something that happened at the event that I found quite interesting. A bit of background on the event: One of our clients has become the broadcast sponsors for the national premier league, and we were holding a press conference to announce this sponsorship. Instead of holding the conference at a regular venue like a city hotel or the client's offices, the press conference was held at the National stadium. Getting the event together came with all the usual woes, but I wont go into that right now. I'll only talk about one major issue that we were having- the CEO of our client company initially did not want to attend the event and finally after much cajoling and convincing, they cleared their schedule and agreed to attend the event, but here's the the catch- they agreed to attend the event, but only for 15 minutes! Everyone reading this post knows that 15 minutes for an appearance at a press conference is one of the most ridiculous things you have ever heard. When the CEO of our client company arrived, exactly at 9 am when the event was supposed to start, as is predictable, not even one person from the media had shown up yet. (This is one thing that I am really curious about. Is it just a Kenyan media thing, or do members of the media have the tendency of being late in other places, please give me some perspective on that from whichever country you're working in). So here is the CEO who's supposed to be leaving in the next 15 minutes, and in all likelihood the bulk of the media will show up in the next 20-30 minutes. Things aren't really looking up at this point. This is when the MD of our company went into what I call “distraction galore” mode.

He began to speak to the CEO of our client company, convinced them to go mingle with the players, and the CEO eventually ended up in a team jersey trying to score a goal against the the team's goalkeeper. Needless to say, by the time the CEO had began trying to score the goals, the press had arrived and the event went on quite nicely, and the 'goal footage' ended up being aired on all the major television stations during prime time news.

One more thing I learnt at this particular event: having good working knowledge of the local language is key to anyone having a press conference. During the question- answer session for the media, a prominent reporter who reports for the Swahili (the Kenyan national language) news on a prominent national station asked a question in Swahili that he expected to be answered in kind.

Everyone from our PR firm held their breath as we waited for the reply from our client's representative, until... phew!- we all breathed a great sigh of relief when the company representative answered the question in proper Swahili.
If the client representative didn't have a proper grasp of the local language, the client would have been left looking very, very bad. In short, wherever you are, learn the local language!(especially if you're a local, there's no excuse for not knowing your own language).

To everyone still doing their internship, I wish you all the best, to those that are done, I hope you all had great experiences, and to those in LUCT, I hope week one of the new semester started off well.

Cheers,
Liwami.