While it's true, only a handful of people can affect the rise of a stock price (and none of them are in radio), consider the possibility that skipping an NAB or RAB conference ensures one certain outcome: you'll never know what you've missed. Sometimes in radio or television we're at our best when we can identify a common enemy. In 2010 it may be as simple as the reality that the most powerful word in media is response and our most identifiable enemy is as George Johns puts it, "the off button."
While conventions have their eccentricities where so much is crammed into a blur of the past and present, people making sincere sweeping emotional agreements to "stay in touch," only to find the following week overrunning all good intentions. It always seems that all the dials are set up two clicks too high. But in the end those of us who seek the stimulation of sessions and interaction with the best and brightest, always come away with a sense of exhilaration (at least that's been my history when presenting or attending).
Conferences showcase strengths to be borrowed and expose weaknesses within. If you have a poor plan, a shallow take on competitive strategies, or inflexibility in planning, you'll lose. If you don't attend a conference, where might you find molecules of information floating by on the convention floor or in a session room? The worst that can happen when you're at a conference is that you find out what you don't know, and new knowledge always defeats worn out opinion.
One of our ADG colleagues once said, "Most of us in radio slept through history class." I think he was right. History books take us to battles, statecraft, and events that led to someone's great victory and someone else's abject failure. Buffalo Bills icon Marv Levy once asked his team, "Do you know why Hitler lost? He lost because he couldn't win on the road." While far less grave in consequence, we're in a battle every week. It may be best to view conferences such as this week's event as a sort of rambling frenetic war college with something there to be borrowed and activated in your building long after the conference has faded from view.
Last year after my segment of the program ended a young woman approached me and said, "I came here thinking this would be the last event in my radio career, since I'm at the height of frustration. What you and your panelists said changed my mind. Tim, do you think I should stay in this business?"
It doesn't get much thicker than that; an appeal for career advice from a bright, sensitive attendee who was willing to base her plan on one toss. I told her that she should think about all the people she'd encountered and all the content she'd absorbed at the conference, then ask a simple introspective question: "Do I love radio...or do I just like it?" A year later, she's hitting home runs and loving her time and place in the business. It's an unconventional outcome thanks to a conventional experience. Enjoy.
