Media owners give a presentation on how to lose an audience

Robin Hicks recently attended The Festival of Media Asia and in a piece that first appeared in Encore, he has some advice for media owners on giving engaging presentations.

You’d think the one thing that media owners would be good at doing is holding an audience. So to see delegates head for the exit whenever a media owner took to the stage at a conference in Singapore a fortnight ago was more than a little ironic. Eyeballs rolled as yet another flashy showreel was bookended by lots of big but arbitrary numbers and a bland observation that anyone could make about growth and Asia’s “amazing potential”.

You know a session is bad when the only take-home point the conference moderator can think of is that the media owner reaches umpteen million mobile users in Vietnam.

No, it’s not unusual to see a media owner get up on stage and sell. They are salespeople, after all. It’s their job. But what frustrated me, and many people I spoke to at The Festival of Media Asia, is that these guys were talking to an audience of media agencies whose job it is to know this stuff anyway. So what’s the point in shoving it down their throats? Media buyers are more than capable of reading a media kit.