Log In
Huddles offer participants a chance to brainstorm challenges, provide a sounding board for future opportunities, and empower idea generation.
When explaining Huddles, John Schlaefli starts off by saying what the concept is not: “What we absolutely don’t do is we don’t have a load of content in one room and then the delegates come out and they look to the right and there’s some nasty, darkly lit room with tabletops, and they go, ‘Oh sh*t, I’m not going to go in there because somebody might try and talk to me.’”
Launched at last year’s FIPP World Media Congress and reintroduced in a new and improved version at this year’s event in June in Lisbon, Portugal, Huddles aims for a totally different vibe, said Schlaefli, cofounder and CCO of Media Makers Meet-Mx3. Mx3 operates the FIPP conference under a license and also organizes three of its own branded media shows globally.
Huddles offer an alternative to exhibit halls that have a clear buyer/seller marketplace dynamic and are positioned instead as media industry conversations between experts and attendees seeking solutions to their challenges. Rather than seeing a sea of pipe and drape, booths, or tabletops, “when you look at the room, it is like having lots of little stands — only they’re not stands, they’re sofas and soft seating areas,” Schlaefli said.
Huddles partners, according to the FIPP World Media Congress website, participate “with one goal: to help you overcome challenges and exploit opportunities. They will offer a unique chance to brainstorm challenges, provide a sounding board for future opportunities, and empower idea generation.”
Central to this approach, Schlaefli said, is focusing on the Huddles partners as people rather than on the companies they represent. “The key thing to it is the positioning of the individuals as the experts,” he said. “That’s the clever bit.”
Partners include leading advisories and consultants and pioneering technologists and solutions providers with unique areas of expertise in the media industry.
“We create an environment where people want to come to our events,” said John Schlaefli, cofounder and CCO of Media Makers Meet-Mx3.
The tables in the seating areas are all numbered, but the environment is “not focused on the business, it’s focused on the individual. There will be a picture of them and a bio of what they can do in your Huddle [conversation], and we would upload all of the information [in the conference app] about why they’re an expert in their area,” he said. “If you are in subscription technology, then it would be: ‘We are the leading light in this, this is the size of company that we help, by default, these are the people that we can’t help because we’re not in that space, these are the sorts of companies that we can talk to.’”
Schlaefli said Huddles are “positioned as free consultancy,” and partners and attendees can invite or book meetings in the app or strike up conversations on the fly. In June, “we had over 400 meetings at the congress in two days,” he said, and those were just the meetings recorded through the app. He said many other meetings took place off-site. “You can’t get your arms around everything,” Schlaefli said, “because people just go off for a cup of tea or a glass of wine — that was happening all day long.”
Only a few companies that directly compete in the same arena are included in the show. “Ideally, we don’t want 15 subscription companies in the room — you want two or three, you want two or three CMS companies,” Schlaefli said. “And ideally, you want the ones with the most cutting-edge solutions that are not the same.”
RELATED: 4 More Ideas to Improve Conference Exhibits
The approach is working. “We create an environment where people want to come to our events,” Schlaefli said. “Then we write a report afterwards, we give the [Huddle partners] all the downloads from the report so they’ve got some actual lead gen afterwards, and we give full access to delegate lists. It’s non-threatening. That’s the key,” he said. “It encourages — rather than discourages — people to come. That’s critical, really, because people don’t like to be sold to.”
The feedback has been “amazingly positive,” Schlaefli said, among the partners. “Even [one] company that didn’t have that many meetings, still had two or three quite landmark meetings, which will go somewhere,” he said. Attendees also appreciated the no-hard-sell interaction. “People came away feeling they had real value and almost without exception, everybody wants to come back.”
Schlaefli is pleased with the improvements — largely tech and related to booking appointments in the app — that were made to Huddles this year. “We didn’t get it right the first time, but we tweaked it and we slightly changed the approach,” he said. “I think these things have to be evolutionary. It’s quite clever how we’ve got to where we got to, but it’s been a journey.”
Michelle Russell is editor in chief of Convene.
Breaking Free From Convention: Event Pros Offer Their Insights
To learn what events industry practices planners believe are out-of-date and no longer useful, Convene editors went right to the planners themselves via our recent Salary Survey and other interviews. We curated and categorized their sacred cows, and how they would change them, for the July-August issue of Convene. Here are links to more results from the research.