“I’m doing my best”, says Pancho Campo, in response to his critics on day one of Wine Future Hong Kong 2011.
In an interview with Campo following the disappointing first day of Wine Future, there appears to have been some soul-searching in a bid to improve the rest of the summit.
If you read yesterday’s blog (if not, it’s below), I was less than impressed with the content of the discussions. Too much self-promotion and not enough fresh insight.
I have had a lot of response to the blog from delegates agreeing with my blog (although Tim Atkin MW did point out he doesn’t like being called old media: “I’ve got an award-winning website,” he said. Sorry, Tim!)
Campo said, “We send every speaker a list of questions we wanted them to answer” but he admitted many had gone off topic, talked too much about their brands and there had be more debate between speakers and audience, and this had been one of the failings of the last summit.
“In Wine Future 2009 the main things our questionnaires showed us that one, there were too many people talking their brands. And two, very few time for Q&A,” he said.
One speaker today did not talk about his brand very much – and it was one of the highlights. However, Campo revealed that gentleman had considered reworking his talk to include some infomation on his brand after hearing all the company guff yesterday. I’m glad he didn’t.
Campo added, “The only speaker that was a success in 2009 was Gary Vaynerchuk and that was not because of what he said but how he said it.”
“One of the problems the industry has is we have great minds but terrible speakers.”
So, we’re only part way through day two and things have picked up a little. But many speakers have been allowed to go on and time for questions has run out. Many people have been encouraged to write down questions but the speakers run over and then slope off without one question being asked. We have to go backstage if we want to ask the questions.
There have been some interesting nuggets of information (and there’s still plenty to go today) but there has continued to be a lot of ‘I’ll just tell you a little bit about my brand’. Please don’t; do your best instead.
