If Carlsberg ran conferences….

What an international corporate user conference promises to be: fun, engaging, and a unique chance to learn, network with your peers, and enjoy some lovely part of the world.

What 99% of international corporate user conference promises often are: a bit dull if we are being honest, often ego exercises by the organiser or a platform for an overzealous CEO to talk us through the company achievements, and a grim trudge around totally anonymous and interchangeable seminar rooms with the obligatory finger buffet food at the ‘relaxed mixer’.

 Yet we keep doing them!

Well I have just returned from the 1% - the conference that really did ‘wow’ me and deliver on its promises – ALL of them

 The premise was, to be honest, very familiar: come to Provence, and ‘Be an Expert’ with us! (Immediate thoughts: it will be held somewhere I can’t easily get to; I’ll lose the will to live at the first ra-ra sales kick-off camouflaged as a ‘Keynote’ - and I’ll be hugely disappointed at the wafer thin ‘expert’ knowledge)

But I did have some basis for confidence, to be honest, as this was my long-standing Life Sciences client AMPLEXOR - and I have had good experiences with them and indeed their conferences before.

This time, the theme, as I’ve said, was about Being The Expert, and the location Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer, Provence, France. Well, promising enough start, though I admit I was a tad concerned that the keynote featured a self-described Philosopher, Ruud Veltenaar. My heart slightly sank… wondering how he might make his experience relevant to a room of regulatory Life Sciences’ professionals.

 Well. How wrong I turned out to be. Like pretty much everything at the show, Ruud was more than worth the trip… a very experienced TED talker, he gave us all genuine value and he expertly weaved it all into a hugely relevant Life Sciences and AI context. As did the entire experience, which was actually for once about what mattered to delegates - zero company propaganda, and 100% thought-provoking content.

Content, I also have to say, that was also TLA-free and which, also unlike the norm, wasn’t an 8am-8pm treadmill packed with speech after PPT marathon after 20 minute compulsory product demo to convince your boss your time out the office was worth it.

Plus, the venue and locale more than delivered, with the company having ensured there was time to really get a sense of the place and to even sample some of the amazing local wines and food. I also found the hotel charming, as it wasn’t your standard-issue conference hotel which could be by any airport or the Moon and you wouldn’t notice, as you never get to leave the A/C-blasted interior! Instead, it was a lovely higgledy-piggedly, very French, rural hotel, and for once it was a plus to get lost moving from meeting to meeting, as you were always finding something else nice to check out and another conference delegate to chat to as you found your way back.

On the plane back I tried to work out why this one had worked so well - why this was a business conference that delivered. I think it was because AMPLEXOR

?     didn’t try to sell itself - so no CEO roadshows and share price boasting

?     went for a relaxed vibe from the start

?     chose speakers with interesting things to say, and encouraged them to say it and then encouraged debate and discussion

?     saw the event as a useful experience for the delegates - not their brand.

 My conclusion? If Carlsberg did Conferences - this is what it’d look like.