Entertain me! ?Elvis in your next corporate keynote?

What if Elvis never left the building? What if he were still here today? What songs would he really be performing? Bruno Mars “Uptown Funk?” and other modern pop songs?

Yesterday, I pondered this in Vegas with my teleprompter operator Holly while whiling away the hours together waiting backstage for our corporate keynote to begin. Her husband is an Elvis impersonator whose whole show is built on these questions. He performs Elvis in a show he’s created in Vegas as if he were alive today – singing modern songs.

As our keynote began and ran its course of a fireside chat built around questions that healthcare IT executives face today, I thought about this. Two words came to mind. ENTERTAIN ME.

Holly and her talented team at Freeman productions are part of this whole parallel universe of production teams who stage massive corporate productions – almost mini Las Vegas night shows – for large corporate conventions. Ours was for 30,000 healthcare IT executives.

Ours started with a highly-produced sci fi video open featuring our trade org’s chairman superimposed in it – then followed a live laser beam dancer who shot beams of green light over the heads of the attendees. Then came our keynote fireside chat. It had a theme – with three sections to reinforce it. Our customer, an IT executive, did a great job in front of 30,000 people facilitating the conversation with our CEO.

The issues they highlighted together were prescient and I’m sure top of mind for many IT execs in the audience. Those in the audience were facing very real challenges in improving the consumer experience in healthcare and turning the vast amounts of info they now have at their fingertips into insight/wisdom so their clinicians can make informed decisions. The U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell came right before them and she made news in her remarks --- that many on the Twitter-sphere welcomed. What she announced could pave the way to one universal language for healthcare technology to help us all, as patients, have a better, easier technology experience in like we do in other industries (Uber; Amazon, etc).

This morning, though, as I think back to last night’s keynote, I feel a bit like Holly Hunter in that scene from “Broadcast News” (wish I could find it online) where she’s a serious network TV news producer doing a speech before the next generation of TV news producers. She’s using an example of entertainment in news via a video in her presentation as what NOT to do in news. The audience starts clapping and clearly loving the dancing monkeys and big chain of dominoes collapsing as passing for news that she was trying to use as a cautionary tale to avoid.

As a former network television news producer myself who favors information over entertainment, I’m left wondering:  How much do our corporate audiences need to be entertained vs. informed? Do our 140-character short attention spans in this day and age translate into our corporate event content as well? Do we need Elvis? More dessert and less meat? Meat laced with dessert? I read this NYT story Sunday about Spike Jonz creating an entire cable channel now - Viceland - based on the original Vice TV concept of content that's called 'news.' It's content served up to a younger generation turning away from network television news -- with short attention spans and responding to compelling characters who entertain.

So many of us are using the word STORYTELLER in our resumes nowadays – but, in the corporate world, is it our job to create ENTERTAINMENT in corporate stage content? To be, for example, TMZ instead of PBS NewsHour in a big event corporate keynote?

As my CEO and my customer have both created excellent entrepreneurial environments in their organizations that encourage us to learn and pivot, I’ve done quick post mortem thoughts I’ve learned from this experience and ask for your thoughts as well:

Creating a memorable corporate keynote – inform, entertain or both?  Ideas:

1. Pick a strong theme for your keynote that bounces off your corporate theme.

The event theme was “Transforming Healthcare through IT.” Our keynote theme bounced off this with our fireside chat questions grouped to THINK, BE AND SEE. Before you can even transform healthcare through IT, you have to THINK in new ways, BE a different culture to innovate and SEE the myriad data you now have before you in new ways for insight and wisdom. Pick a theme that bounces off the event’s main theme and group your content around it.

2. Think about the visual – a hook or a prop

I called my work Yoda after our keynote. She’s the MASTER at storytelling in the corporate world – with a sweet spot for telling stories effectively at large corporate events. I reminded her of an event she did at an IT services company we worked at together years ago where she came up with a concept for the team that nailed it visually for the audience. For a large sales conference, she and the team decide to start a JEANS Friday policy to recognize their big contract wins – where the entire company could wear jeans on a Friday and a new sales team would be featured for their win each Friday.  So, at the keynote, she had the sales team members who’d won deals that year, come up on stage after the story of their win was told via video, and place a pair of jeans on the stage. By the end of the keynote, there was a huge mountain of jeans on stage – a collective build of the company’s success that year from teams from around the globe. It was effective and memorable.

3. Tell little humanized stories in each section that people will remember

If you’ve ever watched a TED talk, what I think is riveting is the personal story the speaker shares – how they overcame an obstacle on their way to changing the world. Working in an anecdote or two in each of your sections – reinforced with a photo to illustrate it – can work well. If you have the time, a 2 minute video bringing to life a story with video can be tremendously effective to play at the beginning of that section. Over at Salesforce, they’ve built a bit of a reputation (and of course, why not? Selling is their expertise) of wowing and winning over audiences with creative keynotes at their annual Dreamforce conference where speakers are backed by short video stories and they do things like walk on stage into the audience to keep attention spans engaged.

What are the most memorable corporate keynotes or 'big stage' presentations you’ve seen and why? And, have they ever involved Elvis?