Meetings People

I spent a good chunk of the week at the Possible conference, which has made remarkable progress in just three years to establish itself as a marquee stop on the marketing events circuit. Now whether there needs to be so many of these events throughout the year is another story but to me speaks to how humans are social creatures, not rational creatures.

Which is to say, I’m looking forward to The Rebooting’s many Cannes activities, including a private dinner with our partners at EX.CO, the New Growth Agenda event with our partners at Marketecture, a cocktails and conversation live podcast with Dotdash Meredith and more. We have partnership opportunities available. Find out more here. Get in touch: [email protected].

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The Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach is one of the city’s most famous hotels. Architect Maurice Lapidus created a grand scene that attracted the Rat Pack in the 1950s. His pièce de résistance: a wide staircase that ascends to… nowhere. 

It was a fitting context for what was the heart of Possible, the sprawling marketing conference that attracted hundreds of marketers and thousands of intermediaries. The lobby was heaving with the pent-up energy of sales. Bleu de Chanel hung in the air. 

The lobby is the locus of Possible. The sessions are elsewhere, the brands are seemingly secured in a Red Keep somewhere in the complex, and the poolside area filled with ad tech companies is fairly placid. The raw energy was in the lobby, where pillars with Viant branding frame a Renaissance-quality orgy of networking. This is the home of Meetings People. For a few hours over a few days, I too was one of them.

Meetings People are a group adjacent to the Email People. An email job is a term that arose during the ZIRP years to describe the coordination roles that have proliferated across the white collar economy. The armies of product managers are at the top of the heap of email jobs. The peak of email jobs was likely those “day in the life’ TikToks of a day in the life of a Meta product manager.

In comparison, meetings jobs are outward facing roles of sales and marketing. These are not Product People. They’re on the go-to-market front lines. The irony of modern media and marketing is it is now 20 years into its automation phase kicked off with the advent of programmatic trading. I kept hearing that that programmatic was the opposite of manual. Looking at thousands of people socializing networking to sell an array of automation products, I wonder about that promise.

For all the understandable hand-wringing about the impact of AI on employment, events like Possible are reassuring. There is no way humans will not find a way to continue to congregate. Meetings People will not surrender the gladhanding. Marc Andreessen believes the last jobs left will be early-stage venture investors – go figure – but I’m placing my bet on Meetings People. Humans will continue to create plausible reasons to socialize network in sunny places.

This is why the events sector has been mostly protected from the advent of AI. One of my worst takes was the belief that events would be unbundled and in–person congregation would decline. Nope. Meetings People will never allow that to happen. The Finance People don’t stand a chance.

The financialization of advertising has commoditized the actual outputs of the media industry. That means the advertising and media product have receded to side players as the power and money has gone to those who build pipes that connect supply and demand or provide the data that sluices through the pipes. In this kind of market, the greater rewards lie with those who sit in the middle of transactions or can do the job of media without the overhead of creating media.