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Keynote Speaker Originality vs. Customization
Yields New Speech Every TimeDuring the last decade, the “hot” trend among professional speakers has been “customization.” This has been especially true for keynote speakers. What is meant by customization? It refers to the practice of adapting “stock” speeches that have been successfully delivered time and again to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of audiences. Since 9/11, business, association and government sponsors of conferences, seminars and other events have wanted more real value to result for their investment. However, higher audience value can only result from more relevant content and, by default, to be more relevant, the content must be developed for the specific needs of a given audience.
Thus, keynote speakers have had to adjust to the changing marketplace, client and changing meeting planner demands. Even those who are primarily motivational speakers have recognized the need to meet these changing client expectations. The vast majority of professional speakers have responded not by changing the core content of presentations, but rather by customizing their existing speeches. This can readily be done by liberally sprinkling in a few readily available client names, general facts and in some cases, a few client specific examples. Thus, the speech is quickly transformed from a “stock” or “canned” presentation, to one that has been “customized” to the individual client, notwithstanding the fact that in many cases, ninety percent or more of the speech has remained unchanged in content from the times it was delivered to other, widely varied audiences.
Unfortunately, this cosmetic window dressing does little to create truly unique and personalized content audiences require, to be effective in today’s globally competitive environment. What is required is not customization of stock speeches by a keynote speaker, but rather presentations that are designed expressly to meet the unique needs of a specific audience. Is this hard to do? The answer is unequivocally “yes.” Not only is it harder to do, but it is also much more time consuming for the speaker. Rather than simply gleaning a few facts and interesting perspectives about an organization and inserting them into a well crafted and often rehearsed speech, it requires that the professional speaker start each speaking assignment from scratch, namely, with a blank sheet of paper. To do so requires considerable planning and often entails telephone interviews with numerous contacts in order to provide a balanced perspective regarding the organization and its people, as well as its past, present, future, strengths, weaknesses and challenges it faces.
It is really worth it? Once again the answer is undeniably, yes. Although this approach entails a significantly greater time commitment from the professional speaker and, to a much lesser extent, the event sponsors (in providing the necessary resource information to the keynote speaker), the outcome for the audience and the sponsor is far superior. Content that is unique to a specific audience, presented by a professional speaker who clearly understands the distinctive characteristics of that audience, will capture the attention of the hearers in a way that stock content, no matter how well performed, can ever accomplish. The result will be much greater buy-in and post event action resulting from the speech.
A popular term in the meeting planning industry today is ROI (Return On Investment). It represents the client’s and sponsor’s interest in seeing a positive payback from the resources invested into meetings and events. Whenever ROI is the focus, those responsible for planning meetings and events need to ensure that the professional speakers who are presenting, particularly their keynote speakers, will provide information that is truly pertinent to their audience.
