Lots of marketing events aspire to the ideals of an eighteenth-century salon where brilliant minds from different disciplines exchange ideas, but Klick’s Leerom Segal says his firm’s MUSE gathering will stand out by being more focused on inspiration than getting a return on investment.
Scheduled for Tuesday evening, MUSE will feature a speaker list that includes novelist Margaret Atwood, filmmaker David Cronenberg and Adrianne Haslet-Davis, a professional ballroom dancer who lost her lower left leg in the Boston Marathon bombing two years ago. The guest list will focus on creative professionals in art, science and technology and will consist of TED-style talks, musical performances and art installations.
Klick is a digital agency best known for its Klick Health division, and which also operates K2 Digital, Klick Learning Solutions (KLS), Katalyst and Sensei Labs. The Toronto-based company has already held similar MUSE events in Boston, New York, Chicago and Philedelphia, but has brought it home in part based on requests from employees, Segal told Marketing. Just don’t expect a direct call to action to do more business with Klick. Segal cited Albert Einsteins’ famous quote, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts,” to explain the approach.
“We find that whenever we do something and try to draw a straight line back to a single objective, we actually undermine the spirit of it,” he said, adding that Klick will not be inviting its own client sales people and Segal won’t be making a formal presentation himself.
Leerom Segal, Klick.
“It’s not because we don’t have anything to say. It’s because the creative minds that we’ve brought in here can do a better job. So there’s no agenda, there’s no pitch,” he added. “Whenever somebody sees anything new, if it’s done well, hopefully it gets them to think about it and initiates a whole bunch of self-conscious processes that moves them a little bit closer to our brand. That’s the best we can hope for — a little bit of affinity.”
Klick has done more traditional business conferences before, in particular its Ideas Exchange for CEOs, which included former U.S. president Bill Clinton among its keynote speakers. Segal said in some respects, those kinds of events are fairly straightforward and have ample room to cover off topics compared to MUSE.
“When we do a salon-type event, the question is whose stories are going to translate well into such a short timeframe? I’ve been going to TED for many years. Sometimes you see a 16-minute presentation that could have been done in six minutes, or should have been at a TEDx event, and sometimes you see a 16-minute presentation and you want it to be an hour.”
Demand for the event has been so strong that Klick asked the location not be revealed at press time.
“You want to be able to say yes to everybody,” he said, but previous events have shown that “curating” doesn’t stop with choosing the right speakers. “It’s made us realize we can’t have sales people. We want to make sure whenever anybody puts out their hand and says, ‘My name’s Bob,’ that there’s an interesting conversation and not a pitch.”
