Despite the cruise ship, Comms Directors' Forum a bust

This recession has killed a lot of events.

Before the crash, I used to be asked to speak at three to five conferences a year, and was invited to scores more. (The former invitations, all expenses paid, I often accepted. The latter, at several hundred pounds a day plus travel expenses, I usually skipped.) Most of those conferences have disappeared. Even prosperous companies aren't paying to send their employees on educational breaks these days.

That validates the cleverness of Richmond Events' simple idea: book a cruise ship; invite big corporate representatives free of charge; get agencies to pay for everything in exchange for guaranteed meetings with the big names. Given that most big corporates limit their vendors to those on a rostered list, and most corporate execs brush off new business calls like dandruff on a collar, this gig is one of the few ways a small agency has any chance of having a sustained conversation with global corporate types. Why they consider us nirvana, I have no idea. (In my experience, large mid-market companies are far more profitable on agency books.) But their enthusiasm has kept the Richmond Events cruise going.

Granted, it's a lot smaller than it used to be. On my first outing, the Communications Directors and the IT Directors split the whole cruise ship. There were hundreds of communications types, and more than 20 just from the IT services sector. It made for a fantastic three days, networking with colleagues, comparing issues and getting ideas for improvement.

Times have changed. Though the conference concept has survived, there are now five different types of directors on the ship. Meaning the specialist groups are much smaller, and the industry specialisms amongst them are tiny. (I still managed to find a happy cluster of colleagues from BT, IBM, Orange and Nokia to drink with.)

It is always valuable to get out of the office to mix, mingle and compare experience with colleagues. Beyond that networking, however, I found myself questioning the value of the time away. Perhaps I'm just getting too old and cynical. Perhaps, now that I'm head of marketing communications, I should have been on the marketing directors forum. But I found the seminars, on the whole, to be distressingly old hat. Surely, these are all the same issues, and all the same bits of advice, I heard at my first such conference in the late 1980s. The critical primacy of internal communications. The need for employee, marketing comms and PR to work together. Confusion over measurement. The call to understand the company's overall goals and lash yourselves to business basics. Good lord. Has the industry not moved on at all in 25 years?

I found myself deeply depressed, and indulging in my recurrent fantasy of becoming a farmer or a restorer of Georgian plasterwork. One thing, at least, comforted me. When I indulged in deep conversation with colleagues, I found their issues to all be the same as mine. If these conferences do nothing else, they remind you that you are not alone.