Hyatt to get companies to hold meetings again

WITH the country in a grim mood about corporate America, Hyatt is adding some humor to its marketing in an effort to get companies to hold meetings again.

In a series of Web videos from the comedy site Funny or Die that begin running Thursday, Hyatt will emphasize what can go wrong when people choose the wrong hotel or meeting planner. (Hint: watch out for rogue mimes.)

During the economic crisis, holding corporate meetings came to be seen as something high-flying and wasteful, like, say, taking private planes or buying naming rights to a stadium.

“Two thousand nine was a tough year economically, and a large part of our business comes from meetings,” said Amy Curtis-McIntyre, senior vice president for marketing at Hyatt.

With the public and the media criticizing banks that had taken taxpayer money for planning retreats, John G. Stumpf, the chief executive of Wells Fargo, took out full-page ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post last February to defend corporate events. The impression that “every employee recognition event is a junket, a boondoggle, a waste, or that it’s for highly paid executives,” he said, was “nonsense.”

Still, Wells Fargo called off all its employee-recognition events for 2009, and a rash of other companies made similar cancellations.

And in 2010, according to a December study from the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, a majority of travel managers say they will use more video or Web conferencing, rather than in-person meetings, to cut travel budgets.

That leaves Hyatt in a bit of a pickle.

“We consider meeting expertise to be something that separates us from our competitors, and something we have a real intuition for,” Ms. Curtis-McIntyre said. For example, she said, Hyatt meeting planners schedule frequent breaks, stock buffets with high-energy foods and use chairs that are comfortable enough to sit in for seven hours.

“The meetings business was slow in 2009, and slow as we come into 2010, so we thought the timing was right to put out an aggressive, confident invitation to get together again,” Ms. Curtis-McIntyre said.

In the past, Hyatt’s campaigns for meetings have centered on ads in publications like “Successful Meetings,” and e-mail to meetings planners. It realized, through internal research, that more than half of small meetings — 100 people or fewer — are not organized by an event planner. “They don’t routinely read those trades,” she said.

“The average meeting holder could be a C.E.O., someone holding a reunion, an H.R. professional, an administrative assistant,” she said. “They all say the same thing: that a meeting has to have great food, the audio-visual has to work, and the planner doesn’t want to get yelled at. So we thought there was something interesting in that.”

The Funny or Die videos show a meeting organizer getting the blame when things go awry. In one, the organizer notes that the hotel is the hippest in all downtown, and that the meeting adviser helped him book a table at the club next door. When the presentation begins, though, it is interrupted by thumping bass from the club, then by a pair of clubgoers embracing. As the meeting organizer is fired, Hyatt ends with the tagline “Bad meetings happen. Just not here.”

In another one, a Benihana-style chef distracts attendees. An executive finally gets the group under control, and starts discuss his plan for increasing profits — but is interrupted by a mime.

Funny or Die, which was co-founded by Will Ferrell and others as a comedy Web site, has been moving into brand-sponsored videos. Recent branded projects include a video featuring Tori Spelling for the toilet-paper brand Cottonelle, and one with Tony Romo for the apparel line Starter.

Hyatt paid less than $300,000 for the project, including production and advertising. “It’s a lot cheaper for the client, yet they’re getting the quality,” said Dick Glover, chief executive of Funny or Die. “You look in the big media companies, you look at agencies, traditional places, they’ve built up over the years this system and overhead and people that have been with them 23 years and have gotten 5 percent pay raises every year. You end up adding it all together, and things become very expensive.”

Also, he said, Funny or Die had an established following among its audience (which is largely young, male and upscale, Mr. Glover said). “We can market that into the social media space, to an audience where we have credibility and where perhaps a consumer products company doesn’t.” (Funny or Die has almost 1.5 million followers on Twitter and almost 50,000 Facebook fans.)

Mr. Glover said he was not worried that Funny or Die would lose credibility if it was perceived to be pushing products.

“The key, the absolute key, is to be funny,” he said. “It’s not that this audience doesn’t want advertising — they dislike bad advertising.”

PHD, Hyatt’s media agency, struck the partnership, part of a project in which PHD will aim to spend $2 million to $3 million in 2010 with Funny or Die for other clients, a list that includes HBO and Starbucks.

“It’s more cost-efficient,” said Andrew Chomer, director of strategic partnerships at PHD, part of the Omnicom Media Group division of the Omnicom Group. “If I chase down a guy like Zach Galifianakis, and I go to CAA, it’s going to cost me $1 million to get him in a video. If I go to Funny or Die, they have these relationships,” and someone like Mr. Galifianakis could be lined up “for somewhere in the ballpark, of, like $75,000 to $100,000,” Mr. Chomer said.

“It’s about fitting the brand into a relevant audience,” he said.

NYTimes.com