We’re living through a time when it could be the first time most Americans are exposed to the dating and partner selections for Gay and Lesbian couples—both on TV, and in real life. The new Love Connection Television TV show took a huge step forward, at the front of the tidal wave of having mixed race and gender dating contestants on national television. This racial and gender diversity was unthinkable on TV shows 10-years ago.

It may still offend more conservative people. The enthusiastic, young, in-studio empowerment of TV shows using a Quick Tally Audience Response System, also known as ARS, Clickers and Electronic voting, had no trouble with the TV audience anonymously participating in selecting dating partners from amongst such diverse groups that would never been possible before. It signals an attitudinal change that has become acceptable by the younger generation that “grew-up” on more diverse TV and in my opinion is working its way up through the generations. 

TV has had its share of influence upon that change and the change circled back upon programming. I remember watching sitcoms that always had to depict married couples in bed with one foot on the ground. It might not have been clearly visible, however, that was the rule. The recent reincarnation of the Love Connection TV Show is an example of the change in attitude as well as methodology in their studio audience voting.

The original show had interactivity with the audience selecting a winner by clapping. That was way back when Quick Tally Interactive Systems (my company) began replacing applause meters on TV shows such as the pioneering game show format of America’s Funniest Home Videos using electronic polling voting devices for instantaneous compilation and display of quantifiable results.

The winner, as originally determined by applause meter, was the contestant that received the loudest noise from the television audience. Results were measured by decibels, not votes. It was wildly inaccurate however it was the only way to instantly determine a winner via group polling.

At about that same time, Quick Tally pioneered real-time, accurate, verifiable audience voting. It was used for the first time on TV on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Audience Response Voting Systems have since become a generic staple at meetings and on TV. Quick Tally Interactive Systems is honored to have been part of this groundbreaking program, supplying accurate instantaneous voting results.

Audience response also known as Electronic Keypad Voting, or Clickers, or ARS are also a powerful tool to empower diverse groups to anonymously voice their opinions on TV Specials dealing with issues such as the nationally televised R.A.C.E, for which Quick Tally Interactive provided the group voting keypad technology. It marked the beginning of the recognition by television producers of the power of anonymity in gaining truthful TV audience polling.

R.A.C.E.

The landmark R.A.C.E – Racial Attitudes and Consciousness Exam was a two-part NBC-TV Nationally Televised program, measuring viewer’s opinions/reactions to various racial scenarios presented. It was ground-breaking (not only in the subject matter) but also technically linking together live interactive voting audiences and individuals across the country.

The Live Quick Tally Audience Polling System technology showed overall individual truthful group polling and analytic results as well as geographic comparison. Often individuals are oblivious to their prejudices. Audience response clickers provided the ability to anonymously discover attitudes of both the individuals and that of the group shown in graphic feedback. Diversity became a major mover and shaker in TV and in the use of electronic keypad (Clicker) polling systems.

History of interracial couples on TV

• Captain Kirk (William Shatner) kissed Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) on Star Trek, which is arguably the first interracial kiss on television.
• I Love Lucy as strange as it seems now, was the first interracial couple, which was made in opposition to the networks having Dezi Arnaz play himself.
• The Jefferson’s had an interracial “black/white” couple as friends of the central characters
• True Colors was about an interracial and their relationships
• The Gilmore Girls
• Six Feet Under about homosexual as well as interracially gay couples
• Scrubs about an interracial couple
• A few more recent examples: Zoe And Wash From Firefly, The L Word (2004), Heroes 2006, Parks and Recreation 2009, Crosby And Jasmine From Parenthood (2010), Happy Endings (2011), and a long list of new shows.

But why are all the TV commercials jumping on the diversity bandwagon? They are also increasingly more representative of the world we’re living in today. They help to attract the broad base of customers and TV audiences whose values align with those portrayed through ads with inclusion and diversity. It’s become good business and in addition, it works towards propagating more diversity in our society.

The change came quickly in advertising. In 1994, Ikea Home Furnishings came out with a trailblazing commercial. Ikea had the first national television ad featuring a gay couple. When it aired, Ikea immediately got negative calls and boycotts. When I wrote to Quick Tally’s clients pointing out interesting change, carefully not making any endorsement, several of them immediately opted out.

In the past few years, companies like travel website Expedia, Amazon and credit card company MasterCard all have ads featuring gay couples. Today it looks like the majority of ads feature multi-racial families. Some producers say that as much as 75% of the product they produce for TV is multi-racial.

The Pepperdine Journal of Communication Research 2017 paper Young Adults’ Acceptance of Interracial Relationships on Television

Theoretical Perspectives

The consequences of television shows depicting minorities and the relationships between them in negative ways as well as the benefits of television positively representing interracial relationships are explained by two theories-social cognitive theory and cultivation theory. According to both theories, the cross-racial interactions viewers observe on television could predispose them to engage in similar types of behaviors in real-life.

Cultivation theory explains how viewers internalize messages as a result of exposure to television and are more likely to accept portrayals as real when television is watched frequently (Potter, 2014). Bandura’s social cognitive theory revolves primarily around the functions and processes of observational learning (Bandura, 1986, 2002). That is, by viewing behaviors, including those of media figures, one may develop rules to guide subsequent actions and/or be prompted to engage in previously learned behaviors. (Bandura, 1994). Thus, for people with limited contact with ethnic groups, television could become a method in which they form subsequent opinions and models. 10 Pepperdine Journal of Communication Research for interaction (Tan, Fujioka, & Lucht, 1997)

Although TV shows such as the New Dating Game are no longer on the air, many of the new TV audience participation shows for which Quick Tally provides the TV studio audience voting (Clicker Polling Technology) now reflect diversity. 

• America’s Funniest Home Videos now has a black host Alfonso Ribeiro. He replaced Bob Saget, Daisy Fuentes, John Fugelsang took over as hosts. In 2001, Tom Bergeron replaced the two hosts and left in 2015, making Alfonso Ribeiro the new face of the show.
• Dancing with the Stars Juniors was co-hosted by Jordan Fisher and Frankie Muniz
• Dancing with the Stars was co-hosted by two diverse people: Tom Bergeron and Lisa Channing
• Masked Singer, the run-away hit of 2019, has an African American host Nick Cannon

CREATE MEETINGS THAT BREAKTHROUGH BARRIERS TO LEARNING AND GROWTH

Electronic Audience Response Systems are far more than voting tools to collect and aggregate data. Learn how you can create questions and run a more interesting and effective interactive event.

Electronic Audience Response System

Electronic voting also known as Audience Response Systems, ARS and Clickers provide these main benefits for use at Electronic Townhalls corporate and association meetings, seminars, elections, synods, and training. Most interactive meetings using electronic voting systems have specific goals and several carefully crafted questions in a session or two. Accomplishing your goals when using the electronic keypad voting system will be greatly enhanced by understanding that the real polling power lies in its anonymity. Here’s how.

Introducing Interactivity

“The mind is like a parachute. It works best when it is open.”

~ Sir Thomas Robert Dewar

The Quick Tally® audience response voting’s interactive process enables the group to learn from one another, break down assumptions, move quickly toward conclusions, and arrive at a consensus. Using the electronic voting system intelligently and judiciously, Quick Tally®:

• Speeds the Decision Process
• Enhances Productivity. Saving time by dramatically speeding up the process creates more usable time. Votes are instantly collected, aggregated and available for viewing (or not) in PowerPoint in real-time.
• Creates Anonymity. Eliminating a public showing of hands enables individuals to freely express their opinions
• Eliminates Gross Assumptions
• Forces Ownership of Opinions
• Empowers the Audience
• Generates a Discovery Process
• Encourages Growth
• Accelerates Group Consensus
• Enlivens Sessions and Provides Entertainment

The Basic Elements

The Participants

Quick Tally® transforms your audience into active participants. The questions you ask your audience will create enthusiasm, and the result will be not only the acquisition of new, unbiased information, but also to generate a process of discovery within the audience, a feeling that there is true concern and value placed upon their responses, and an eagerness to participate. As an inherent and very important bonus, the process of inclusion creates participant satisfaction. In many cultures, this may be the primary benefit of using Audience Response Electronic Voting Technology.

The Speaker/Moderator

The most important objective for the speaker is to empower the participants in the interactive environment. Think of yourself as a media commentator, adding color to the session. When you are posing questions, it’s a good technique to ask the question and go over the list of possible responses; however, when the Quick Tally® results appear on the screen, rather than read off the list of responses, your job is to provide commentary. The attendees can read the visualization of the group’s results without you. Interpret what you see on the screen, encourage discussion of the possible implications of the responses, and look for follow-up “why” questions.

The Power of Anonymity

Tips on Conducting a Better Session

Use Time Wisely

“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”. ~ Mark Twain

• Ask the audience if the issues or topics most important to them are being discussed.
• Eliminate all but the few most basic, meaningful questions. Less is more!
• Arrange the question list in descending order of importance, so that if the session runs long, the least important questions are the ones eliminated. If there are multiple topics in the session, do so with each topic.
• Keep it simple: The on-screen question is merely a brief visual prompt of the spoken question. Truncating the question to its basics is a great exercise in clarifying your questions and your overall session.
• Although there may be many possible choices, do not have unnecessary choices that take time to read and fill the screen. Usually, about four choices are enough.

Anonymity vs. Tracking Responses

You can track responses—i.e., in a testing mode for continuing education, or identify the individual or groups that need training.

A word of caution: In some applications tracking is necessary and in others it is deadly. Are the attendees to be empowered to speak to issues candidly, or is there a need to track their responses as in training or continuing education? The difference between the two determines how candid and honest the responses will be. Neither is wrong; they are just different.

 In a typical meeting, the process is to ask attendees for a few demographics such as

• Identifying their job description or relevant identification: Volunteer or Staff
• Geographic location and number of years of service.

 The goal is to ask just enough to gain useful information without the attendees feeling that you are tracking them.  Consider how open and trusting your culture is and how valuable truthful responses are before asking a lot of demographic questions.

Developing a Questionnaire

If you have an open organizational or corporate culture, you might consider a more open interactive group participation structure. Some environments require a more formal approach. In any case, consider gearing your questionnaire toward the success of the event itself, i.e. primarily for the benefit of the attendees, to enhance the individual sessions and provide information to enhance the overall event.

• “How many questions should I ask in an hour-long session?”
• “How long does it take to ask and answer a question?”

The first answer is that you should ask the fewest possible questions – the caveat is that they are the most basic and meaningful. Although this is completely subjective, for most sessions it’s about four to twelve questions.

As for how much time needs to be allotted to ask a question, it takes as long as you need to read the question aloud, plus 15 seconds (depending upon the complexity of the question) for the audience to respond. A countdown clock may be inserted into the question screen to speed up the process.

The bulk of time in an is generally spent after the question is asked, so make decisions in advance about the time for discussion and teaching, i.e.:
 

• Are you merely reading the responses back, or are you doing color commentary and explaining the meaning of the response?
• At an educational session, are you going to explain the correct answer, or deal with reinforcing learning later?
• If the response is important to the progress of your talk, will you discuss it in depth?
• Will there be follow-up questions?

The Most Basic Question is the Best

Quick Tally®’s axiom with regard to questions is this:

The more basic the question, the more valuable the data.

The more interactive you want to be, the more you need to ask the most important, most basic questions that are catalysts for thought and action. The follow-up “why” question is typically the one that provides the deep insights you seek. Or, it may be that there is a one truly important question. If so, ask it prior to any discussion/day and ask it again at the end of the session/day. This simple technique of only asking one repeated question has in some meetings been the single most powerful use of the audience response technology.

Question Length On-screen

Long question text must be edited to create a prompt containing only as much information as is needed.  During your session, the question may be spoken at full length, and/or presented at greater length on a separate text screen. Less is more!

Impromptu Questions and Cross-tabulations

Impromptu questions can be added at any time during your session, and any questions asked during the session (even impromptu ones) can be referenced (cross-tabulated) by any other question. If you’ve asked a few simple demographic questions, you can crosstab responses by any other question, such as how men answered a question, or how people of a specified income or educational level answered.

Quick Tally® Question Formats

The formats described below allow you to gather information and feedback in a measurable context. They are: Closed-End Questions: Multiple Choice, Yes/No (True False), Likert Scale and Rank Open-end Questions.

Closed-End ARS Questions

Open-end Questions

Open-ended questions can allow you to measure unplanned responses. For example, in a multiple-choice question, you may offer “OTHER” as an answer category. If a significant number of participants respond with “OTHER”, you can then open the floor to take responses. The question can then be rephrased with the new categories added and entered into the system by the operator.

Achieving Break-Through Communications

At events introduced or run by the CEO, we generally advise a theme of listening and honoring the opinions of the attendees. We often advise management to rethink their usual approach to their meeting as an opportunity to lecture and spend some of their time listening. It’s both powerful and simple to champion a listening/caring theme.

Perception vs. Reality—Exploding Myths

The Quick Tally® interactive technique involved in this premise is simple—and the results are very powerful. Ask your audience a series of related questions without showing the responses until all questions in the series are asked and answered. For example, ask:

“How honest is the US Congress?”

The format would be a Scale question, in this case on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being honest and 1 being dishonest.

Then ask:

“How honest is your own Congressperson?”

Remember, you didn’t immediately show the group their responses to the first question.

Finally, with both results, show the responses. You will find the answers are almost always that Congress is dishonest (rating around a 3,) while their own local elected official is honest (and gets around a 7.)

So, the conclusion to share with the audience is then:

“How is it possible that Congress is dishonest, while all of you have honest Congresspersons?”

This technique demonstrates, in a tangible way, the difference between individual perceptions and reality.

The simple process of pushing the button and translating the responses to visual language (viewing on screen) forces ownership of the participants’ collective opinion. There is nothing threatening and nothing to think about. They are physically, verbally and visually connected to the results and to each other. They own it because they discovered it and told it to themselves.

Break-Through Communications is the single most dynamic interactive technique. It can force people off of autopilot, to examine ideas and issues, first as individuals and then as a part of a group. The participants almost imperceptibly “buy into” their own responses. When the truth becomes difficult for your audience to accept, this technique allows them to discover it for themselves, laying down the groundwork for growth and movement to action.

Review

Audience Response systems are far more than tools to collect and aggregate data. This has been a basic guide to learn how you create questions and run more interesting and effective interactive events. There is much more that can be done in areas not discussed, training, education, and knowledge-based games and with results reporting, analyzing results and opening the minds of your event participants to learn and grow.

Please add your comments and observances or ask questions. Make sure to check out how “The Best Meetings are Theatrical Events“

Easy ways to make meetings work

Your group meeting is a rare occasion in which the experiences and expectations of every person come together in one room. It offers you the opportunity to “walk your talk.” It can be enlightening, perhaps a transformative group experience, and can even modify your corporate or association culture. And it could be a rare or unique opportunity to communicate freely, if you could eliminate the politics, and if thoughts and opinions could be expressed anonymously.

The internet is overflowing with repetitive advice and rules on conducting and organizing more productive, meaningful and engaging meetings. There are common-sense rules that I like such as make more frequent meetings shorter and less frequent meetings longer; templates for creating agendas and presentations, using whiteboards, voting with Post-its and one site that advocates “throwing balloons”. There is also a discussion about how employees use meetings as a way to avoid actual work.

The common thread is that meetings are generally boring because the organizers are stuck in the monotonous meetings rut. They don’t really involve the participants on a personal level. No one on the internet or in print is discussing the important simple rethinking of meetings as theatre.

The challenge is to have meetings that empower the expression of true anonymous opinions; learn and retain the content of the meeting; discover new information about both themselves and the group and not be put to sleep. Impossible? Not at all!

In the next five minutes, discover how meetings are theatre and learn the simple steps to great interactive entertaining events. It’s just about rethinking the basics tenants and presentation of meetings. It’s really that simple.

A client of mine was having an all-hands corporate meeting (conference). As a 32-year veteran of thousands of corporate and association interactive events, I was consulting on the client’s event. During the conversation, I called her the “producer” she became offended: Are you calling me the producer? Well, yes, I was. That’s when I had an epiphany and realized that my client(s) didn’t understand that they were producing theatrical events; maybe that is why her conferences and yours were/are so dull and lifeless.

My client never put the show/meeting dots together and wondered why she had hired a venue with stage lighting, sound, scenery (even if it’s just drape), entry and exit music, and a crew including a director to call the show unless it was a show. In her mind, her only consideration was having several completely independent dull presentations have their microphone and PowerPoint slides work.

Meetings and audience response interactive sessions don’t work well because of staging. Questions are often invited, and opinions solicited; however, the message delivered by the physical formality positioning, the lighting, the dress, etc.is clear: the true job of the audience is to stay awake listen. That’s the message sent by one type of theatrical setting (think of a stage play). It is specifically designed for a passive audience (viewer).

Most meetings are set up as talking heads, lit by stage lights with someone behind an elevated podium, lecturing to a hushed audience sitting in the dark. That’s a bad idea if you plan to involve the attendees be interactive, so do the opposite: be inclusive; bring the audience into the light so that you can see them, and they can see each other. If you can’t see them, realize that you’ve created a barrier and effectively cut yourself off from them–and they’re cut off from each other. I’ve been at medical meetings where rooms were so dark that the attendees were snoring.

Whether you realize it or not, in interactive meetings, it’s showtime!

The Unspoken Partnership

From early Greek times, there has been an unspoken partnership between the audience and the people on stage. That deal made centuries ago is the underpinning of our events today. Each group plays their respective parts for it to work. They’re divided into entertainer (speaker) and audience (listener). At a play or at your meeting, the audience is traditionally there to listen (be entertained) or be taught—not to participate. This unspoken recognition of the traditional meeting partnership; that the audience isn’t an active participant in the barrier to having a successful interactive meeting.

 Many speakers/lecturers/presenters think of “their session” as a standalone event. That’s the way meting work—or don’t work. Those who think that it is “their session” and not a cooperative partnership with the audience and part of an overall interaction with the other “acts” have already failed. It isn’t their session! The sessions are the same as an act at a show (meeting) that needs to hold attention and relate to the other acts, and they all need to work together. Where an act is placed in the show is an important consideration for the act itself and for the pacing of the show. The same tools used in theatre should become part of your toolbox for your event.

The Fourth Wall

A Broadway stage has three walls. The missing (invisible) wall through which a stage play audience sees the show is famously called the fourth wall. The frame that we look through on a stage is called a proscenium. It is the metaphorical vertical plane of space in a theatre, surrounded by an arch (proscenium) or frame into which the audience observes a theatrical performance. The audience recognizes that they’re supposed to see through a missing or transparent fourth wall into a different reality. The actors for their part of the bargain pretend there is no audience. The reward for the audience’s “suspension of disbelief” in stagecraft is to be entertained.

Interactive TV Lessons for your Meeting

All TV shows have a hook. Almost no meetings have a hook—unless there is an election. What’s the hook at your event: conflict resolution, decision making, election results, or pretty much nothing? Is it just a thinly disguised social event or lecture? It is easy to make it much more. The easiest way is to find and ask the most basic and meaningful questions about the topic and ask it at both the start and conclusion. Finding the movement of opinions is just as crucial as finding none.

• The home purchase and improvement shows are simple and formulaic: A couple wants to buy a home, and they do. My wife loves these shows. My explaining that the show must be shot in reverse order; cheating by selecting the house first–while it is on the market, doesn’t change the viewer’s interest because it is still a conflict with a resolution. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all of our conflicts were resolved in 30-minutes? Interestingly, as the pace of TV shows increases, so does the public’s expectation that there should be speedy conflict resolution in their own lives. What resolution does your audience look forward to at the end of a session? Ask your audience the same basic question at both the beginning and conclusion of a session, or event. 

Lighting at Interactive Meetings

If you keep your audience in the dark they’ll return
the favor.

• Take a lesson from TV shows. The more that a TV show – and your event – depends upon audience interaction, the less separation–of all kinds there should be between the performers and the audience.  
• The unspoken signal of inclusion is in the physical setup. Dr. Phil, The Ellen Show, and most talk show hosts work from a low accessible stage. In many cases, it’s not a stage at all, just a flat surface with the audience placed on a gentle slope for the seats. 
• Daytime game shows use “daytime” bright colors and have brighter lighting. Change the look of your meeting to delineate day from night.
• Dr. Phil doesn’t depend on the audience’s voting, which Quick Tally does, as much as the inclusiveness. The staging and lighting signal that to the audience.  
• Wayne Brady, host of The Price is Right, and arguably the most underestimated talent on TV is a master at improvisation. His show is a show completely based upon audience interaction. The audience is a character on the show. He works with no separation from the audience both because they’re an element of the show and for the purpose of this discussion–the show depends upon their energy. Use the energy of the audience by making them part of portions of your event.

Back to the Point

Aside from free coffee, what’s so exciting about your meeting? Is it entertaining? What’s the hook; do the attendees get to participate, share, contribute, and learn from each other, truly voice their opinions, have fun, are there any surprises? A Silicon Valley tech company uses us for Jeopardy-style games (for retention and fun) using product knowledge–and they give away meaningful prizes. Other companies have no prizes and get the same enthusiasm just by creating competitive teams.

Motivational Speakers recognize that your meeting is set up intentionally, or unintentionally to thwart interaction. There is a good reason why they immediately break the barriers, working with the lights up and from “the floor.” If they do it to connect with your audience, why are you always behind a podium?

When a speaker didn’t show up at Cisco systems Customer Forum at Harvard, I was asked to fill in and run the session. I asked how they expected me to do it without knowing much about their products. The session wasn’t about specific products, it was a forum for their clients to discuss the products. Oh, that’s different! At that point, the moderator (me) simply had to stay off the stage, work the room, and empower the audience to discuss commonly shared views and discover solutions to problems. Anyone familiar with the dynamics of meetings could moderate an event about any product. The really important information is on the audience’s side of the podium.

Your show follows the same process that makes theatre work. A good film brings the viewer into its reality because there is an unspoken agreement with the audience regarding the “suspension of disbelief.” We all know it’s not real, yet when it really works, we forget about it. In Army basic training in South Carolina – by the way, the Carolina’s were never invaded while I was there – we got to see movies on the base (Yes, John Wayne). I recall vividly that during the movie, I’d forgotten where I was–until the lights went on. I wasn’t seeing a movie; I was escaping and immersed in its reality.

How professionals use Silence 

What if you got up in front of an audience and didn’t say anything? You would think the audience would lose attention. No, it’s just the opposite. This is true just as most of what I’m sharing with you is both simple and counterintuitive. Silence is actually a trick used by professionals to rivet an audience. Suppose you had something really important to say and wanted to force attention. The simplest and best solution is to make them wait. Make them wonder why you are silent. Do you have stage fright? Forget your notes? Everything will stop in anticipation and curiosity about what’s happening or not happening. The longer the pause, the more attentive they will be.

By not saying anything, you will command attention. Then when you do speak, the first line should be really well thought out. If Donald Trump was speaking at a meeting of Democrats, he might begin with – “Why did you invite me here?” Then there might be a second “pregnant pause.” It should be just long enough for the audience to have an internal dialogue and answer the question themselves. Finally, with the audience at the edge of their seats, state a clear topic point.

Pausing appropriately is what’s meant in theatrics when they say: “Make ’em wait for it.” Sinatra sings a slightly offbeat, making you wait a split second for him. Professional speakers pause regularly from their prepared speech, take a moment to look up at the audience to connect and create the appearance of thoughtfulness.

This works so well comics (Andy Kaufman) has opened by saying/doing nothing for so long that the audience began to laugh to release nervous energy. I remember seeing Dick Shawn’s show, “The Second Greatest Entertainer in the World.” Shawn opened with nothing happen on stage, except for a toy airplane running overhead for several minutes and a pile of paper and leaves on the floor. The audience just sat there, waiting for the start of the show. Of course, the show had already started, and they were riveted.

Tragically, during a performance of the show in San Diego, he would visibly lie on the stage floor absolutely still. At this show, he suddenly fell forward during one of his spiels about the Holocaust. The audience, of course, laughed, thinking it was just a part of his odd silent shtick. Tragically, no one came to his aid.

The Amazing Power of Converting Verbal language into Visual Language

We all know the value of a picture being worth a thousand words and how the movies can “move” us. The power of converting verbal language to visual language (projection) is often overlooked at events. Projecting the response slides is not just reporting– it’s a key to the strength of the process.

When the results are projected on a large screen in real-time, the visualization creates instant ownership and automatic buy-in. At the end of the day, the best part is that they weren’t told something, they told it to themselves. The power of this cannot be overstated. If there is a better, faster, or simpler way to open the door to ownership, growth, and change, I am unaware of it.

Monty Python’s Lesson for Meetings

“And Now For Something Completely Different”

Create an ongoing joke. Ask an interactive inside joke about some company-related topics (golf, food, etc.). Perhaps ask why the attendees are at the event; include something silly such as free coffee as a choice. Then during the event (especially when things get dull or tense), use it as an unexpected running joke. Go back to it unexpectedly with: Let’s see how the people who are here for the free coffee responded to this question”. As hokey as it sounds, it really works. It works because it is lighthearted and unexpected in the midst of serious business. It is something completely different.

My favorite was a client that built in the line for the speaker: Sure, that’ll happen when it snows here in Las Vegas! That prompted turning on snowmaking machines mounted in the rafters, and it snowed in Las Vegas. You don’t need to make it snow. However, you do need to understand the value of doing the unexpected.

In Conclusion

You may not ever consciously use any of the specific methodologies that I’ve shared. However, you’ll have a deeper understanding of the power of the interactive experience as theatre. I encourage you to open your thoughts to possibilities beyond your previously envisioned purely quantitative use of ARS and explore the system’s transformative power. It’s like a great movie or play. We are moved without our being aware that it’s happening.

Check List

Thanks for reading this, here’s a short checklist to help you remember the main points discussed here:

• Remember to be entertaining. It’s a show!
• Give me a break! Remember that the mind cannot absorb what the seat cannot endure.
• Keep refreshing and changing the show elements: venues, types, and tempos of music, lighting, seating, pacing, different styles of seating– everything. Small changes keep people interested.
• Have an opening, a second act, and a conclusion. Don’t just lump several similar looking and sounding presentations together. 
• If you keep the audience in the dark, they’ll return the favor. 
• Have a bright daytime look or a darker nighttime look. This includes colors and lighting. Daytime TV uses much brighter “daytime” lighting and bright colors. So should you.
• Deal with your serious business and also make it interesting and at times, fun/interesting to be there.  
• At an open interactive session, with real input from the audience, structure it with the most important issues first to be sure they’re dealt with.
• Launch a discovery process. As long as people are learning about themselves, they’ll be interested. 
• Questions ideally should be a catalyst for thought and action.
• Keep the attendees involved. Use your audience response system to determine the audiences’ level of interest and importance to the audience. 
• Consider allowing them to submit interesting questions for the overall group. Collect them as index cards and sort them out.
• Have an unexpected quick interactive game with meaningful prizes. 
• Determine if there is consensus before going to a breakout that isn’t needed. 
• Look for and welcome differences of opinion. 
• Find an issue and hook the attendees on creating or learning a solution.

Finally, remember this:  

It’s a show

Empower and listen 

Follow Monty Python’s advice: “And now for something completely different.”

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. 

Alan

“All TV show voting is fixed!” Or at least that’s what the airport shuttle bus driver was saying. I took my seat, listened to her loud conversation on the phone and then told her that I did most of the TV Contest and Game Show voting – about a thousand shows. She was surprised when I explained how the voting really works.

TV Audience Voting—from Applause Meters to Funniest Home Videos and American Idol

The original method of empowering an in-house TV audience to vote was an applause meter used to measure sound (applause). If you are old enough, you remember the host of shows holding his hand over the head of each contestant and then a shot of the needle spiking on the meter to determine the winner.

The next step (almost three decades ago) was when Quick Tally started wired in-house electronic keypad voting for America’s Funniest Home Videos. We used our audience response system and purpose-made voting devices. The $100,000.00 prize shows involved in-studio voting at multiple “away” locations. The more advanced methodology involves having home viewers cast their votes along with that of the studio audience. Typically the voting is not aggregated adding the studio audience one-on-one with the millions of home voters; each of these elements (including possible celebrity judges) are treated as a separate weighted vote, perhaps with each group given equaled value, perhaps not.

An exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum honoring America’s Funniest Home Videos contains our original wired device. They were honored for helping develop the reality-show with voting competition. It used our purpose-made wired voting devices (keypads). Our largest event (and the world’s largest at the time) was 5,000 people. It took a crew of 45 people a full day to wire the arena then—and just one today.

Large and reliable wireless events were made possible with the advent of spread spectrum radio technology. It really began during World War II, Hedy Lamarr and a scientist invented spread spectrum technology. It was created by a need to work around interference with radio signals to torpedoes.

It was war time (WW II) and out of necessity they were looking for a way to make radio-guided torpedoes harder to detect and jam. Hedy Lammar, the 1940s movie star (often called the most beautiful woman in the world) is in very large part responsible for the ability to use wireless ARS equipment and modern communications including your cell phone). It began with Nikola Tesla and related to work that he did around the start of the 20th Century. (Tesla is probably best known for work that formed the basis of modern alternating current.)

Hedy Lamarr and scientist and composer George Antheil co-invented their “Secret Communications System” an early form of frequency hopping. If knowing it was Hedy Lamarr was not enough to make this fascinating, the most wonderful part of the story is that they used a player piano roll to change among 88 radio frequencies. One frequency could be found and blocked; however skipping between multiple frequencies is quite a difference story. Ms. Lamarr invention was shelved by the Navy and eventually used. Despite her scientific contribution, she also raised millions of dollars in War Bonds, and her treatment by the US government was shameful.

The Rise of Phone and Text Voting

Almost thirty years ago telephone land line call in voting was tried by Funniest Home Videos. They were on right track; however technology wasn’t up to the task. The millions of calls coming in all at once wasn’t really a viable concept. (Quick Tally provided then and now the in-studio and multi-site voting for AFV without using the phone lines.)

After 9-11 people were justifiably afraid to travel and meet in large public gatherings. Online meeting participation solutions became popular out of necessity. Voting was now possible on any web enabled device–and on a huge scale. Not taking into account voting by computer, the number of Smartphones world-wide is over two billion, this year. The estimated number of smartphones in the US is estimated to reach over 270 million in 2020. To put that into perspective, world population is 7.7 billion.

Television soon made that ease of participation into a production value (entertainment and interest by participation) element and a way to hook the voter. If the show was not broadcast at the same time across the country, the results would come in hours after the show ended, so it happily created the need to have a “results show”. Texting empowered huge audiences to participate using their own devices. That changed the game regarding one-person-one-vote in studio voting surety and fairness.

When the voters were outside of the studio, all bets were off regarding fairness. The producers were happy to expand the audience involvement and have an emotional investment in their selection. They also realized that by splitting the texting fee, or being sponsored by the carriers — on millions of calls, was very profitable. The cost was automatically debited from the user’s provider.

American Idol — the benefits and problems with text and internet voting.

The success of American Idol has been described as “unparalleled in broadcasting history”. In 2014 the population of the United States was 318.9 million. American Idol had 178 million texts in a single season, that’s more texts than half of the US population.

Here’s how it’s done: There is a two hour window where the audience can vote for their favorite performers in multiple ways: (1) Toll-free Number Voting; (2) Text Voting; (3) Online Voting (Facebook, Google, etc.) and (4) the American Idol App Voting.

Viewers were allowed to vote as many times as they can on the internet within the two-hour voting window. Voting via text messaging was made available when AT&T Wireless joined as a sponsor of the show. The number of text messages reached 178 million by season eight. Online voting was offered for the first time in season ten.

Good news/bad news!

The good news with the ability to move voting out of the studio is that anyone can vote. The bad news is that anyone can vote—and they do– multiple times. The desire to vote as many times (in general, not specifically related to TV) as possible lead to the rise of Power Voting, which is where viewers use some sort of program that allows them to cast more votes than they could on their own. The show “has the right to discard” that voting. (That is not to say that they do, or do not.) The overall process is fair only in that everyone has an equal opportunity to subvert the vote.

Texting and Web based applications have several important benefits:

• The viewer is hooked. By allowing the viewer to think that their vote matters and perceive a result in the form of an artist surviving, than the viewer will believe that their interactivity is influential.
• This involvement and heightened interest created the need for a second highly rated and profitable “results” show.
• In the beginning of the process producers figured out that there were large amounts of money to be made from splitting the fees with the texting service providers.
• The voting helps determine which contestant is most popular and marketable. This is extremely valuable information for future shows and potential investments in record sales, etc.
• The ability to track and possibly respond to viewers is a great chance to sell them on seeing the results show, other shows, or soap suds.

Here the very strictly enforced safeguards

There are two main checks: producers wisely remove themselves from the process by hiring outside companies for the voting, (which is how I make a living) and the entire process is strictly supervised by the networks. In my 30-plus years in the audience response business, I have been asked twice, if I could fix “pre determine” (an artful way of saying fix) the vote at corporate/union events; never by a TV production company.

Audience voting is subjective. It depends upon what the vote is about. Some are simply popularity contests instead of talent contests. Audiences vote differently if the contestants are unknowns than if they are celebrities. If the contestants are known, they vote emotionally as fans, not as judges. Fans have no problem assigning an unpopular personality a zero, or a one. Professional judges normally rate performance and don’t score below a four.

Producers, if they were to choose to, could influence the outcome of the contest, but not via the vote itself. I’m certainly not saying that they do, I’m just pointing out ways in which they could help influence the outcome. They are responsible for the original selection of contestants (and later on for challengers). For example, do the producers of Jeopardy pick more, or less qualified contestants to continue, or break a winning streak? (That would mean selecting contestants on a daily basis and subvert the scheduled process, under the watchful eye of Network Standards and Practices.) Other general factors influencing voting on entertainment shows could be: placement in the order of the show and production elements that are used to “sweeten” the presentation. An example of sweeting might be musical accompaniment and other theatrical elements used as a part of the presentation.

The biggest (generally unknown by the public) deterrent to cheating are the Network Standards and Practices (S&P) Departments which are staffed with very professional personnel– sometimes they are attorneys. They insure fairness both in the presentation and accuracy of the voting. For example, when the voting is limited to the in-house studio audience, “friends and family” of the contestants, employees of the production company, the contestants and network, etc., are not allowed to vote. They also make sure the contestants appear in the voting segment in the same order in which they performed. They watch our Quick Tally computer screens as the voting is collected and insure the voting is valid. I have never been aware of a show favoring any one contestant in the voting process.

The Future

A historic moment for some perspective: A US television station put on a production of a play by Shakespeare; not a big TV event compared to the Super Bowl, or the popularity of Uncle Miltie. However it was special when put into perspective. Understanding that prior to TV, plays were performed for audiences of hundreds, or as many as a few thousand people. The Globe Theatre (still my favorite way to see Shakespeare) holds about 1,500 people. On the day of the TV broadcast, which I watched, more people saw the play, in one country, than had seen it world-wide from the day it was written—from 360 years ago until then. That was the power of modern communications in the 1950s.

Content was traditionally limited by the limitations of the methods of distribution. Now, the traditional barriers to the flow of information being only, print, radio and TV, no longer exist. Things started to change as Quick Tally was used in Florida by Blockbuster Video to have the audience select which video game that was to be played by contestants—and keep score. Then we were used on television, for the first time, to have an audience (which was also the worlds-largest interactive event) determine the winner of a skating contest. It was now possible to move away from only being able to quickly score a few judges votes to an entire arena in real time. The innovation continued with, Eat the Runt, an interactive stage play that used our voting system to empower the audience to select the actors to play each part. There were no pronouns, so depending upon the selection of gender, the meaning changed.

We’ll have to wait and see what future technology makes possible for TV and audience voting. How many millions of people world-wide could become the audience for one broadcast, or message on different voting platforms? Will the world get smaller and more interconnected for the better? What other consequences will the next giant step for audience participation and linking the world-wide together bring? Will the future of our interactive audience participation change from the traditional formats of today and include, or morph to include Augmented Reality? Is the gaming industries delivery of product and hold on the current generation, a harbinger of the future of the TV contests? How will we participate? How will fairness and rules be handled?

You tell me. I welcome (encourage) your comments.

The surprising story of how and where clapping, applause signs and acoustic amplification begin, a few thousand years ago.

We take for granted that we show appreciation for a performance by clapping. If we like it, we clap. The more we like it the more and louder we clap. It is so engrained in us that we think it to be an organic reaction. It isn’t. It started somewhere.

Applause was started by the ancient Greeks. Then it was adopted by the Romans. It is still used to measure appreciation for a performance. In the early days of TV (The Love Connection and others) moved a step forward by replacing a judge deciding which contestant got the most applause and used VU meters to determine the loudest applause.

Then about thirty years ago, Quick Tally Interactive Systems started computer based TV audience voting. Today’s TV shows including the modern version of The Love Connection have all replaced measuring noise with actual voting devices.

Television shows also use another invention from about two-thousand years ago: APPLAUSE SIGNS. They signal the appropriate moments for applause now, as they did when started by Emperor Agustustus – first emperor of the Roman world (27 BCE – 14 CE). He actually pointed an official to signal when to applaud. We do the same thing today – a few thousand later.

The Greeks wore stage masks both to identify the character that they were playing and they also served as megaphones. Their wooden stages also acted as sound amplifiers.

The Romans took amplification another clever step forward. They used bronze and terracotta casks placed alongside the stage to create further amplification.

If you find yourself as an audience member in a TV studio, you might be the only person there who knows why and how clapping and applause signs started.

Give yourself a round of applause!

When I review our meetings clients proposed questionnaire (their list of questions to be asked at the event), I often ask if a particular question is intended to be “loaded”. Sometimes I get a blank look and sometimes an impish smile of acknowledgement. Here is an explanation of what a loaded question is, and a better way to subtly help guide the audience to a conclusion.

A loaded question is one that already contains something that makes the question itself fallacious. The best example is an attorney asking “Have you stopped beating your wife?” The obvious problem is the assumption that you do beat your wife. There is no way to answer it without admitting the assumption that you do beat your wife. The only way to get out of the trap is to not play the game by making a counter statement “I have never beaten my wife.”

The epiphany for most of the attendees at community Town Halls where there is a racial divide is that everyone wants the same things. As strange as it seems, that is a surprise. They all basically want safer streets, better schools, etc. That sounds like it would be a given, except it really isn’t.

At meetings and in research, this type of question is often much more subtle. Sometimes it is actually unintentionally based on the authors own unwitting bias. For example “How much do you like our new advertising campaign?” presupposes liking it. The real question is “Do you like our new campaign? The follow-up question is “If you like the campaign, how much do you like it?” Or, perhaps “Why do you like it?”

A more honest approach is to present a series of questions that walk the audience through a thought process. Those questions might have them explore ideas that they may not have previously considered. It would allow them to reach a more informed and thoughtful conclusion.

Everyone—the community, the groups and the individuals within it are forced discover and own their opinion. The visceral connection made by press the ARS voting button and the result being projected creates ownership of their responses. This, plus the conversion of verbal language to visual language ends any doubt about the truth. The visualization creates unthreatening change and automatic buy-in.

As an added bonus, the anonymity of using an audience response system is its anonymity. It allows the individual to see how they fit into the overall group’s opinion without having their individual opinion known by the group.

There is something simple and moving that I learned about Audience Response Systems (ARS) at Town Halls. Quick Tally has done some nationally televised events and some community level events. They have been a wonderful learning experience about the power of audience voting at meetings.

The underpinning of the process is that the importance of the technology is in providing an equal and anonymous voice to every member of the community. Without anonymity many people will not reveal their true feelings due to peer pressure. It is also noteworthy at community meetings that different ethnic and racial groups may be very vocal, or culturally quiet. The technology is possibly the only way to level the playing field.

The epiphany for most of the attendees at community Town Halls where there is a racial divide is that everyone wants the same things. As strange as it seems, that is a surprise. They all basically want safer streets, better schools, etc. That sounds like it would be a given, except it really isn’t.

Of course, they may disagree on how to get there, or have differences to air. The key is that it is a discovery process– by both the individual and the community. Many individuals may believe that they have really examined the issue and they actually haven’t. They are on autopilot. Perhaps an individual believed they were part of a clear majority/minority, only to discover they were not. This is part of the process of using audience voting, exposing the incredibly important difference between perception and reality.

People are separated by misconceptions. Interestingly they are often misconceptions about themselves. They discover them by being confronted with the questions that they may never have asked themselves, or ever answered in public. Exploding those misconceptions and moving to consensus is what an interactive event is really about. The anonymity of an audience response system is the key. The most basic technique is used; showing how the overall population of the room responded and then showing how the subgroups responded.

Everyone—the community, the groups and the individuals within it are forced discover and own their opinion. The visceral connection made by press the ARS voting button and the result being projected creates ownership of their responses. This, plus the conversion of verbal language to visual language ends any doubt about the truth. The visualization creates unthreatening change and automatic buy-in.

And, at the end of the day, the best part is that they told it to themselves.

A previous Quick Tally Interactive Systems blog discussed exposing event data when using wireless, or web based audience polling with devices supplied by a vendor. There are more important and less well considered vulnerabilities that are created when using the event attendee’s personal internet connected devices.

Securing event communications has been heightened by the recent flood of news about intervention in the American election process. The topic relating more specifically to events (of interest to event planners) was highlighted in a recent article by the Event Manager Blog, the post discussed the Coachella music festival website data breach earlier this year which led to hundreds of thousands of people’s personal information ending up in the wrong hands.

Information on the Internet is stored on the hard drives of servers all over the world. Apart from the World Wide Web, the Internet also carries traffic for email, peer-to-peer file sharing, virtual private networks, encrypted financial transactions, online games, Internet telephony, instant messaging and lots and lots of other things.

While the organization having the interactive meeting or event may have the best internal security on their own network, they are still vulnerable when their information is going out over the Internet by a third party at their event. Their security is only as strong as the weakest link. That weak link might easily be the internet and/or the vendor that processes the audience voting data.

When internet based systems use the attendees own internet connected devices, the information travels out, gets aggregated and sent back to the venue both for projection—and viewing the results on the attendees Smartphones. That creates two problems. The first less important one is exposing the data from the event. The second and much worse problem is capturing the email contact information for all of the participants.

That could create a list of all key employees at that meeting or division, or working on that project. It could be used for many destructive purposes; among them is the creation of false communications between accounts. Imagine how valuable a list, just a list, of all of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project would have been to a hostile government?

From personal experience while working after 911 on several nationwide meetings for a government agency, I know that many major US companies truly believed they were prepared for a cyber-attack. They were surprised to discover that they were not. They hadn’t seriously considered all of the possibilities. This scenario is unlikely; however it is worth considering in high security situations.

5 Simple Ways to Keep Your Event Data Safe by rsvpBOOK

In a recent article by the Event Manager Blog, the post discussed the Coachella music festival website data breach earlier this year which led to hundreds of thousands of people’s personal information ending up in the wrong hands. Such an event data breach is certainly an event professional’s worst nightmare. Although you can’t always prevent very determined cyber hackers from stealing personal and financial information, you can make every effort to make your event data as secure as possible.

From retailers and banks to tech companies and Hollywood movie studios, data has been exposed as crackable, hackable and exploitable. Your event data is just as vulnerable. With today’s events reaching thousands or even millions of people, event data breaches become more possible.

How can event data hackers access event attendees’ personal information? Opportunities to collect event data are everywhere at events including pre-event emails, registration systems (online and onsite), interactive technologies especially those using unsecured Wi-Fi, mobile apps, insufficient event tech provider security.

… And the list goes on. Event data brings incredible insights and measurement capabilities to event professionals. However, with the industry overflowing in information, we now also have the responsibility of protecting it

In her interesting article quoted in part below, a speaker discovered something amazing about her meeting audience at a Pharma Forum:

“A whopping 89 percent admitted to checking e-mail and 62 percent had been texting. Ouch!”

Although not her premise, mine is that it never makes sense to direct your attendees to their web connected devices. In the audience response business, there is conflict between using purpose made voting devices (not connected to the internet) and Smart Phones that are. The reason for an audience not using their own devices for audience polling, or any other reason, is that they will naturally wander off and check emails, as an amazing 89% of this audience did.

Polling with purpose made devices (not internet connected) makes a lot more sense.

Meetingsnet Article
Dec 1, 2016 by Sue Hatch

Engagement: It’s Not Rocket Science (But it Is Neuroscience)

Jere Thomas is a brave soul. Midway through her presentation at the Pharma Forum, she asked her audience of medical meeting professionals and suppliers to reveal, via audience response technology, what other tasks they’d been tending to during her talk.

A whopping 89 percent admitted to checking e-mail and 62 percent had been texting. Ouch!

But as much as a speaker might not want to hear that her audience was dividing its attention, for Thomas, president of leadership development company Sage Resources, the exercise underlined her basic premise: The need for engagement. And for Thomas, the path to engagement leads directly through the brain.

In her presentation on “Brain Science and Engagement,” at the 12th annual Pharma Forum held at New York City’s Marriott Marquis March 20–23, she discussed the science behind attendee learning and engagement. Specifically, she looked at how interactions are processed through the “primitive brain,” or amygdala, which plays a pivotal role in the “fight or flight” survival response, before they move to the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for forming memories and retaining learning.