A webinar is essentially conference call combined with a PowerPoint presentation. Of the dozens I receive a month, few meet my rigid criteria: educational content, straightforward delivery. It’s usually easy to tell from the email if it’s likely going to be some kind of lame marketing presentation.
Speaking of which, here’s an invitation I received on Friday for a webinar this morning:
We invite you to reserve time to listen in on how [we] are transforming mission critical computing based on industry standard technologies and modular/converged infrastructure.
Hear directly from [six-figured vice presidents representing each company] on how businesses can leverage next generation […] technology into business performance that can improve your bottom line. [Our products] meet the needs of mission critical workloads for the next decade into the most resilient, easily scalable, and completely integrated virtualization platform that delivers mission critical business outcomes every time. Learn more about the new processor platform that delivers a big leap in mission critical technologies, standardization and longevity.
When I read this the first time, I immediately had sympathy for the poor marketing communications person who was forced to send this. They probably started off with something simple like:
Our new [product] will run Microsoft Word 7% faster than the previous version.
With each review, the sentence was tossed in a blender with a random New York Times Business Book Bestseller and set to Frappé until it had enough “pop” (or, perhaps, one “mission critical” for each six-figured vice president involved). I imagine the ideal recipients of these marketing messages also speak in tongues. If the email address was from a human, I would send in the Mystery Matador.