What Does The Future Hold For NCOF?
Las Vegas – Near the end of a Wednesday session here at the National Conference on Operations & Fulfillment, Timothy Holody, chief operating office/general manager of Seta Corp. (Palm Beach Jewelry), noticed Ernie Schell, director of the consultancy Marketing Systems Analysis, sitting in the back of the room.
Holody and Schell are veterans of the industry and Holody noted that he and Schell have been at NCOF every year since it began in 1991.
Earlier in the day, I was at a breakfast roundtable discussion that turned to the issue of the future of this conference. A pair of educated estimates placed this year’s conference attendance around 260, a far cry of what NCOF has been in the past. And the conference’s future is very much in doubt.
If NCOF is to continue beyond this year, some believe it should become a kind of exclusive members-only club, attaching cachet to the conference. Others hope it will continue as it is because the operations and fulfillment segment of the industry is a dedicated group that yearns for assistance in bettering its respective companies.
No one knows what the future holds for NCOF, but here’s hoping it will be there in 2012 and beyond.
April 11th, 2011 at 1:17 pm
As one of the early speaker participants in the NCOF (along with Ernie Schell, Stanley Fenvessey, and others), we welcomed and supported Chuck Tannen, the founder and promoter of the NCOF, in his vision for the growing importance of the “back-end” operations and fulfillment executives of direct marketing moving to the board rooms as equal players with marketing, finance and merchandising. Chuck Tannen was (and is) a genius in the world of conference management. He knew how to involve his audience and how to treat his speakers, and how to run a conference. His legendary successes were the DMB Conference, the BtoB Conference, and the NCOF, along with their respective magazines. These conferences would routinely draw up to 3,000 attendees and ran for a number of years, delivering the new technologies and practices of the increasingly complex fulfillment discipline worldwide. For a period of six years or so, these were the finest conferences in all of direct marketing. They were, without doubt, the highest expression of DM conferences in our history.
Then the DMA purchased all of these conferences. They all were too successful and were detracting from the already diminishing DMA Conferences. No longer was Chuck Tannen, his incredible staff of conference professionals, or his roster of experienced and talented speakers involved; the bothersome competition was eliminated by the DMA purchase and its monopoly was assured at a high cost; and the DMA immediately began its process of “dumbing down” and “cutting cost” and, as an inevitable result, the conferences lost their creativity, their cutting edge information, and their audience. Now, after years of shrinking mediocrity, the conferences are in their death throes; nobody cares anymore because they are, essentially, irrelevant in a world that has moved on and expended — just as the visionary Tannen had predicted.
If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that you get what you pay for. The highest ground in direct marketing conference history has always been held by the private entrepreneurs — the Chuck Tannens –who know what the audience wants and gives it to them. The worst examples of conferences (and, unfortunately, the bulk of the history) has belonged to the “non-profit” associations who marginalize creativity and intelligence in favor of the “party line” and political maintenance of the status quo. The sad part, however, is that one remembers the looks on the faces of warehouse managers, call-center supervisors, third-part shipping managersw, and so many others who found a world of professional recognition and accomplishment through these formerly wonderful conferences. For a brief moment in time, we had it all — and then . . . . gone.