For Chicago-based marketing specialists Yvette and Kofi Moyo, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have presented a special challenge.
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The pair had planned to use a section of the now-destroyed New York Marriott World Trade Center hotel next April to host the 10th anniversary of their Marketing Opportunities in Business & Entertainment conference.
The showcase is a well-recognized event designed to link small African-American players in marketing, entertainment and technology with Corporate America.
Over the past decade more than $180 million of work is thought to have been won at the MOBE event by minority firms from major companies such as Revlon and NBC, which were among those to strike deals at previous gatherings.
Already, the couple and their seven-strong marketing company, located on the edge of the Magnificent Mile, have tackled some of the more obvious hurdles.
A new venue has been found at the Millennium Hotel New York Broadway. Marketing for the event began in earnest Nov. 1, when the pair led a team of 75 minority business executives to a briefing at the White House on potential business opportunities.
But in the scramble to compete with rival seminars, firms desperate for space and others dislocated by the terrorist atrocities, the date for the conference had to be brought forward a week to April 6 to 10.
Costs have also risen fast as a result of the uncertainties created by the disasters, Yvette Moyo says.
However, most disconcerting is the fact that many of the corporate sponsors that have traditionally shared the cost of putting on the event have cut staff and frozen marketing budgets, says Kofi, who was also a co-founder of the popular Real Men Cook charity events held every year on Father’s Day.
Many of the same corporations that typically send executives to the conference have restricted flying to essential company business.
Sprint, Hewlett-Packard and Ford Motor Co. have put all spending on such future marketing projects on hold, a fact that hampers many local small firms that rely on their business.
Some corporations, like Walt Disney Co., look set to back out altogether, while possible deals with the likes of Microsoft and AOL Time Warner are up in the air, according to Yvette.
Its difficult to know just how many people will attend in April given the uncertainties. Preliminary expectations are that between 200 and 400 will attend, and that they will pay on average $1,000 to attend.
“We’ve gone ahead based largely on faith,” Yvette said. “By the New Year I think our partners will be ready to go forward.”
“I know Sprint, Motorola, Target and others will be there” she adds. “I cannot believe they would be able to walk away from the African-American market and the people that make it happen for them there.”
Such confidence has been developed after more than a decade helping create the demand for the conference and is heartening given that it will cost at least $150,000 to run the event, whether corporate sponsors and delegates turn up in their numbers or not.
Confidence unchanged: The confidence of small firms remained the same in October as it was in September immediately after the terrorist attacks, according to the National Federation of Independent Business.
Its optimism index, the association’s measure of small firms’ confidence in the economy, fell to 94.2 in the two weeks after Sept.11 from 99.2 immediately prior to the disasters. Overall, the monthly index was set at 96.3 for September, a figure that has remained unchanged in October.
Of the 10 components that go to make up the index, four posted a gain, five fell and one was unchanged in October. None of the components changed substantially, but hiring plans dropped to their lowest level since 1993. Capital spending and plans to build up inventory were slightly ahead of post-attack levels.