Industry veteran and tech expert Brandt Krueger is helping educate meeting and event professionals during MPI’s European Meetings & Events Conference (EMEC) taking place online June 15. We chatted with him to share a little more insight on his session.

What do you hope participants take away from your EMEC session, “Presenting Remotely: The New Dress for Success”?

Krueger: I’m hoping that folks will learn that they can influence their stakeholders through leading by example. How can we get our executives to care about their video setups if we don’t care about ours? Having a great video setup is like having a fine Italian suit—you look great, you feel great and when you “walk” into a Zoom room, it’s like being a supermodel.

How have you adjusted your own video call presence over the past 15 months?

Krueger: I’ve been slowly improving my video setup for the better part of a decade, so I’m not a good test case. I just keep making incremental improvements. I just replaced the lights I bought less than a year ago because it was a better set that was on sale for ridiculously low. Now I’ll sell my old ones online, making the discount even deeper.

What’s one of the most egregious examples of a poor appearance on video call (whether due to attire, lighting, setting, etc.) that you’ve personally seen during the pandemic?

Krueger: It amazed me how long news organizations allowed bad setups for their call-in remotes. Deep into the pandemic, we were still seeing bad lighting and audio. I have a screengrab I use in my classes of a guy with a giant sunbeam across his head, holding the mic down by his belly with cords coming out of his shirt, and then to top it off an overflowing laundry hamper in the background. I don’t care how much of an expert he might have been on whatever they were talking about, there was no way I was going to take him seriously—and that’s kind of the point of the session: it’s the new dress for success!

Learn more about this session and the rest of the outstanding EMEC lineup!