On the Rise
MPI Proudly Presents the 2010 RISE Award – Individual Category Winners
By Elaine Pofeldt
David Rich and Krzysztof Celuch, please step up. The two will be honored as winners of MPI’s Recognizing Industry Success and Excellence (RISE) - Individual awards at the World Education Congress in Vancouver this July.
Rich accepts the RISE Award for Meeting Industry Leadership, honoring his vision, creative insight and positive impact on the global meeting and event industry community. The award recognizes sustained commitment and contributions to the industry and inspires others to learn from example.
Celuch earns the RISE Award for Young Professional Achievement, which recognizes an individual 30 years of age or younger with five or less years professional experience who has made outstanding contributions to the meeting industry.
Meeting Industry Leadership As a teenage magician, David Michael Rich wondered why a magic trick that enthralled an audience in one performer’s hands fell flat when someone else performed it.
“I can clearly remember asking myself, ‘So what’s the difference? Why is it that some experiences absolutely transport people and others utterly fail to?’” he recalled.
Now the senior vice president of worldwide marketing strategy for George P. Johnson (GPJ), Rich has devoted his career to answering similar questions about meetings and events—and finding the answers. He has made a name for himself by using careful research to help corporate clients understand and maximize the ROI of events they plan. In doing so, the winner of this year’s RISE Award for Meeting Industry Leadership has created one of the largest global integrated event and experience marketing strategy practices in the world.
What’s surprising about Rich is that he hasn’t kept this sought-after knowledge under wraps. He’s brought his strategic perspective to an entire industry. As a longtime MPI member who has held several leadership positions, he has been a major force behind the GPJ/MPI Foundation EventView study, which has helped to demonstrate the business case for meetings and events. He has also become a leading voice for using meetings and events as strategic tools in corporate marketing plans.
“Many times those in the MPI community have complained that their peers don’t really understand what they do,” he said. “When one has a really strategic orientation and role, those issues fall away.”
Rich developed his strategic focus over many years in events marketing. He started his career working as a performer on children’s television show Rex Trailer’s Boomtown that aired in the Boston area. After the show went off the air, he and the show’s star, Rex Trailer, launched an agency called Universal Speakers and Entertainment in 1981, booking celebrity speakers, as well as comedians including Rich Little and Steve Allen.
“I really started to look at the ways you could engineer an event, a live experience to transport and transform people and the ways of making that happen,” he said. “I started to develop methodologies that one could reliably deploy to make that happen.”
After selling the agency to Lordly & Dame, a corporate lecture and entertainment agency, he joined it as a vice president. There, he started Strategic Events International, a division that created strategically aligned events.
“It was a reinvention of the corporate division to help generate high ROI for meetings and events,” he said. “I knew that to get the message across, to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace, we would have to change our name, position and brand.”
Rich also began his long association with the MPI New England Chapter, eventually becoming a two-term president.
“I learned the ways of leadership from MPI and folded it back into Lordly & Dame,” he said.
MPI also helped him build a far-reaching professional network, he says—it was an MPI contact who eventually recruited Rich away to the technology firm EMC in 1998.
“I was probably the first manager of events strategy and marketing for a major U.S. corporation,” he said. “My job was to make sure that all of its events were developed from a strategic orientation, motivated audiences to action and helped with business objectives.”
George P. Johnson, which had become the worldwide event lead for IBM, soon got wind of what he was doing and by 1999 another MPI contact there enticed him to manage strategic development of corporate events. It was at GPJ that he helped birth the EventView study eight years ago.
“I’ve pushed hardest on doing whatever we can to move the industry in a strategic direction,” Rich said.
As this consummate strategist grasped intuitively as a young magician, understanding exactly what engages an audience is essential to creating better events—and a stronger industry.
Young Professional Achievement If Poland doesn’t leap to mind when you are hunting for a site for your next meeting or convention, Krzysztof Celuch won’t be surprised.
“We are quite a new destination on the map,” said the 28-year-old president of the MPI Poland Club.
But Celuch, winner of the RISE Award for Young Professional Achievement, hopes to change that. He has made it his professional mission to build the former Eastern Bloc country’s “brand” in incentive travel, showing up at conferences and MPI meetings in other countries to share what his nation has to offer.
“If you come, we will help you [envision] the lakes, the mountains, the sea, the cuisine,” Celuch said. “We are really proud of our hospitality.”
If anyone seems capable of raising the country’s profile as an incentive travel destination, it is this highly educated and ambitious young professional, who recently completed his doctoral studies at Warsaw University (with a scholarship from the MPI Foundation).
Besides working as a manager of the Convention Bureau of Poland, part of the Polish Tourist Organization, he independently produces the annual Warsaw Meetings Industry Report on the state of the industry and its future. And in 2009, he took the helm of the MPI Poland Club. This year, he hopes to see the group become a full-on MPI chapter.
With many young people in Poland traveling more freely since it became a member of the European Union—and finding interest in travel-related careers—Celuch has also been a major force in introducing the up-and-coming generation to his field. On top of his day job, he works as a lecturer on business tourism at the University of Economics and Computer Science in Warsaw. There, he runs the business tourism specialty in both the master’s and bachelor’s degree programs and organizes the IMEX-MPI Future Leaders Forum at the Student Scientific Conference, Warsaw. Having earned the Certificate of Incentive and Travel Executive designation, he is also an MPI Global Training-accredited trainer. He says the meeting industry is offering some attractive options for young people seeking to establish careers in Poland’s current economy, particularly in hospitality.
“From my perspective, if someone is looking for a job, he or she will find it,” he said.
Celuch says what hooked him on the meeting and event industry is the chance to find ways to connect with people in other cultures.
“It is challenging to find a way to speak to people around the world,” he said. “Cultural differences are so huge.”
In March, Celuch spoke at EIBTM Barcelona about what Poland has to offer. There’s plenty going on now that he wants to promote, from new facilities to the country’s hosting of the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship.
“I am working really hard to represent Poland,” he said. “I’m using connections in MPI chapters around the world. Hopefully, we will spread the word around other countries.”
One+ ELAIN POFELDT is a regular contributor to One+
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