Paris 2024: our prompter strategy to help secure this victory could appeal to your VIP customers.

Friday 28 June 2024

I’m Lucía Arribas, founder of Solutions Prompteur. Participating in Paris’s victory in the bid to host the 2024 Olympic Games in Lima (Peru), along with the French Olympic delegation, was one of the most memorable moments of my career.

From what I’ve read, this victory will bring Paris around €7,200,000,000. If you’re interested in the strategies used in international performances at this level, I’m going to tell you about several of them.

I invite you to think about this: “How could these strategies help me in events for my clients?

The most important thing to protect when a speech is strategic.

In 2017, three cities were candidates to host the 2024 Olympic Games: Los Angeles, Budapest and Paris.

In front of the Olympic Committee, every presentation was meticulously timed. In our delegation, there were 10 speakers (a sportsman, the mayor of Paris, Mr Macron, etc.) and each one put forward a key point to defend Paris.

Everything was meticulously timed because there were images to accompany the presentation, and it could not exceed 20 minutes. Here, the prompter dictated each presentation precisely, so that everyone followed their script synchronised with the images.

Everything was thought out to the last millimetre to convince the Olympic Committee to attribute the 2024 Games to Paris.

The key word was “confidentiality”.

Every speech loaded on the computer was of the utmost strategic importance and we had to protect it from any leaks.

We’ve all seen enough films to know that, if these presentations had leaked, the other candidates would have had a much easier time preparing a speech capable of countering Paris’s arguments.

Precision was key too, of course (everything was meticulously timed) but the confidentiality here had to be extreme.

These texts had to go nowhere.

How can we guarantee maximum confidentiality with the prompter for your technological or political client?

It’s simple: none of our computers connect to the Internet.

No information passes through the Internet. Absolutely everything is used on prompters or systems that never connect to the internet.

(Good luck, hackers!)

At Solutions Prompteur, the importance of protecting confidential data cannot be overlooked, even if we ourselves don’t know how important it can sometimes be.

The rule is clear: “never put a prompter PC on the internet”.

So, can you imagine a computer (programmed to do updates on the internet) starting an update at the very moment you’re prompting?

Beware: the goodwill of an amateur prompter operator could ruin your client's ultra-specific speech.

Let me explain: in a presentation like this, every word is important. So we don’t change or correct anything that isn’t indicated.

For example: sometimes we read a word that looks badly spelt. A novice operator might think: “Shall I correct it?

The answer is NO. You never change a word without asking. It may be that your customer has deliberately written it this way to help with pronunciation, or it may be that this is the most important concept.

The reasons why a word is written in a particular way may be beyond us, so the rule here is also clear: “We never intervene in a text without asking for validation”.

And how much time do you think we had to rehearse these historical presentations?

45 minutes.

I’m not talking about the rehearsals in each country before the presentations, but the official rehearsals. In the different countries, as in Lima, we only had a 45-minute slot (just one!!) to get our bearings in the venue where each official presentation would be held.

Another very important detail that could have compromised us:

During the presentations, the prompter equipment used was not ours, but that of the Olympic Committee.

As prompter operators, we had to know the references of their equipment in the OC room, and master it so that everything would be identical to our rehearsals outside the Olympic site.

We had to take new references in order to set the parameters of the OC’s Obama devices, adjust their height according to the information recorded, redesign the layout of the texts, etc.

It takes a lot of experience and finesse to ensure that no detail ruins this meticulous plan. And that it can be done in 45 minutes.

Finally, a super-important detail for clients who can't afford to make a mistake with the prompter.

This detail is the obsession with finding everything that could go wrong and anticipating it so that their interventions are perfect and professional.

The Obama device you see in the photo is a prompter that looks transparent when seen from the audience. The speaker, on the other hand, can see the text reflected on it from his lectern.

This system only works if you are at a specific point in space.

If you move a few centimetres, you lose the text.

What could spoil a female speaker’s speech?

If we didn’t ask her how high her heels would be on the day of the presentation. For example.

It’s a detail, but that’s what the prompter is all about: controlling absolutely every detail to achieve a level of excellence that ensures your presentations have a 0% chance of failing.

In order to offer the best international prompter services in the most demanding environment, it is necessary to...

1. Maintain confidentiality.

2. Absolute respect for texts.

3. Efficiency when time is short.

4. Uncompromising technical mastery.

5. Obsession with detail.

It’s the only way to maintain a 0% error rate.

Lucía ARRIBAS

PS : I hope this publication has been useful to you. I only publish 25% of this information on the web. If you’re in the events business, I’m sharing privately the tips I’ve observed from the most sought-after production directors in France (and around the world) after working with many of them for over 20 years. This information is free of charge and will help you avoid many coordination errors during an event, thereby increasing your prestige.