Film Director, Michael Bay, abandons talk at CES 2014 for lack of preparation

Michael Bay was on stage less than 2 minutes before he walked off the stage unable to carry on because his teleprompter didn’t work.

The Transformer director was on stage during a Samsung presentation at CES 2014.

A couple of questions in and he walked off the stage.

A couple of tries at ‘winging in’ and a little self motivation didn’t work.

Bay said on his web site,

” Wow! I just embarrassed myself at CES – I was about to speak for Samsung for this awesome Curved 105-inch UHD TV. I rarely lend my name to any products, but this one is just stellar. I got so excited to talk, that I skipped over the Exec VP’s intro line and then the teleprompter got lost. Then the prompter went up and down – then I walked off. I guess live shows aren’t my thing.”

Good honest response on his part.

But where was plan B on the organizer’s part?

I was speaking at an event in Thailand when the battery on my laptop went down. Later I learned that it had somehow come dislodged and was never fully charged or charging.

When the screen went blank, I looked at the little girl assigned to my session set up and asked her to get the back up.

I kept on talking. In less than 5 minutes she had my pc disconnected from the projector, hers plugged in and a back up on a thumb drive to my talk up on the screen. The back up wasn’t the most current version of my talk (I had tweaked it some before going on stage) but it was plenty usable.

In the feedback from the attendees there was, “he kept going despite the technology breakdown” or some words to that affect.

As for Bay’s part, in the end people are associating his name and his walk-off with Samsung. Bay hasn’t lost any love for being human and Samsung still gets talked about.

Maybe it was planned.

But I don’t think so.

What’s your plan B?

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