It's possible that the attitudes are changing and that Cheryl is thinking of an older, more conservative and "hyper-fannish" approach. As you probably know, we used "slide show" ads prior to all of Interaction's major events. These were a series of advertising (and other) slides that played on the projection screen during the event load-ins. We sold those ads, and the money we raised, while not huge, was enough to fund some extra "nice to have" functions, mostly "backstage" stuff that most attendees would not have noticed but which made all of our events run more smoothly. (Example: snack food backstage pre-Masquerade, which allowed the staff and partcipants to be able to get a bit to eat rather than having to run off and find food during the setup period, when time is at a premium.) Also, the slides gave the audience something to look at during the otherwise dead "load in," like at a movie theatre.
The slides didn't go quite as smoothly as I wanted, for technical reasons. On one event, the slides got stuck rather than running continuously. (I think this was due to porting from Windows PowerPoint to the Mac version for that one event -- the Mac version apparently didn't recognize the "run continuously" command in the slide deck.) On another, we accidentally hit the "show all" instead of "show Closing Ceremony" button. (All of the slides were in a single file, with a separate slide show programmed for each of the five major events. That was because we sold slides per individual event as well as all-event packages, and also because there were "editorial" slides tailored to each event. Still, we didn't hear too many complaints aside from one internal complaint that I'd rather not discuss here and with which we dealt as well as we could.
On the other hand, comparisons with Worldcon may not be valid, on account of the perception by some "traditionalists" that "Worldcon is a big American convention that sometimes is held outside of America, so nothing that happens there has any bearing on Real British Conventions."
Re: British cons and ads ...
The slides didn't go quite as smoothly as I wanted, for technical reasons. On one event, the slides got stuck rather than running continuously. (I think this was due to porting from Windows PowerPoint to the Mac version for that one event -- the Mac version apparently didn't recognize the "run continuously" command in the slide deck.) On another, we accidentally hit the "show all" instead of "show Closing Ceremony" button. (All of the slides were in a single file, with a separate slide show programmed for each of the five major events. That was because we sold slides per individual event as well as all-event packages, and also because there were "editorial" slides tailored to each event. Still, we didn't hear too many complaints aside from one internal complaint that I'd rather not discuss here and with which we dealt as well as we could.
On the other hand, comparisons with Worldcon may not be valid, on account of the perception by some "traditionalists" that "Worldcon is a big American convention that sometimes is held outside of America, so nothing that happens there has any bearing on Real British Conventions."