Pictured above is Volodomyr Zelenskyy speaking at the Munich Security Conference. Per Wikipedia:
Over the past four decades the Munich Security Conference has become the most important independent forum for the exchange of views by international security policy decision-makers. Each year it brings together about 350 senior figures from more than 70 countries around the world to engage in an intensive debate on current and future security challenges. The list of attendees includes heads of states, governments and international organizations, ministers, members of parliament, high-ranking representatives of armed forces, science, civil society, as well as business and media.
This is an important enough geopolitical conference that the President of Ukraine is spending precious hours away from his country, which is on the brink of invasion, to address the assembled potentates about their global commitments.
So why does the Munich Security Conference make him stand in front of a wall patterned all over with their tacky logo, like they do at film festivals to make sure that any celebrity snapshots taken there also advertise the event? Who on earth is the Munich Security Conference so desperate to advertise to? It feels almost comically tacky and demeaning – how you’d expect a sponsored sporting event to be run, not a private gathering of roughly the 350 most powerful individuals in the world, assembled to discuss the gravest imaginable matters of war and peace.
I guess that… individual defense contractors might want to promote the particular conference in which they have slightly more of a foothold vs. some other format? But it seems sort of bizarre that world leaders can’t demand a little more dignity at these things.
Film festivals and celebrity shit do that cause people are going to run photos of the celebs so you may as well make use of the backdrop for self-promotion or rent it out to sponsors. Stuff like this will get run in like, FP, and on various power brokers’ “walls of fame”, where they establish their credentials of proximity to power by displaying photographs of themselves interacting with widely recognized figures.
Entities like the conference hosts themselves might want to claim mindshare in the audience of specialists exposed to these things, though Veuve Clicquot is never going to sponsor them.
