My son does this thing where he pretends not to hear me when I’m trying to get him off his iPad and into the kitchen for dinner table (Wait, your kid, too? Amazing).

“Time for dinner. Turn the iPad off.” (No response)

“Time for dinner. Turn the iPad off.” (No response)

“Time for dinner. Turn the iPad off.” (No response)

(Walks over and puts hands in front of iPad screen)

“Hey, what the heck? Why’d you do that… Oh, it’s time for dinner. I didn’t hear you!”

Every. Single. Night.

Turns out, however, that it’s not just the youth of America who are experts at tuning out vital information. You, too, are to blame! Yes, you, the loyal followers of CMEpalooza! For shame, for shame!

Now before you run to mommy and daddy whining, “But I didn’t do anything!!!” allow me to explain.

First in 2017, then again in 2018, and then again just this past July, Derek tried his best to get across a very important message about CMEpalooza.

The message is simple.

It’s CMEpalooza.

Big “CME”

Little “palooza”

Now mash it together.

CMEpalooza

Sounds simple enough, but trust me, our experience tells us otherwise. All joking aside – and that’s hard for me to do – at least 50% of our friends and fans mess it up. Just this past week in my email, it’s been “CMEPalooza and “CME Palooza” and, my personal favorite “CMEPalozza.”

I know, I know. Who cares, right? As long as you get it close, that means you know who we are and that’s all that should matter. I get it. And I really don’t think people get it wrong on purpose, at least not most of the time. So we should, I suppose, agree to brush it aside like those crumbs that end up around my son’s plate because he refuses to use his fork at the dinner table (Wait, your kid, too? Amazing).

I hear you. But Derek doesn’t. And so every time we get a “CME palooza” or a “Cmepalooza” or a “CME Pepperoni Pizza” or some other combination (you’d be amazed how many different ways there are to butcher CMEpalooza), I get an email with a cringy emoji from Derek. It’s his way of telling me how he dies just a tiny bit inside every time our event is butchered in print (note from Derek: all true.)

You are probably asking yourself right now, “Isn’t this all kind of your fault? I mean, you did come up with the name knowing how weird it is?”

Again, fair point, and I’ll need to defer to Derek on this one. He came up with the name CMEpalooza. It’s his baby (I guess that makes me the cool babysitter? [note from Derek: It does not, no.]). But it’s too late now. It’s CMEpalooza.

Big CME

Little palooza

CMEpalooza

But hey, if you want to torture Derek, be my guest. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to remind someone that, “You don’t need to scream into the iPad when you are playing a game with your friends. Inside voice!”

Loyalty.

It’s a powerful yet complicated concept. You are loyal to a family member, a friend, a partner, or even, I suppose, a pet (sorry, I’m not an animal person). In business, you are loyal to your company or your boss or your co-workers. I know, it’s kind of a dying concept.

To me, loyalty means that you can count on someone, that they will be there to support you and carry their weight, and they won’t just say, “Sorry, you are on your own.” Loyalty is one of the most valuable qualities someone can have.

At least according to Hollywood, the mafia is big on loyalty. Once you become part of “the family,” you take an oath of loyalty. If you break that oath, well, better get fitted for a pair of concrete shoes.

As we head into our eighth year of CMEpalooza, I figured it was a good time to look at just how loyal the CME community has been to CMEpalooza. I’m not talking about your individual loyalty. I have no doubt that many of you have read every single blog post and watched every single session since Derek trotted out the concept for CMEpalooza in the spring of 2014, but since we don’t track our readers and there is no formal registration for our events, we can’t tell how many of you get a gold star. You have our permission to put one on if you want to feel special.

What we can track is the loyalty of our sponsors. Since we began accepting corporate sponsors for CMEpalooza in the fall of 2014, there have been 66 different organizations who have sponsored at least one ‘palooza. That alone is a pretty astounding number. But what is perhaps even more astounding is the loyalty that most of these organizations have shown to us. Of the 66 sponsoring organizations, only 11 have been “concrete boot” sponsors, latching themselves onto CMEpalooza like a pesky barnacle for just one event before sinking to the bottom of the sea. Some of those companies either folded, were gobbled up by a larger organizations, or simply lost our email address. It happens.

While we will, of course, be holding our special sponsor event in a few weeks for those 24 companies (and counting) who have already signed up as sponsors for our 2021 Spring meeting. (SPECIAL REMINDER: Yes, you can still sign up for a sponsorship. All of the information is in our Sponsor Prospectus), today, we want to celebrate those organizations who have shown loyalty to us over the years. We want to honor your faith, trust, and belief in CMEpalooza. Today, we celebrate your loyalty.

THE PRINCES OF LOYALTY (sponsoring >50% of CMEpaloozas)

• Genentech
• Global Education Group
• PlatformQ Health
• ASiM
• Educational Measures/Array
• Healio CME
• RedMedEd
• infograph-ed

THE QUEENS OF LOYALTY (sponsoring >75% of CMEpaloozas)

• Vindico Medical Education
• Clinical Care Options
• Academy for Continued Healthcare Learning (ACHL)
• RMEI
• PVI

THE KING OF LOYALTY (sponsoring every single CMEpalooza)

• CMEology

 

One of my first jobs as a high school kid was at a local movie theater. It was actually kind of fun. A lot of my friends also worked there, along with a handful of cute girls from other schools who didn’t know how awkward I was in advance of meeting me. I had about 5 minutes to make a good impression. Guess how well I did?

Alas, fleeting youth.

Anyway, at the movie theater, there were good “assignments” and bad “assignments” for the nightly team.

The bad: Working the concession stand. This was where everyone started out, because it kind of sucked. You were on your feet the whole shift, had to deal with cranky customers who couldn’t figure out what they wanted until they got to the front of the line despite waiting for 15 minutes behind dozens of other people, and you had to constantly refill the popcorn maker without burning yourself. On busy nights, the time passed quickly, but on slow nights, you just had to stand there and stare into space. There was nowhere to hide.

The good: Being an usher. What’s fun about carrying about a broom and dustpan and cleaning up the messes the customers make? Well, if you walked into an empty theater, you could usually sit down and watch 10-15 minutes of whatever movie was playing before anyone missed you. Plus, it was dark, so if you did a half-assed job, no one cared. I would often time my entrance into a theater so that I could pick up the movie where I left off 2 hours ago. For some movies that played in multiple theater simultaneously, I could watch the whole thing (more or less) in one shift.

Apropos of nothing, a quick movie theater story because it remains to this day one of my favorites. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen to me, but was relayed by a friend of mine.

(Customer walks up to the concession stand)

Customer: Yeah, I’d like a hot dog and some lemon chips?

Friend: Lemon chips? I’m not sure what you mean.

Customer: Yeah, lemon chips. (Points)

Friend: Um, you mean nachos?

Yes, people, the world is full of geniuses.

So why am I telling you about my movie theater days today? Well, because the days of movie premieres (Fridays) were always the busiest. This was an era where you would actually sell out the entire theater, sometimes hours in advance, for a film that had a lot of hype. I can’t imagine with all of the avenues of entertainment available at our fingertips today that that ever happens (yes, yes, we’re making the whole pre/post-COVID assumption).

It’s the same deal with CMEpalooza. On the day that we put out our meeting agendas for public consumption, we get a massive rush of traffic to our website that dwarfs what’s been going on with the Robinhood thing-a-ma-bob (but hey, if you made a million dollars last week, buy a CMEpalooza sponsorship, won’t you?).

We’re ready for the big rush, because today indeed is the day when we unveil the CMEpalooza Spring agenda. As always, we’ve put in quite a bit of thought into our sessions, and we think we have a really interesting mix for you. There are definitely a few quirky, out-of-the-box formats we’ll be trying out that may or may not work (Of course they’ll work! We are professionals here!). We always try hard to bring in some new stars that haven’t been on the CMEpalooza marquee before, so you’ll hopefully see some names in here you don’t recognize but can’t wait to hear from.

So take a look at what we’ve got in store, double check your calendar to make sure you have Wednesday, March 24 blocked off (yes, Derek, this is a reminder specifically for you), and order up a box of Junior Mints to be delivered that morning. Or lemon chips. That works too.