The Meade Blog

Cringe Alert! Michael Bay has mini meltdown on stage in front of thousands at Las Vegas CES

You’ll watch this video through your fingers.

David Meade is one of Europe’s most sought after corporate event speakers and trainers, delivering high energy keynotes and workshops on leadership, innovation, and motivation.  Visit www.davidmeade.co.uk for more information.

Yesterday, internationally acclaimed director/producer Michael Bay of Transformers fame suffered – and I use the word suffered quite deliberately – from everyone’s worst nightmare.  Imagine standing in front of thousands of peers, critics, and journalists – and drawing a complete blank.  To be fair to Michael, his Autocue (a device used in live and televised events to feed a speaker his script on a screen) had clearly failed in some way.  Still though, you would think he’d make more of an attempt to fill, wing it, or even just make stuff up.

And for the record, in the last year my largest audience size was 8000 people, and the smallest was just 6 company directors, and I feel the exact same momentary terror in the moments before I walk out and start.  It’s part of what makes speaking and performing as rewarding as it is terrifying.

UPDATE UPDATE

Michael Bay has commented on this experience in a statement, saying;

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.

But I’m doing a special curved screen experience with Samsung and Transformers 4 footage that will be traveling around the world.

Michael

Chin up Michael – could happen to the best of us!