Want to improve your marketing skills? Attend the upcoming Amaz!ing Meeting, sponsored by the James Randi Educational Foundation.

The Amaz!ng Meeting isn’t a marketing convention. It’s better. Marketing is rife with myths that get regurgitated and re-ingested at typical marketing conventions. (I expose quite a few in my book Prove It Before You Promote It .) By contrast, the Amaz!ng Meeting is about rational thinking. You’ll be blown away at how often and how easily you — yes, you — can be duped. You’ll pick up new skills for putting assumptions, including rampantly accepted ones, to the test, so that you’ll never be duped again. Sounds like a good idea for someone whose job is to wisely spend sizable marketing budgets.

The Amaz!ng Meeting happens this week in Las Vegas. Main sessions are Friday and Saturday. Speakers include entertainers, biologists, physicists, astronomers, magicians, physicians, you name it. The keynote will be given by the inimitable Richard Dawkins. Attendance this year will top 1,100. Yours Truly will give a brief 10-minute presentation Sunday morning at 9:50 PT. But don’t let that put you off attending. You can, after all, skip my part.

Leave behind those marketing conventions where cronies recycle the same old tripe and try something that challenges your thinking instead. The Amaz!ng Meeting is the most mind-clarifying and expanding event you can attend.

Though the online registration deadline has passed, you can register in person. Short of that, you will be able to watch sessions online via a live feed. When the link becomes available, I’ll post it here.

—Steve Cuno