Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/03/big_shows/
Big shows and little legs
The bell tolleth for some
Posted in Entertainment, 3rd August 2006 09:25 GMT
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Comment If you have legs, you will be delighted to hear that another big IT show is being cut down to size: it looks like the big computer games show, E3, is changing.
The good news: no more LA Convention Centre. The bad news: it will be spread around a couple of dozen different hotels. And the inevitable: once again, the organisers didn't see it coming.
Convention organisers never do see it coming. They don't understand about legs.
Once again, I won't go to the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Actually, I hate big conventions. But even so, they have to be covered. And there's actually a great formula for covering technology conventions. It goes like this:
- Register
- Don't go
I hope you were making notes. It's important. Registering will mean you get all the mail. Anybody who is in the business areas you checked when you signed up will send you everything you need to know about what they are going to show at the exhibit booth, which is good; but they won't be able to book you for a one-hour "one to one with the VP of strategic marketing" when you want to find out new stuff. And "don't go" means your legs will survive.
If you have to go, hide. My own trick, as a journalist, is to avoid the main central areas, and walk around the walls looking for the mom-and-pop booths with tiny companies and good ideas.
Unfortunately, show organisers aren't in the business of making life easy for delegates. They are out to extract the highest price per square metre they can get from the exhibitors, and if this means the exhibitors can't make a profit on the show, so be it. Organisers work on the "green shield stamps" assumption: if one company starts doing it, everyone else will join in. No company wants to be the one left out.
And of course, it works the other way, too. When, finally, someone drops out, suddenly everybody does. No one in the UK currently gives green shield stamps, they all do Nectar cards instead. But there was a time when you wouldn't buy fuel for your car unless the pumps screamed "Quad stamps!" in big green letters.
The equivalent disaster for show organisers happens just as inevitably. One day, Microsoft and Nintendo get together and say: "Know what? this is costing us a fortune! - and what do we get back, really? If you guys weren't going, we wouldn't bother..." And next thing you know, E3 is "evolving" and becoming smaller.
Of course, if you're Microsoft, you always run the risk of getting shafted by Nintendo, who tell you they're pulling out, and then announce they're going back. But it's the beginning of the end for the show organisers, because there's no going back.
What show organisers need to learn, is that it takes time to walk a long distance. And that involves legs. I once measured the entire length of carpet at the Las Vegas Convention Centre in the days of the giant Comdex show, and then the carpet in the other convention halls and hotel convention annexes. When it got to over 20 miles, I gave up. But I'd given up trying to walk around the show years before that.
The organisers, of course, spend their marketing effort trying to frighten Microsoft into taking a bigger acreage of carpet. They warn the exhibition manager that Electronic Arts is doubling its space (for the purpose of the exercise, it doesn't appear to be important if EA really is doing that, or not) and from the exhibition organiser's point of view, this is a great tactic, because it usually works, and they charge by the square foot.
But the rest of us have to plod on the bruised foot. And the bigger the Microsoft booth, the longer it takes to walk past.
That's how you end up spending all day walking, and actually only get to see two or three exhibits. Comdex started to die when just one company decided to drop the game: Compaq pulled out way ahead of anybody else. But the little domino knocked over the next, which ended the next; and when the bubble finally burst, nobody worth writing about was there. Even the mom-and-pop lemonade stalls were no longer innovators, they were liquidation agents flogging obsolete stock at half price and vanishing before anyone could realise that this wasn't a reputable retail outlet which would accept returns.
So, which over-size convention gets your vote for "bubble ready for pricking"? I think the writing is on the wall for several, and I'd point at my favourite show, 3GSM, as the ripest fruit ready to drop.
The 3GSM show is the mobile phone industry thrash. It was held at Cannes for years, and some of the glamour of being "the same exhibition area as the film festival" rubbed off. The trouble is that the phone business is many, many times bigger than the movie business, so although the show was good, you simply couldn't find a hotel within an hour of the convention centre.
Now it's moved to Barcelona. A great city (if you ignore pickpocketing as a problem) and quite a lot easier to find accommodation - but, unfortunately, it has far more convention space than 3GSM needs.
What's the result? Easy! Everyone is "offered the opportunity" to have a bigger booth and everyone discovers that their main rival is "taking advantage of this special offer", and everybody spends a little more, and gets a lot more space.
And those of us with legs, give up.
By the time you've collected two branded shoulder bags filled with CDs, special purpose-built rattlesnake-skin souvenir binders for the CDs, glossy brochures, clockwork phone chargers, special sample software on USB dongle chips, invitations to parties where you get cuddly zebras, and "prize draw" bottles of commemorative Scotch, it's not just the legs, either. There's a limit to how much you can carry with you all day and still feel enthusiastic about tucking it all under one arm so you can use the other to shake hands with. And where do you put it all when you need a meal?
And yes, that's another trivial matter for the organisers. They can eat in the organisers' office - after all, the catering concessions bring in a lot of money. But ordinary people with legs need food; and preferably, nice food at reasonable prices. When did you last see nice food at an exhibition, or food at an exhibition that wasn't extortionately priced?
And so, one by one, the big shows implode. Can E3 re-vamp itself in time? Many think not, but organisers the Entertainment Software Association, say they'll spread out into a lot of smaller "more intimate" shows and not just in that City of Angel's (http://www.buffy-vs-angel.com/) (where Buffy isn't allowed to go), but also in other parts of the world - Germany, Asia, and so on.
It may work for the ESA, in that it may make more revenue from exhibit space than it would if the show just collapsed. But I won't be going, all the same. Send your press announcement, in advance, and I'll write about it, for sure; but actually being there isn't the fun the organisers seem to think. ®