Because my marketing career was on the business-technology side of the house, I never (thank God) had to go to CES, which would have given me a nervous breakdown. Too big. Too chaotic. Too noisy. About 100,000 attendees, and nearly 3 million square feet of exhibit space. I get the heebie-jeebies after a few minutes in Frankfurt Airport. If I'd had to roam around CES, or even stand stock-still in a booth there, I'd have been carried out on a stretcher - perhaps in a straight jacket - a few hours in.
The biggest show I ever attended was Comdex, a now defunct tech show founded by right-wing kabillionaire Sheldon Adelson. Comdex was a combo of business and consumer tech, and it was at Comdex that I learned to quickly dequalify booth-crawling lookie-loos who didn't look like our type by stating our product price point before they could get their paws in our candy dish.
Although I'm not a CES sort of person, I've kept an eye on this show for a while.
Although I'm not a CES sort of person, I've kept an eye on this show for a while.
I write a regular blog post for a tech client that is in the decidedly non-consumer space. (They develop components using in heavy-duty industrial, medical, scientific, transportation, defense and other heavy-duty industry apps.) Even though my client isn't on the consumer side, each January, we have a bit of fun and I write about what's happening at CES. Last year, I couldn't resist mentioning the robot that delivered toilet paper, but mostly I focused on the car-related technology that was being shown on the floor. (The guy who I write on behalf of is a car buff.)
This year, CES - which got underway on Monday - is fully virtual. (I haven't poked around yet, but will be looking for blog fodder at some point.)
While attending a trade show virtually would be easier on the nerves, attendees will be missing out on what makes trade shows so great, namely, the ability to trip from booth to booth picking up swag - mostly shoddy, but sometimes useful, junk: stress balls, pens, keychains, tiny flashlights, pads, chocolates, tins of mints, tee shirts, mouse pads (do they still exist?), etc. - that won't fit in your suitcase and will end up in a heap in your hotel room. Trade shows are also good for meeting up with clients and running into old acquaintances. (I once ran into the ex-boyfriend of one of my close college friends. S. was wandering around a West Coast trade show floor, wearing his infant son in a front-loading baby carrier. I probably hadn't seen him in a 15 years, but we had fun catching up on old times, like our 1969 bus trip to Washington, DC to protest the Vietnam War.)
Anyway, thinking about CES got me reminiscing about the trade shows I attended over the years. And there were dozens of them. While, after all these years, it's all starting to blur - it's been nearly twenty-years since I last played the trade-show circuit - there are some standout memories.
SIAC was a small-ish show for securities industry tech. Their annual show was held in - where else? - New York City. At one memorable SIAC, British Telecom had models in French maid outfits - including fishnets and spike heels - wandering around giving out packets of Twining's English Breakfast Tea. I was probably the only person on the show floor who actually wanted the tea and wasn't interested in ogling the French maid.
I can't remember what product we were there showing off, but I don't think it was that favorite of the all-male quants on Wall Street, AutoBJ, a forecasting software application that I managed. AutoBJ! Ho-ho!
This year, CES - which got underway on Monday - is fully virtual. (I haven't poked around yet, but will be looking for blog fodder at some point.)
While attending a trade show virtually would be easier on the nerves, attendees will be missing out on what makes trade shows so great, namely, the ability to trip from booth to booth picking up swag - mostly shoddy, but sometimes useful, junk: stress balls, pens, keychains, tiny flashlights, pads, chocolates, tins of mints, tee shirts, mouse pads (do they still exist?), etc. - that won't fit in your suitcase and will end up in a heap in your hotel room. Trade shows are also good for meeting up with clients and running into old acquaintances. (I once ran into the ex-boyfriend of one of my close college friends. S. was wandering around a West Coast trade show floor, wearing his infant son in a front-loading baby carrier. I probably hadn't seen him in a 15 years, but we had fun catching up on old times, like our 1969 bus trip to Washington, DC to protest the Vietnam War.)
Anyway, thinking about CES got me reminiscing about the trade shows I attended over the years. And there were dozens of them. While, after all these years, it's all starting to blur - it's been nearly twenty-years since I last played the trade-show circuit - there are some standout memories.
SIAC was a small-ish show for securities industry tech. Their annual show was held in - where else? - New York City. At one memorable SIAC, British Telecom had models in French maid outfits - including fishnets and spike heels - wandering around giving out packets of Twining's English Breakfast Tea. I was probably the only person on the show floor who actually wanted the tea and wasn't interested in ogling the French maid.
I can't remember what product we were there showing off, but I don't think it was that favorite of the all-male quants on Wall Street, AutoBJ, a forecasting software application that I managed. AutoBJ! Ho-ho!
But I do remember standing in our booth in my duddy menswear business suit and floppy bow tie, where I was paired with the only female sales person our company had at the time. A. was a very attractive woman who wouldn't have been caught dead in a penis-envy suit. She had on a suit with a slim pencil skirt, a well-fitting jacket, and a silk shirt cut to her navel. And she entertained us both with her running commentary on every guy who walked by, mostly along the lines of "He'd like to jump my bones."
That's the comment the has stuck in my mind all these decades. I hadn't thought of this woman in years, and I couldn't find much about her on the Interwebs. But I did find her (ex?) husband on LinkedIn. There was a current picture, and I had forgotten how good looking he was. D.'s in his mid-seventies and he's almost in the Paul Newman category. The two of them made quite a couple, and I'm certain that A. was quite correct when she observed that everyone walking by wanted to "jump her bones."
Not that I was without my SIAC "suitors". Taking a SIAC break one year, and heading out to lunch from the NY Hilton, where the show was always held back in the day, someone grabbed my ass while I was waiting at the light with a colleague. I reeled around to see who'd done it, and it was no wolf of Wall Street. No, it was a disheveled old street person in a filthy trench coat, shitfaced in the middle of the day.
Ah, the good old days!
One December, I worked Client/Server World at the McCormick Place Center in Chicago. During an ice storm. So no one showed up.
Well, not quite nobody. I was scheduled to give a presentation on the scintillating topic of automated regression testing, and 50 people had signed up for it. Two ended up coming.
There is nothing that make you feel dumber than standing on a stage behind a podium, looking down at an audience of two.
So I didn't.
I got off the stage and went and sat with my audience, and had a very nice convo about automated regression testing.
At a trade show at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, I lost my voice. (I had an allergic reaction to something in the SF air, and literally could not croak out word-one for a week.) The sales guy who was supposed to work the booth with me failed to show up one afternoon, so there was no one to do the talking. I wrote out my responses on a notepad, and when that got tiring, wrote up the FAQ's and just handed them to people who stopped by to learn about our product. (First Q: Why aren't you talking? First A: I have no idea why, but I've lost my voice.)
Trade shows, especially in the pre- and early-Internet days, were a good way of finding out intelligence about your competitors. We'd always attend competitors' presentations, grab collateral (and swag), and ask questions in the booth to see how far we could get before someone realized we weren't a "live one" but, rather a competitor. You never did have to misrepresent yourself. Standing around a trade show floor can be deadly boring, and you're if things are slow, you're usually happy to have someone - anyone - to interact with.
At one Internet World, in the very early days of the Internet, I sat through a competitor's presentation, and also took part in the trivia contest they were running. Which I won. Everyone who won one of the hourly trivia contests was entered in a drawing for a video camera. Astoundingly, I won that.
Having been involved in many prize drawings at trade show - one of the well-used techniques for gathering business cards was collecting them in a fishbowl, and fishing out the grand prize winner from the bowl - I was well aware that the most likely winner of any drawing would be/should be a prospect, or at least someone who worked in a company you were targeting. Thus, most drawings were done under a cloak of secrecy.
Anyway, I was working for a very well-known company at the time, and it was shocking to me that the marketing folks in the competitor's booth either didn't know we were a competitor, or didn't know how the purpose of these "contests."
I happily went home with the video camera, even though it meant I had to jettison my swag to make place for it in my carryon bag.
At yet another show, we were supposed to have "demo disks" to give away. These were going to contain a cute little demo/preso we'd put together. We were under no illusion about the fact that most people would grab the diskette - a 3 1/2" floppy - and just write over our content. (This was when having a free diskette was considered swag-gy.) Anyway, we didn't get our "demo disks" produced in time, so we offered people rain checks: sign up for a "demo disk" and we'd mail to to you.
Early on, my hysterically funny and brilliantly astute colleague V. decided to set up two lists. One for those who wanted the "demo disk", and the other for those who were just interested in a free blank diskette. As I recall, we never did end up fulfilling the free blank diskette list...
Sometimes I saw famous people. (Tech famous, anyway.) In San Jose, I shared an elevator with Sun Microsystem's Bill Joy. I once stood in front of a hotel in Rosemont, Illinois waiting for cab, while Bill Gates stood next to me, waiting for his car.
I could go on, but my bottom line is that I mostly enjoyed doing trade shows. Boring, exhausting, and sometimes only marginally worth it. But they were pretty much fun.
I'm not going to go so far as to say that I miss trade shows. And I'm certainly not going to go so far as to say I feel like I'm missing out on CES this year. (Most assuredly not.) But it's a part of my past life that I look back on fondly.
That's the comment the has stuck in my mind all these decades. I hadn't thought of this woman in years, and I couldn't find much about her on the Interwebs. But I did find her (ex?) husband on LinkedIn. There was a current picture, and I had forgotten how good looking he was. D.'s in his mid-seventies and he's almost in the Paul Newman category. The two of them made quite a couple, and I'm certain that A. was quite correct when she observed that everyone walking by wanted to "jump her bones."
Not that I was without my SIAC "suitors". Taking a SIAC break one year, and heading out to lunch from the NY Hilton, where the show was always held back in the day, someone grabbed my ass while I was waiting at the light with a colleague. I reeled around to see who'd done it, and it was no wolf of Wall Street. No, it was a disheveled old street person in a filthy trench coat, shitfaced in the middle of the day.
Ah, the good old days!
One December, I worked Client/Server World at the McCormick Place Center in Chicago. During an ice storm. So no one showed up.
Well, not quite nobody. I was scheduled to give a presentation on the scintillating topic of automated regression testing, and 50 people had signed up for it. Two ended up coming.
There is nothing that make you feel dumber than standing on a stage behind a podium, looking down at an audience of two.
So I didn't.
I got off the stage and went and sat with my audience, and had a very nice convo about automated regression testing.
At a trade show at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, I lost my voice. (I had an allergic reaction to something in the SF air, and literally could not croak out word-one for a week.) The sales guy who was supposed to work the booth with me failed to show up one afternoon, so there was no one to do the talking. I wrote out my responses on a notepad, and when that got tiring, wrote up the FAQ's and just handed them to people who stopped by to learn about our product. (First Q: Why aren't you talking? First A: I have no idea why, but I've lost my voice.)
Trade shows, especially in the pre- and early-Internet days, were a good way of finding out intelligence about your competitors. We'd always attend competitors' presentations, grab collateral (and swag), and ask questions in the booth to see how far we could get before someone realized we weren't a "live one" but, rather a competitor. You never did have to misrepresent yourself. Standing around a trade show floor can be deadly boring, and you're if things are slow, you're usually happy to have someone - anyone - to interact with.
At one Internet World, in the very early days of the Internet, I sat through a competitor's presentation, and also took part in the trivia contest they were running. Which I won. Everyone who won one of the hourly trivia contests was entered in a drawing for a video camera. Astoundingly, I won that.
Having been involved in many prize drawings at trade show - one of the well-used techniques for gathering business cards was collecting them in a fishbowl, and fishing out the grand prize winner from the bowl - I was well aware that the most likely winner of any drawing would be/should be a prospect, or at least someone who worked in a company you were targeting. Thus, most drawings were done under a cloak of secrecy.
Anyway, I was working for a very well-known company at the time, and it was shocking to me that the marketing folks in the competitor's booth either didn't know we were a competitor, or didn't know how the purpose of these "contests."
I happily went home with the video camera, even though it meant I had to jettison my swag to make place for it in my carryon bag.
At yet another show, we were supposed to have "demo disks" to give away. These were going to contain a cute little demo/preso we'd put together. We were under no illusion about the fact that most people would grab the diskette - a 3 1/2" floppy - and just write over our content. (This was when having a free diskette was considered swag-gy.) Anyway, we didn't get our "demo disks" produced in time, so we offered people rain checks: sign up for a "demo disk" and we'd mail to to you.
Early on, my hysterically funny and brilliantly astute colleague V. decided to set up two lists. One for those who wanted the "demo disk", and the other for those who were just interested in a free blank diskette. As I recall, we never did end up fulfilling the free blank diskette list...
Sometimes I saw famous people. (Tech famous, anyway.) In San Jose, I shared an elevator with Sun Microsystem's Bill Joy. I once stood in front of a hotel in Rosemont, Illinois waiting for cab, while Bill Gates stood next to me, waiting for his car.
I could go on, but my bottom line is that I mostly enjoyed doing trade shows. Boring, exhausting, and sometimes only marginally worth it. But they were pretty much fun.
I'm not going to go so far as to say that I miss trade shows. And I'm certainly not going to go so far as to say I feel like I'm missing out on CES this year. (Most assuredly not.) But it's a part of my past life that I look back on fondly.
I know I've already said it, but, ah, the good old days.
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I'm inserting this picture for one reason only. This woman, attending last year's CES, looks like a younger version of me. Right down to the purple sweater. Hope she had fun!
1 comment:
Note to other readers: Maureen looks way better than purple-shirt woman. Thanks for remembering some good ole days with me.
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