A New Way of Charting Success

Last week's Tradeshow Week carried a report on the E³ Media & Business Summit, the scaled-back event that has replaced the old-fashioned E³/Electronics Entertainment Expo. Between the lines of that report was an important message about where the industry is going.

To quickly refresh the memory of anyone who doesn't remember E³, last year organizers abruptly canceled the old extravagant tradeshow with booths that cost millions of dollars each and a Los Angeles Convention Center showfloor crowded with young gamers. In their place are the summit with a very small showfloor in Santa Monica, Calif.'s Barker Hanger and companies holding meetings in hotel suites up and down the beach.

TSW Assistant Editor Stephanie Corbin spent most of a day talking with attendees and exhibitors, and she found that many were not particularly happy with the changes. Clearly, they missed the excitement that made the old E³ one of the best-known shows in the industry. Most, in practically the same breath, also recognized the new version of E³ was a sign of the times.

If you attribute the disappearance of COMDEX primarily to mismanagement, then the old E³ was the first notable tradeshow extravaganza to collapse under its own weight. Over the next few years, it is likely that exhibitors at tradeshows that have come to seem like they are bigger than life will say the same thing some of the major exhibitors at E³ did: Enough is enough. We will find a more efficient, less expensive way to interact with our customers.

And while that way may not be as much fun, we will all eventually adjust. Doing so, quite frankly, will be just as hard for those of us whose job it is to chart the success of the industry and its players.

We at Tradeshow Week are as guilty as anybody of judging success by the numbers: If it's big, it must be good.

The truth, of course, is that companies that deign to use the services of the industry we cover are happy if and when they connect with people who may eventually spend money with them. At the end of the day, they don't really care how or why that interaction takes place.

I believe that the longer we watch, the more things will change.

It will be hard in the interim for tradeshow organizers to look at smaller showfloors with fewer people moving from booth to booth and not get sweaty palms. It will even be hard for exhibitors not to get nervous when they don't see as much traffic in the aisles. And it will be a challenge for us in the media to find new ways of measuring and illustrating success in the world of face-to-face marketing.