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Apple out of NAB… What say you, Ron?
When the news of Avid abandoning NAB came out, you Ron were one of the few “calming” voices on the topic, arguing that it really made business sense for them to do it.
Now that Apple has done the same thing… I’m curious, what say you?
Mark
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31 Replies
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Hello Mark,
I have been expecting this for months now and Tim Wilson and I have been talking about this since probably last October sometime.
When Avid announced that they were pulling out, I suspected that Apple would be next — but not if they could get the booth for nothing. I tend to believe that was the whole point of the distance between Apple asking NAB to pull down their name from the Expo exhibitors list and this announcement today (months later) that Apple is officially out. In my opinion I think Apple marketing put the squeeze on NAB management and NAB wouldn’t give them the deal they wanted.
So exit Apple.
I think Apple did the math and realized that they could not really prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they sold even near enough *new* business from NAB to justify the costs.
And NAB costs are HUGE. It would take a LOT of boxes to pay that freight and when calculating not just cash flow dollars but paying this kind of expense with the net profit from these sales, the number of boxes skyrockets off the board.
Yes, Apple and others understand the value of hand-holding with their customers, but they also see what it costs when shows like NAB just keep raising the costs and the hotels in Vegas just raise their rates through the roof when NAB comes to town.
In the end, I said it long ago when it was Avid — that Avid was just the first of many that would figure this out — and now we see Number Two.
Expect many more.
Bessie says that there are enough udders on display in Las Vegas without her showing up and giving a view of hers. So, as we said when Avid made their announcement, we won’t be there.
A week of burning out in Vegas and coming home and collapsing afterwards seems a waste to us at this point in time.
Like both Avid and Apple, we think that we’ll likely in the days ahead take the COW to some local events and film festivals, road shows and other kinds of things. But spending the kinds of dollars needed to do NAB just seems a huge expense that isn’t necessary anymore.
We expect to see NAB 2009 in fewer buildings than customary and in the years ahead, we expect to see it in a single building.
That’s the view from here. What do you see in Los Angeles, Mark?
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronlindeboom
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine
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Ron
What was the purpose of having a COW booth at NAB? I had wondered about that in the past but how about a word from the Moo Master?
Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
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Ron,
Interesting POV.
I’ve always felt that the “personal touch”, be it in tech support or individual marketing always carries more weight than a big glitzy display. Having said that, I once read that advertising is as much about selling to new customers as it is about reassuring your existing customers that they’ve made the right choice.
So, even though I made my choice years ago, it’s reassuring to go to NAB and see the big flashy booth with hundreds of people clamoring about. Of course, if no one is clamoring over the competition, I guess it’s a moot point.
Here in Los Angeles I may have more access to Apple resources than someone in say, Bismarck, North Dakota. Therefore, the fact that Apple is passing on NAB this year is really a “non-event” for me.
I think the bottom line here is that people don’t like change. Even though change is inevitable, it scares them. What we’re witnessing here is a major change in the way that trade shows do business. I agree with you that we probably haven’t seen the end of the NAB defections.
I’m still going to NAB this year, but as always, for me it’s as much about the people as the products. As you’ve correctly pointed out, web resources like the Cow and other sites have gone a long way towards making the availability of information easier. But, if you hadn’t had a booth at NAB I would never have met you. There are many people who live in other countries that I would never have met if not for NAB. So, perhaps the focus of the conference should move towards more “people oriented” than product oriented.
These are interesting times.
Mark
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[Steve Wargo] “What was the purpose of having a COW booth at NAB?”
Well I’m not Ron, but I can tell you the main purpose is just like everyone else. Exposure and selling the product. I worked in the booth for a day last year and met dozens of people who had no idea what the Creative COW was. Shocking I know, but there are a lot of people out there in the creative world who simply don’t know about this resource. The booth was a nice way to get the Cow’s name out there, introduce the service to folks who did not know about it, and was a central gathering space where Cow leaders could make appearances and actually meet some of you folks. I REALLY enjoyed it and was hoping Ron and Kathlyn could have another booth this year.
I fully understand their decision to skip the show and put their resources into the website, magazine and other avenues as their return on investment probably is not worth the money spent on that show.
But for Apple and Avid, for whom millions of dollars are spent by the production community, to pull out of the one show where the production community gets the opportunity to meet and see the products is very disappointing.
My blog has a lot more of my thoughts and observations. Feel free to read and post your comments there too.
https://blogs.creativecow.net/node/421
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR
The new Color Training DVD now available from the Creative Cow! -
It’s an interesting move.
With Avid, I think beyond the official reasoning, there is an obvious financial problem there. Ask the hundred+ ex-Avid employees laid off in the last year…
For Apple…I dunno. Apple does not market like everyone else. I think Apple really benefits from large gatherings of the faithful reaffirming each other and making some sort of personal connection with Apple staff and insiders.
You can’t have a tent revival without a tent.
If I were Apple, I might have taken advantage of Avid’s absence. Now Adobe is the only ‘A’ left.
I’m still scratching my head quite honestly.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
[Tim Kolb] “Now Adobe is the only ‘A’ left.”
Well actually Autodesk is still on the show floor at the moment.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR
The new Color Training DVD now available from the Creative Cow! -
[Tim Kolb] “With Avid, I think beyond the official reasoning, there is an obvious financial problem there. Ask the hundred+ ex-Avid employees laid off in the last year…”
I can’t think of a single company in this industry of whom the same thing couldn’t be said. I get letters almost daily from associates and friends from most all the companies in this industry that write me and ask if I know anywhere that they might find an opportunity.
Apple is no exception in this category.
I think that sheer numbers have come to haunt NAB and those numbers are the profits that it takes to have and man a booth at NAB. I think that with the democratization of video came the “commoditication” of video. When systems and tools are commodity items, the profits and costs are low. It takes an astronomical number of units to bear the cost of NAB.
Another of the “A” companies that I know who is not an editing software company but has a rather substantial booth at NAB every year, once told me that they spend nearly $400,000 to be at NAB. Considering that they sell their products for about $499 a whack, they’d have to sell one hell of a lot of product to make that nut.
As the experiential level of user drops every year, (trust me, it has, as both Kathlyn and I have had many a conversation with people at NAB who ask “What’s digital video?”), NAB is becoming increasingly irrelevant when considered en masse.
As for tent revivals, who needs tents in the days of “24 hour a day television evangelists”? So gone are the tents (with rare exception).
The net is also 24 hour a day and I can’t count the number of people over the years who have come in from one brand of editing system and made a decision to switch to another based on what they learned online. I even see heavy decisions being made here as to which networking software people will use and how to configure and support their network. It happens all the time.
The argument that this stuff requires hands-on facetime is simply becoming increasingly irrelevant in the Day of the Internet — which itself is like a fulltime 24 hour a day tent revival.
Me, I think that NAB made a huge mistake by not giving into what I suspect were Apple’s pointed requests for (shall we say?) heavily discounted floor space at the NAB Expo.
Why?
No company I can think of has the ability to pull easily 30,000 or more people to the show directly on nothing more than that the company is there.
By letting Apple escape because they probably wanted the same kind of deal that they get at Macworld Expo (which I won’t tell you what they pay but let’s just say that it costs you and I more to get there), NAB set in motion a chain of events that is sure to reverberate with serious repercussions in the days ahead.
As I said elsewhere on this subject, I expect to see NAB down to a single building in the next few years.
When Avid did what they did, people surmised incorrectly that there could be little more than financial troubles at the heart of Avid’s decision. By letting Apple take the next turn, NAB itself has promulgated a set of events wherein many companies are going to take out their own pencils and scratch out the real costs and returns from the NAB event, and figure out that they too can stay home.
The bloodletting has just begun and when it’s done, NAB is going to bear a lot more resemblance to what it started as: an event wherein those who need serious broadcast uplink and switching gear show up to strike deals for their station.
I can remember when the Sands was the oddball part of NAB and was the “multimedia” showcase area and was not really considered a real part of NAB by the broadcast contingent. I can remember back then that often Apple and many others didn’t attend. Now people make it out that Apple and others must attend or they are not real.
Philosophers and others have argued “what is real” for eons and I doubt that NAB is going to resolve the age-old question.
But one thing’s for sure: NAB has seen its better days and its glory days are well behind it.
As I have for years asked some of the company heads and others that I know: “How many people on the floor at NAB do you really surprise with anything you are showing and how many do you really teach anything new?” They almost always answer that most people already know exactly what they want and are there to learn a few finer points. But the buying decision has already largely been made.
Me, I believe that as long as the accountants will write checks to send company representatives to NAB to “research” new gear and other purchases, there will always be company reps willing to go and suffer attending Las Vegas floor shows and casinos while picking up a few brochures of products they already know about and then report that: “Yep, I found what we should be getting and here is my research…” (Insert sound of dropping pamphlets here.)
It’s a tough job but someone has to do it.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronlindeboom
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine
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Now in the COW Magazine: Commercials. A look at the history, strategy, techniques and production workflows of successful commercials. All brought to you by some of the COW’s brightest members. Accept no substitutes!Would you like to be in Creative COW Magazine with your story or contribution? Contact me.
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Not picking on you, TK, but you’ve laid out the only issues I think are worth exploring.
An interesting discussion for another thread (please, on another thread), I’m going to disagree that layoffs at Avid are bad news — they need to do more, for the same reason that some people (not your or Walter) need to lose weight, for the same benefits: longevity, mobility, health…and good looks.
Leaving out money then, Apple is out of touch with its customers, getting out of post, and lying about its reasons for not having a booth. That’s what everyone said about Avid.
Let’s add that Apple is squirrelly. Avid made their announcement in the cold light of day, to every news outlet on the planet. Apple didn’t make an announcement. They snuck a sentence into the industry’s least significant, smallest circ mag.
BTW, Avid’s VP and GM showed up in the Cow to take heat. Let me know when Apple shows up here. I’ll bake a bundt cake. We’ll have ice cream.
Even though Apple’s not going to show up here, the only reason to scratch one’s head and try to figure out what Apple REALLY means is that you think they’re lying…and dead and out of touch and leaving post.
Or you can believe that both have nothing to gain by having a booth. Read Apple’s lips, just as Apple read Avid’s:
En. Ay. Bee. Is. A. Waste. Of. Time. And. Money.
Tim Wilson, Creative Cow
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Apple knows it can be one (albeit large) player in an expensive crowd at NAB or be the entire raison d’etre’ of Macworld. That’s a big difference. Apple has between two and four huge shows every year that are all just about Apple and anything that runs on or leverages off Apple. Not to mention CES.
Apple is not a broadcast Tv equipment company. Its a computer hardware and software company, a decidedly consumer-oriented computer company, that happens to sell some kick-ass software and hardware that’s also popular with broadcast Tv production people. But that is not their main line of business. That’s where Apple is different from Avid, in that only Tv people buy Avids, you don’t buy an Avid to run games or spreadsheets or all the other consumner things. People don’t line up at the Avid Store to buy Avipods or aviphones.
Also I think the tanked economy plays no small role in the decision.
I also think that as far as video production goes, Apple’s biggest competitors by sheer size are Avid and Adobe. If Avid drops away, maybe Apple feels it can relax a bit with regards to Adobe. At any rate, Apple is making huge money planetwide with their consumer products and besides FCP, what would they be selling at NAB?
I think Avid made a decision because they had to. Apple made it because it chose to. That’s a big difference.
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[Tim Wilson] ”
Even though Apple’s not going to show up here, the only reason to scratch one’s head and try to figure out what Apple REALLY means is that you think they’re lying…and dead and out of touch and leaving post.”Well…scratching my head means I’m wondering what the strategy is…those words are of Wilson, not of Kolb…
Apple is definitely a consumer products company on the balance sheet, I would agree. But the pro production market is one of value, and I think for Apple, one of pride if they choose to maintain the angle that a Mac is the computer for the creative… It’s a market that does take more contact than the consumer market to maintain.
I would agree that Avid’s best chance for forging ahead is downsizing, but Avid’s consumer products produce much smaller margins per sale, granted that there are exponentially more of them. Pro video users are a bit fickle as we see here on the Cow all the time. I hope that Avid has a kickin’ butt alternative plan to maintain and build its pro user community if it intends to stay in.
Apple…well OK. NAB is useless. They are consistently the busiest booth it seems. Maybe they think they’ve saturated the market? I don’t really believe that there are economic factors that are dictating this…I’m sure Apple could pay the bill.
However, I completely buy Ron’s point about paying the freight to be at NAB out of profits on smaller and smaller ticket items, but one pays for NAB booths through the course of the year so apparently Apple is abandoning a fair chunk of change that I suspect won’t be refunded this late in the game. Apparently whatever that loss is seems better than the cost of attending and hauling in, setting up, and staffing a booth. That’s certainly plausible. It just doesn’t seem like a choice this late in the cycle. A choice would be saying something in July/August before you reserve space and exist on the hall map I would think.
There are lots of interesting points that can be made and I’m not really arguing against any of them. It just doesn’t parse for me for some reason. I can’t help but think there is a significant unknown somewhere…
Or…maybe I’m simply not bright enough to ‘get it’.
It really doesn’t matter what I think anyway, so it is whatever it is…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net
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