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ATTN Advertisers…Ron is on the money, save yourself a pile of $$$
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I would like to add that, as a trade group, NAB’s politics and lobbying almost always go directly against my personal beliefs. Of course not everyone will agree with this, and that’s fine, but I am not eager to give them even more money to lobby with when consumers are almost always at the losing end of their pet issues. They’ve spent well over $50M lobbying and paying for trips, etc. over the past five years, mostly to curry favor on issues like media consolidation and protecting the biggest media corporations from their own mistakes. I don’t see how this possibly benefits me, in fact it works AGAINST me as a consumer and media enthusiast, so why should I give them my money?
Sorry to get political but hey – I’m a wacky Californian what can I say.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
[Tim Kolb:] “I think that since the discussion somehow morphed from NAB Pro vs Con to NAB vs CreativeCow.net.”
It’s much, much bigger than either NAB or the Cow. Our dynamic is a single example among a multitude.
ALL tradeshows have been on the decline for years. Comdex and KIPI are gone. CES is shrinking fast. MacWorld went from 2 massive shows (at its peak, the Boston show took up 3 area convention centers in area — shuttles galore) to one teensy one (New York) and the moderately sized one in SF that remains.
Not many among us attend Siggraph anymore — remember when we DID, because that show MATTERED? Now, it’s mostly a job fair. The last time I went, the biggest booth was for Full Sail, soliciting students.
Part of our audience attends the DV Expo…but an increasingly smaller part. The New York expo is gone. The last year I attended, vendors were double and tripled up in dealer’s booths. (I, at Boris, and 4 guys from Apple were all camped at one such dealer, the only presence for either of our companies at the show.) The LA show is a shockingly small shadow of its former self.
The once-important LADV and NYDV shows are both gone.
I know I’m missing others in the media biz, so I did a speedy Google search for other industries.
The first result that GOOG returned says that B2B tradeshows used to return their investment, but now they just don’t.
–New products are first announced on the Internet
–Vendors and manufacturers do their competitive analysis on the Internet
–Potential buyers or existing customers gather information over the Internet.
–And Sales people are spoiling their time on booths, waiting for a visitor to pass along.Moreover Sales are starting to spend more time on the mobile phone or behind their portable during tradeshows, than actively looking to capture leads on the trade show. This due to the fact of the ever-decreasing number of visitors on the trade shows.
…The whole Internet with all it’s websites, have become the biggest tradeshow, night and day and worldwide reach.
Industrial expos are far larger in scope than anything in our little pond. Sorry for the long quote, but it’s a really good one.
The Hannover Fair in Germany was easily the largest of all industrial exhibitions, housed in its own self-contained city with major entrances on all four sides, streets, traffic light, buses and its own train station with an express direct from Frankfurt, some 200 kilometers away.
During exhibition week, hotels in a radius of some 50 kilometers are typically overbooked, and lodging arrangements are made with local people to take in guests. Busses brought exhibitors and attendees every day from as far away as 100 kilometers.
…Attendance at all the large automation exhibitions has declined to a fraction of former times. Attendance at the annual ISA exhibition has declined to about 15,000.
The vendor to end-user ratio which used to be as much as 10 to 1 is more like 2:1 today and sometimes less (my estimates). Traffic is sparse, with forlorn exhibitors spending their time reviewing each others products and bemoaning hard times.
Many explanations have been given for this decline of exhibitions:
–Cost of participation for both exhibitors and attendees;
–Business decline, which has reduced budgets and personnel;
–Because of constrained development expenditures, there is very little new to see that can’t be reviewed via the Internet;
–Greed on the part of the organizers – charging huge booth and overhead fees;
–Gross overspending by exhibitors on booths/stands.C’mon man — any of this sounding familiar? It’s a worldwide phenomenon, in every industry, and it’s truly staggering when you look at the whole picture.
And every trade show I can find blames the internet for the decline. You don’t have to like it, but that’s what THEY say.
We see that the decline of NAB is exactly in line with other shows, including such forces as greedy organizers leading to fewer vendors, fewer qualified leads, overspending, etc. It’s just not efficient anymore, which is why the two biggest non-camera exhibitors (by a long shot) have dropped their booths.
So, since every other industry blames the internet for the decline of its tradeshows, why is there such a hub-bub when we make the same observation for ours? Not just NAB, but all the others I mentioned.
The Cow is far from the only online resource in our industry. We’re just larger than the rest combined. We didn’t actually know this until we looked up easily available public numbers, so I invite you to do the same.
So when we’re talking about the decline of NAB due to the internet, we absolutely take some of the credit…or blame if you prefer. Not all of it, mind you. Not by any means. But with nearly 1 million unique monthly visitors — and nearly 3 million totally unique visitors since last August — I hope you can understand why we feel that we are in fact a large part of the problem or solution re: NAB, depending on your perspective.
To underscore Brendan’s points, NAB is the third most heinous lobby on my list. (The other two are a discussion for another day.) Like Brendan, these lobbyists represent the opposite of almost everything I care about in this industry where I’ve lived for 30 years. I like lobbyists just fine, and support a number of them with my money. But these are evil dudes.
Second, a point I made in the Avid part of the festivities that Brendan mentions here, that there are many, many other places to get better information and better hands-on experience than any big tradeshow in any industry.
In conclusion (honest), I’ve never said that there’s NO reason to go to NAB. I’ve named plenty of them in other posts. Just that it’s highly inefficient, and that those inefficiences are driving NAB’s decline no less than every other tradeshow, in every other industry.
The contrasting efficiency of the web is also a factor, in ever other industry, and in ours.
Yr pal,
Tim -
I type unbelievably fast. Really. You may never have met somebody who can type as fast as I do.
And I think unbelievably slow.
I overstated my objection to the NAB lobby. They’re only number 4 on my list. With #3 as the cut-off for “evil” and “heinous,” the NAB lobby is merely “annoying.” My apologies for the error.
Also, the number of monthly Cow visits is only over 1.2 MILLION. That’s right, only ONE POINT TWO million. I knew that – just another example of my hands moving too fast.
I also know, but left out, that visitors to the Cow spend anywhere from 3 to NINE times as long here as visitors to other industry sites, making our overall impact even larger than visits alone would indicate.
I like the rest of the post just fine.
Believe it or not, I have my typing and thinking geared wrt each other better now than ever, but I’m still working on it.
tw
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[Brendan Coots] “Sorry to get political but hey – I’m a wacky Californian what can I say.”
From one wacky Californian to another, I couldn’t agree more, Brendan.
Thanks for saying something that I have been sitting on my hands afraid to say, as I am already out on the branch pretty far.
;o)
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronlindeboom
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine
Join the COW’s LinkedIn Group
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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(Ron Lindeboom) – “But the part I will always miss by not going anymore is the people. That was the part that both Kathlyn and I liked best. That we will miss.”
That’s what we’ll all miss. I was in radio for 18 years and the thing that really is killng that industry was the increasing lack of human interaction. The past greats in radio told of how their connection with the audience is what created a fan base. The talkers of today do still enjoy that, but normal FM radio has been taken over by voices via satellite and Internet. Even the guys in the booths are “voice-tracking”, pre-recording their raps so they can get out and sell for their station, or attend a remote broadcast, or a staff meeting for crying out loud.
Buying and shopping via the Internet has its place, but as we become an ever-increasingly isolationistic society, the demise of the trade show is another stark reminder about how little we actually want to get to know other people. Production people are sometimes characterized as pale, big-eyed, socially deficient lab rats who sit in the dark for ten hours a day staring at a computer screen. If we’re not careful, that’s exactly who we’ll all become, whether we’re in production or not.
I’ve lived in my house for 9 years…I don’t even know my neighbor across the street because he never comes out of the house. His blinds are always closed. Come to think of it, so are mine. Crap. I’ve been sucked in. Goodbye world, if you’re still out there.
KC Allen
Allen Film & Video“Who’s the more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows?”
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[KC Allen] “The past greats in radio told of how their connection with the audience is what created a fan base. The talkers of today do still enjoy that, but normal FM radio has been taken over by voices via satellite and Internet. Even the guys in the booths are “voice-tracking”, pre-recording their raps so they can get out and sell for their station, or attend a remote broadcast, or a staff meeting for crying out loud.”
As an ex-radioman myself, I agree with this but would add another point to consider. The standardization of formats and stations by conglomerates like Clear Channel who all play the same few artists shoved down our throats by a few mega-record conglomerates is killing listener interest in radio. (Thank God for my iPod.) Gone is any real artistry in most modern playlists — for the most part — and with few exceptions, I can’t tell one of the sound-alike girl and boy cookie-cutter artists from the other. And if rock is your cup of tea instead, just how many bands do we need to have force-fed to us that have singers that sound just like Eddie Vetter anyway?
The station I worked at was one of the last full power commercial FM free-form radio stations in the country, and now it’s part of a conglomerate and has the same exact playlist day-in and day-out that runs on all the other channels on their network. Boring. Boring beyond belief.
But as Brendan Coots pointed out in his comments regarding NAB as a lobbying organization, these kinds of things are the things that they lobby for and protect at the expense of the little independents.
Just my opinion, your’s may differ — and likely does.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronlindeboom
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine
Join the COW’s LinkedIn Group
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.
Do you have your complimentary subscription to Creative COW Magazine yet?
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[Tim Wilson] “Second, a point I made in the Avid part of the festivities that Brendan mentions here, that there are many, many other places to get better information and better hands-on experience than any big tradeshow in any industry. “
Agreed. That is one of the benefits of local groups. Much more personal interaction in which both sides can carry away valuable information.
Terence Curren
http://www.alphadogs.tv
http://www.digitalservicestation.com
Burbank,Ca -
[Terence Curren] “Agreed. That is one of the benefits of local groups. Much more personal interaction in which both sides can carry away valuable information.”
Local groups are a fantastic resource, but not everyone lives in Burbank or Manhattan, or Chicago or Dallas, or even Milwaukee or Kansas City…
There may not be an Avid user group anywhere close to a great many Avid users…or Apple group to Apple users…
I’m typically not arguing the positive points posed on all these other venues, just trying to figure out why it has to be an all or nothing situation for so many…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
[Tim Kolb] “I’m typically not arguing the positive points posed on all these other venues, just trying to figure out why it has to be an all or nothing situation for so many…”
For me personally, it’s not an all or nothing thing at all. Not everyone is well served by avoiding an event like NAB, and not everyone is well served by going to NAB.
For some companies, it makes perfect sense to go to NAB and the same holds true for many users. But conversely, the opposite is true and the only point I have tried to make in all of this is that as long as the NAB organization and the Las Vegas hotels conspire to raise the rates beyond what is reasonable — especially in a poor business climate and one with a falling dollar — of those for whom it does indeed make good business sense to go, they will find fewer and fewer takers.
But I doubt they’ll listen, and so as I said much earlier in this whole debate, they are likely killing their own goose that lays the golden eggs.
THAT is much of what my point is all about.
Just to clarify my stand.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronlindeboom
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine
Join the COW’s LinkedIn Group
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.
Do you have your complimentary subscription to Creative COW Magazine yet?
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And after you visit the Editor’s Lounge, step across the street to Donut Prince. Buy an apple cruller and think of me.
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