Have Trade Shows Become Irrelevant?

Trade shows are here to stay, but I've always wondered whether they've endured because of their usefulness or because no one influential enough has called out the truth: that most conferences, especially the bigger ones, do little or nothing to help attending companies drum up business, but if those companies didn't show up, the ensuing negative buzz would cripple their enterprises.

It's not as bad as it used to be. At the height of the boom, niche conferences sprung up everywhere, and the event-planning business was one of the faddish beneficiaries of the insanity, like push technology or pen-based computers. The absurdity reached its peak at Comdex, when by 1999 the show had ballooned to such an unnavigable girth that it took a cab ride to go from the registration desk to the conference floor (if you could ever hope to get a cab)

In the mid-1990s, conferences like Comdex and Networld Interop were big, important events. Back then the mission of the trade press was to sniff out the scoops in the days leading up to the shows, because most of the companies saved their splashiest unveilings of the year for those particular weeks. Once the show began, reporters rushed from booth to booth to get briefings by company officers that usually had a "C" in their title.

Today, most trade shows have nothing but incremental product and alliance announcements, still hyped way out of proportion to their influence -- PR people, God bless them, haven't changed since the dawn of time -- and briefings usually are given by marketing people because executives are off somewhere conducting real business. Seminar audiences more often than not consist of attendees yawningly checking their wireless e-mail or fiddling with their PalmPilots. Of the major conferences, only Macworld lives up to its hype, as Apple consistently does a masterful (and infuriating) job of manipulating the preshow buzz then announcing something, for lack of a better word, cool.

This week, San Francisco hosted the RSA Conference, one of the hallmark events of the security industry. The content was very good, including about 200 seminars aimed at every corner of the highly nuanced security sector and several useful keynote presentations. And even though the current economic climate is all about preserving the bottom line, the conference organizers wisely remembered to have some fun, among other things incorporating a closing address from the comedian Ben Stein that had little or nothing to do with security and a fascinating lecture by the anthropologist Michael Coe about the centuries-long quest to decode Mayan hieroglyphics.

That said, the conference couldn't completely escape the standard trade show flatness. The announcements were predictably pedestrian, and the seminars still contained plenty of bored-looking e-mail fiddlers. Several of the presenters on the floor said that despite the 10,000 or so attendees, they didn't expect to garner much new business from the event and were there primarily to avoid the negative perceptions their absence would create.

And frankly, conference tchotchkes just aren't what they used to be. The flashiest goodie at the RSA show was the free five-minute Segway scooter ride that one company was giving away. If this were 1998, they would've raffled off 100 Segways for winners to keep and thrown in a free consultation with a personal injury attorney.

The best trade shows combine compelling, forward-looking content, companies that make meaningful product or strategy announcements, and means -- formal or informal -- for new deals to get struck. The current downturn has resulted in a somewhat unavoidable age of corporate timidity that's reflected by this ongoing trade show overkill: Many niche shows have died, but the survivors drone on, unable to escape the drag of their own wake. Hopefully the day will come soon when a company or an event organizer-- someone -- reinjects some newsworthy life into this plodding entity.