Déjà vu and the Education Tradeshow Circuit

Feb 17, 2010

Having recently attended conferences such as Educause, FETC, TCEA, and others that have now all blurred together, I see that times are changing with the tradeshow circuit in education.  What’s interesting is that I feel like I’ve been through this before. 

From 1987 to 2000 I worked with Government Technology magazine, attending dozens of major trade shows every year in the government market.   In the beginning, trade shows were different, exciting and new affairs.  Before that, the likes of DEC, IBM, Apple, Oracle had to send armies of reps out to call on everyone individually.   I remember back in 1990 a Director of a Department in California, in the days before “CIO” as a title was cool, saying that back in his day, IBM used to have a rep for practically every square block.  They were frequently in his office. 

All of this puts me in mind of the great cycle of birth-growth-apex-decay-death of things, and how once done, it always starts back over. 

In the government market, top events with 200+ booths happened annually in Washington D.C. and the big spending State capitals of Albany, Sacramento and Austin.   Major associations aligned their regional meetings with these large trade shows and tens of thousands of the various program managers, IT staff and CIOs would parade through the booths.   Mid-day of the first few days of the events would be so crowded that one couldn’t get across the trade show floor through any of the hallways quickly.  Vendors would bring lots of give-aways and many hosted mini-theatres in their large booths.  Loud presenters would regal the crowds with an artful mini-pitch.   Companies spent upwards of $50,000 on booth space, another $50,000 on shipping a booth, advertising, and more sending their staffs.  Some companies spent additional thousands on dinners, lunch sponsorships and other side activities.  Across all the events in the government market a major company was spending in the $1 Million or more ranges for what I will call the “heyday years.” 

Sometime around 2004 the “heyday years” were more and more obviously gone from the tradeshows in the government market.   Shows got smaller with fewer and fewer vendors.  Some of the really large vendors had gotten so big that they had disappeared into the consumer stratosphere and no longer deigned to take booths at all in the “vertical” market of government.  They were horizontal, apparently, still selling to government but with that sort of absent feel of a friend-you-knew-in-school who’s made it big now and can’t be reached.   Somewhere along the way, the bonanza of hardware started to shrink with buyouts and the occasional fail-out.  At the same time this consolidation occurred, the software industry was growing, peaking and then doing the same consolidation and shrinking.    Companies who were still taking booths started complaining about the diminishing attendance, which, by the way, was also  poor quality low-level hunters of the freebies.   The new marketers mantra became keen interest in senior executive attendance.  Erroneously supposing the show producer could easily get the same volumes of executives as regular workers to fill the wide aisles, marketers kept doing the usual booth purchase and trade shows continued limply on. 

Then the shows couldn’t do it anymore and evolved to new formats, one-ballroom affairs for usually a single day, less commercial and intolerant of the routine companies are used to doing with a booth-and-speaker timeslot.  After all, if you want “just executives,” you can’t expect that they have the time to listen to every hour-long product pitch, and they don’t “shop.”  You will have to evolve your sidle-up and strike up a conversation at the appropriate moment, or go to them in real life with one-on-one meetings. 

Imagine a business world like that, where you had to go to see everyone individually. 

In the days before a high degree of order in who-did-what came in with CIO and CTO titles and the rank-and-file of tech staffs, and people generally knew little about technology, anybody could show up and play.  Later as more and more delegation of duties came about, just anybody wasn’t good enough.  That’s the way of things, you see, as order goes in someone get’s designated “it” and so not everybody plays or they’re coloring outside the lines and that’s not tolerated. 

Now back to the Education market.  In the early days there were the hardware firms, and of course the many publishers-turned-software producers, all with armies of staffs calling directly on executives in the market, creating in their wake new CIOs and more order in the market itself.  Then came the NECC shows, the FETC, Educause, and so many more.  The long list of association events became mind-numbing.  In 2004 when I stepped into the Education market, I believe most of these events were at their “apex” because they were huge events, true theatres of a great game.  In 2007 I started to notice a change, an undercurrent of disgruntlement with the vendors who were seeing only “teachers” show up.  Where that might have been fine before, their standards were going up and now only technology staffs and executives were really needed by most.

Today we’re at a crossroads.  The larger shows are all shrinking.  The biggest vendors have mostly gone into the stratosphere and you won’t find them at most of the shows.   There are jewelry and clothing vendors showing up alongside the tech vendors, weakening the shows.  Complaints I have heard from vendors are, to me, echoes of the past.  Some of the companies are doing their own sole-sponsored roadshow events, diluting the audiences with repeated small-scale gatherings that almost never get adequate attendance, but are done at great expense.  Even the traditional webinar doesn’t pull the same volumes in attendance. 

The thing with the Education market is that there is still a lot of unknown territory in the software side, and big change on the horizon with how education gets done.  If charter schools take off even more with the current federal push, and education delivery online takes off even more, then the landscape change will continue to drive tradeshows.  However, these changes are changes that are on one side driving disaggregation (charters) and on the other an aggregation (online) of buying power.  For vendors this could mean we’re in the awkward place where up-market marketing (executive focused), less trade shows and more custom executive events is now more important than tradeshows for the ol’ face-to-face part of the marketing mix; and a new down-market marketing to new institutions is also in order, so more tradeshows.  

We may be coming to the end-of-life of big tradeshows as they were in Education, but coincidentally at the birth of something else brand new.