Avigilon / Motorola VS Virtual ISC West

This exposes some additional interesting challenges for virtual tradeshows.

With a physical show, you've historically had some number of exhibitors attempt to ride on the show for free(ish) by doing a hospitality suite or similar nearby event that is not part of the show officially. While these save money, you miss out on walk-by traffic, and it can still be hard to get people to actually come to your side-show, especially if it feels like too much of a distance from the real show.

With virtual shows, there is almost no cost or barrier to attending multiple shows simultaneously or in the same day. Provided that ISC or ASIS can make these virtual shows a big enough draw that people actually block of time to attend them, that offers more potential incentive for larger organizations to just do their own shows that overlap. Someone can easily do ISCW *AND* the Avigilon show without really missing out on any part of either experience. In that scenario ISC loses money, and Avigilon really gains (IMO) by having full control of their own event.

IMO we need to either get back to real shows, or just adapt to multiple individual virtual events instead of one consolidated event.

At first I was all hyped on all the virtual shows, IPVM's included. But there is serious fatigue and boredom from it. Granted, I have 8 zoom meeting internally a week which is a huge contributor to the fatigue, I fall back to being strongly interested in still attending ISC West physically in spite of SIA being greedy pieces of shat. I want to see the products in person, the demos in person, talk to my reps in person.

Call me old fashioned.

I agree 100% that there will be a large 'swing back'. However I think the virtual cat is out of the bag.

Most tradeshows are mostly fashion shows. Who is cool. Who is IN. Who has the big booth, the shiniest showoff etc. Im positive somewhere there is a tech show that isn't mostly that. But in 20+ years I havent see one yet.

Big companies are not going back to big offices. All my friends at the big tech companies are officially NOT doing offices until near end of 2021. And an ever increasing number of those former office employees have or are in process of moving somewhere else. If your work is virtual, your meetings are virtual, your presentations are virtual, your tradeshows are virtual then the office is virtual.

When the office is virtual the tradeshow will either become the one time/place you get to meet in person aside from quarterly company meetings, OR it will be looked back on as a weird cold war relic.

Face to face aint never going away. But most meetings could be abolished. And that would likely make a huge morale and productivity boost! I would argue that the size of the booth is the primary indicator for large established companies. The main benefit of a tradeshow is: (if we are being honest)

1. meet people in person you would normally NOT be willing to travel to directly (aka they aren't THAT important to spend actual time and money on)

2. Find those weird, new companies that you didn't already know about - and because they literally HAVE to talk to you, get actual conversation and information.

3. Competitive research - you get to pretend to be someone else and get all kinds of great info free that they would never release digitally.

To me those 3 things are key and have NOT been replaced yet. So tradeshows will resume. (I won't go to one till a massive deployment of a vaccine) but the above three reasons are not the ones we tell our bosses.