Savvy Marketers Announce Before Shows

The message still remains: Want to know who the savvy marketers are? Check who announces products and moves before the show. For example, in the last 24 hours, both Axis and Milestone made two significant announcements. [Update: Milestone has done it again in 2013, scheduling their Arcus announcement earlier to get attention all to itself.]

Now ask yourself, why would two of the biggest brands in the industry start making announcements so early? Shouldn't they wait like the mass of the industry and announce on the first day of the show? Couldn't these, of all surveillance companies, get the word out even against dozens of other releases?

What these companies realize is that announcing early has two powerful benefits:

• Doing it early gives people time to read and hear about it before the show while they are in their offices and at home; instead of when they are on the road or rushing to meetings at a show
• Doing it first reduces the level of competing voices and makes it easier for them to get the spotlight.

Whether or not your love or hate these Axis and Milestone announcements from a business or technology standpoint, from a purely marketing perspective, it is a smart move.

Orthodoxy dies hard. In the old days, before the Internet, releasing at the show had no downsides plus symbolic meaning. Now, waiting to the show means virtually no one will read or hear about it unless they go to your booth. Which is ironic because if they had announced early, they'd have a lot more people interested to go to their booth and talk about their new thing.