A Primer for Trade Show Exhibitors—How to Treat Attendees

I've been going to trade shows since 1984.  In those days, I would come home with (or ship) a pile of heavy catalogs of all kinds of cool stuff, some newly discovered.  In the age of Google, I’m likely going to find product solutions for on the internet, but I still find trade shows to be a valuable experience, because there I can put faces with emails (as they say, you have to be real before you can be virtual), hang out with friends both on the floor and in the bar, present at or attend a session, and—of course—check out the latest and greatest gear.  But I’m continually surprised at some exhibitors, and the way they clue-lessly drive me out of their booth. So, I thought I’d write up this little primer for exhibitors who want to reach people like me.

At a trade show, I have several kinds of booths I go to see:

  • The Old Friend: In our little industry, sometimes these literally are staffed by long-time personal friends, schoolmates, or vendors I've had a relationship with for many years.  At these booths, I typically check in to see how things are in my friend's world, and after a bit of personal talk, we’ll talk new product. I have good friends that I see only once or twice a year in conjunction with some trade show.
  • The New Friend: An exhibitor might have a new and/or innovative product that someone told me I had to see, or something I read about somewhere in advance of the show.  Or, I might have orders pending with an exhibitor I hadn't dealt with before, and I want to meet them—nothing builds trust like a face to face interaction.
  • The Curiosity: A booth might have something that I just find to be of general interest, but it’s something I’m never going to buy.  For example, I’m primarily a sound guy, but I might like to see what the state of the art in moving lights is these days. Or, I might be fascinated by a manufacturing process, or a blinking light caught my eye.  Here, I just want to take a quick look--I may not even want to talk to anyone, and I don't want to waste a salesperson's time.

Here’s the way I’d like to be treated when visiting a booth:

  • Unless you fall into the “old friend” category, please give me 20 seconds to look at your booth before talking to me. I may be over there just trying to figure out what you’re selling because you have crappy signage, or I’m just curious about a field different than mine and will never buy your product.
  • If you do talk to me, please just start by asking me if I have any questions. And if I say no, please say “OK, thanks, I’m over here if anything comes up”.
  • If I do ask a question, please don't launch into a thirty minute sales presentation.  Just start with an overview, and go deeper only if I ask.
  • Be sensitive to the customer’s time availability. There may be 1000 booths at this show, and it’s rare that I really want to spend 20 minutes with your salesman.

These are the kinds of booths that I (sometimes literally) run away from:

  • The Used Car Salesman: Annoying, slimy, aggressive salespeople, who really know nothing about the technology, but swoop down on you like a vulture and seem completely oblivious to the fact that you could care less what he or she is saying. A lot of the trade shows I go to feature a lot of technology, and a lot of technical attendees are (like me) introverts. Aggressive salesmen drive me away—if I sense this is coming I won't ask a question. There are booths at shows that I routinely avoid because I don’t want to deal with some jerk.
  • The Name Callers:  If you don’t know me personally, don’t EVER call out my name because you read it off my badge. Leave that kind of stunt to the outside talker at a sideshow. At a trade show, it’s disorienting (do I know this person who is calling my name?) and sleazy. Companies that do this have a permanent black mark in my book.
  •  The Scanners: “Can I scan you?  It’s just for booth traffic”. Uh, no.  I don’t believe you. I hate spam and I only let people scan my badge if I'm really interested in the product and want more information.  If I want you to have my contact info, I’ll offer it.
  • The Bimbos: If I want to hang out with primped up women who are talking to me only because I'm a potential customer, I’ll go to a strip club. If you feel that “booth babes” (AKA rent-a-bimbos) differentiate your company, then you're doing something wrong.
  • The Mysteries: If I can’t figure out what segment of the business you’re in by looking at your booth signage within two seconds, you've failed. If your banner has “synergy” or related, vague buzzwords in the signage, I’m not going near it.  Also, your company should have a memorable name, color scheme, etc.
  • The Revolutionaries: If your booth signage says you have "revolutionized" anything, I’m moving on. 
  • The Trash Talkers: It’s great, of course, to compare your product to the competition, but bad mouthing the other guy is just bad form and reflects badly on you.

See you at the next show!

AVB On the Verge?

For years, I've been following the development of Audio Video Bridging (AVB): an open standard way to transport audio and video over a Local Area Network (LAN).But I hadn't seen AVB in action until a friend told me to check out the AVB pavilion at the 2009 Infocomm show in Orlando; I wrote up my thoughts at that time. But as work on the standard dragged on, I started to think that AVB might end up going the way of so many other far-reaching standards with broad application, like AES-24, ACN, etc: These standards all were completed and well designed by very smart people, but never gained traction in the market (my thoughts on that whole situation here). 

While there was lots of talk about AVB over the years, Meyer Sound was the only major player in our live sound market that I had seen really embrace AVB, and I grew even more pessimistic about AVB's future when, at Infocomm 2012, Yamaha demonstrated its adoption of Audinate’s proprietary, Ethernet-based Dante sound networking system as its backbone of its CL product line. I think Dante is a great system for transporting audio over Ethernet, and I use it. But it’s a proprietary system, and if you have any problems (I've experienced weird clicks, loss of sync, connectivity etc) you’re pretty much on your own--there's really no easy way to look under the hood.  

With Dante's increasingly broad market share, I was starting to wonder if it was really would be in Audinate's interest to support something like AVB, which could obviate the need for their bread and butter, proprietary product.  Well, at Infocomm 2013, there was a very encouraging AVB sign in the AVNU pavillion:

Yep, down below those XLR’s is a Dante Ethernet jack, which the Yamaha rep said was running beta Audinate firmware, sending AVB out to the system. With Audinate's substantial market penetration, this could be a game changer. Audinate's role in AVB might be to offer manufacturers AVB on a chip (they already do this with their Dante network) with some layer 3 management tools (AVB operates only at Layer 2).  If Audinate really can and will do a firmware-only update to allow them to switch over AVB (I was a bit dubious that this would work) then this could, possibly, maybe start a chain of system upgrades that could really give AVB very quick acceptance into our market. 

And the great thing is that AVB, as an open standard, is not limited to Audinate, or any other manufacturer, and Yamaha wasn’t the only  company in our market demonstrating working product at Infocomm 2013.  Avid had a mixer also putting out AVB:

Riedel was there using AVB on their intercom system:

And Barco was there showing video over AVB:

Is this a tipping point?  Will 2014 be the year of AVB, Dante, or AVB/Dante?  With more and more major players in our market showing working AVB prototypes, it's sure getting interesting!

More photos here. 

 

2013 controlgeek.net Geekout at Infocomm Orlando!

About 30 people (including six of my City Tech students) navigated the wilds of central Florida from Infocomm, at the Orange County Convention Center, to the Full Sail “Live 3” facility in Winter Park for our Geekout. We had three really great talks (details here), covering a wide range of applications and subjects, and then went to a bowling alley bar afterwards. 

 Dave Christoffers, Sr. Systems Specialist, The Walt Disney Company, kicked off with a great talk on show control on Disney cruise ships.

Next up was Mike Blasko, Principal & Director of Technology, Weigl Works, LLC, who talked about his work on the Jekyll and Hyde Club in NYC (my writeup on that here)

Closing out the session was John Leonard, Freelance Sound & Show Control Designer, who gave a really fun presentation on his work with antique clocks:

Thanks to Mark Johnson and Josh Mudge for hosting us, and we’re likely going to do this again during next year’s Infocomm, so stay tuned!  I generally post a call for entries here and on the show control mailing list.  More photos here, hope to see you next time!

Hudson Valley Storm Chase

With so many hills and trees, it's incredibly difficult chase terrain, but with a slight risk out, and eventually a severe thunderstorm watch, we took a run up yesterday from the southern Catskills and back across the Hudson.  The storm turned in a huge messy, tornado-warned lined and rolled in to the only clear sky we could find right at sunset south of Hudson, New York, but I got a few photos:

After Years of Chasing, My First Tornado (Rozel, Kansas EF-4)

I've been interested in severe weather as long as I can remember.  I chased hurricanes in the 80's, and I've been chasing storms in the plains when I could since 2009. While on sabbatical last spring, I chased severe storms for several weeks in the plains (photo highlights and writeup here), but never caught one of the very few tornadoes that happened last year. So when a major outbreak was forecast on a rare weekend when I was not working, I hopped on a plane to chase in the plains.

I started Saturday (5/18) in Manhattan, Kansas, and headed west and south to get into the zone forecast for significant tornadoes. I filled up on gas and ran a couple errands in Hays, and then headed south. I sat in the tiny town of Rush for a while waiting to see what would happen, and since the models were forecasting storm development a bit later in the afternoon, I decided to head over east to Great Bend to grab some lunch. Of course, as soon as I sat down for lunch, storms started to fire out to my west, heading right back up towards Hays. I was now a bit out of range for these storms, but watching the storms developing just as the short range models predicted, I figured that more storms were to come further south.  I started south, and saw the anvil of a developing storm blowing out towards me:

Of course, by this time, the Hays storm had a tornado warning and a report of a funnel cloud, and I was starting to question my decision to head south instead of north. But I stopped for a while near Rozel, and the winds were just incredible.  We don't see this kind of wind in the east very much--it was just sustained 20+ MPH, and it was out of the south and just pumping moist air--one of the key ingredients of severe thunderstorms--into the area.  Here's the winds knocking around my heavy Nikon D600:

I watched the sky for a while from here, and then decided to roll south.  I stopped to watch a huge wind kicking up dust and being drawn up into the storm system:

Rolling into Kinsley, I saw Josh Wurman and the Doppler on Wheels (DOW) armada--these are the mobile radars that try to get close to tornadoes to learn about how they form.  So I figured if this storm busted, I wouldn't be the only one to be stuck with a bad decision.  I rolled west of town and spotted this, just before 6pm local time:

That's a big fat lowering in the updraft of the main storm system--a good point to watch for development.  Rain started falling out of this system (in the distance beyond the lowering):

(The white dot in a circle is me; note too that that purple box on the top left of the screen is a tornado-warned storm aiming right north of Rush, where I sat for at least an hour).  This lowering lasted for a while, so I tried some different shots waiting for something to happen.

Eventually, it looked like a wall cloud was trying to get started on the lowering:

At this point, I figured I should start heading north.  I got a few miles out of town, and the National Weather Service in Dodge City issued a severe warning on the storm.  You can also see now how many other chasers are now on this storm--each of those green dots is a storm chaser.

But while that might look like a traffic jam on spotter network, this is what it looks like on the ground--there's plenty of room out there.

I tried to head north, but this nice paved road turned to dirt.  And then mud.  With the storm approaching, I didn't want to get stuck in the mud, so I tried to head east, and ended up blasting--at high speed--into a muddy field.  With the storm approaching, I figured it was prudent to backtrack south and around to the east and a paved road. Heading back north again on the pavement, I stopped when I saw a funnel starting to drop, almost right in the spot where I had bailed on the dirt road, now several miles to my west:

It reached a bit lower:

I moved north again, and about 7:25, after I had now been watching this one storm for about an hour and half--touchdown!

After years of trying, it was my first ever tornado!

The storm intensified and moved north east, as I moved north to keep up with it and get closer.  I was listening to a local radio station too, and with all the spotter reports and at least one of the many chasers streaming video of the storm, the radio announcer was literally calling a play by play on what I was seeing, which is a great help to the local community.

It was now close to Rozel, where I had shot video of the crazy winds earlier:

The storm now lifted, about 10 minutes after it first touched down:

I thought it was done, but I moved north east some more, and it dropped again around 7:55:

It was now moving away from me north and slightly west, and I moved again:

Eventually only the funnel was left:

And then it was gone, more than two hours since I started on this  storm.  It was an amazing display of nature's power and beauty, especially since we found out the next day that no one was hurt by this EF-4 storm (rated later by the National Weather Service, in part with data from the DOW trucks I had seen earlier, their write up here).  Tragically, one house was severely damaged, but it could have been a lot worse if it had shifted into Rozel or another town nearby.

You can view all my photos on a Google map here, and I also shot some video along the way:

Tired, but excited after finally seeing a tornado, I headed to Wichita for the night.  

The next day (May 19) I headed south out of Wichita, and was stuck in an internet data hole as a wedge tornado ran into Wichita.  Fortunately, this storm wasn't as bad as it could have been; this sky was downstream of those storms:

After a long day of missing storms and driving around with no internet, I ended up in Arkansas City, Kansas, and watched a tornado warned storm system come across the town.  It was my first time hearing tornado sirens.

I was about to throw in the towel, but saw an incredible hook on the radar on the tail end of the storm south near Newkirk, Oklahoma, so I headed down there and watched a storm try to make a tornado, but eventually it just fizzled out.

I had to get back to Kansas City for a very early flight the next morning, so I blasted through the line and ran up along the back side of the system:

The lightning was incredible, but I was rushing back to the hotel to try and get a few hours of sleep so I couldn't wait around for it.  And then, of course, after 11pm, as I was rolling into the hotel near the KCI airport, Delta emailed me, cancelling my flight and rescheduling me a full day later.  So on Monday, I could have been chasing, but didn't have enough time to get south to Oklahoma and back.  So--fortunately--I missed the Moore disaster altogether.  I did chase a storm system locally in northern Missouri, but I was on the wrong side of the storm when it produced a brief tornado. I did get a lot of experience driving through severe storm rain, though, and saw some crazy flash flooding,

It was an exhausting but amazing weekend, and in many ways I feel like I finished some unfinished business, finally seeing a tornado, and a photogenic one at that.  But as I write this, another outbreak is forecast for the plains, and if I didn't have all these end of semester meetings at school, I'd be on my way out there again....