Tuesday October 19th 2004 – In Praise of the Trade Show

Tuesday October 19th 2004 – In Praise of the Trade Show

There is nothing quite like a large hall about to be converted into an trade show exhibition. Whether it’s the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas right after New Year or something more esoteric like SuperComm in Atlanta, the process, the people, and the finished product is the same. What differentiates individual events is the packaging. The same layout in Las Vegas or Atlanta is transformed by the signs, the lights, and the elaborate displays participants bring to make themselves stand out.

My first major trade show—where I was hired for my first job in journalism—was the West Coast Computer Faire, which long ago went the way of all great exhibitions that fail to evolve with their crowd. The West Coast Computer Faire crowd was every geek with a pocket protector who in the late 1970s wanted to acquire or build onto a computer he already had. This was a trade show with no pretensions, a table containing some equipment to display or sell, a couple or three geeks that could describe what was on the table inside and out and tell you what it could and couldn’t do. The dress code was grunge casual and anyone in a suit was suspect.

The guy who was interviewing me had on a suit and I was wearing a sports coat, long sleeve sports shirt—it was cold in San Francisco in the fall, and dress pants that contrasted just enough with the jacket. He was an advertising sales person, “TB”, who became quite well off thanks to some shrewd investments in one of the magazines springing up to serve the information starved group inside Brooks Hall—then the only convention center in San Francisco.

He and I were both standing at an economic crossroad. He was smart enough to take the road that was just opening up and accelerating. I was content to ride the one he was leaving. His road led down the path of first the hobby computer, then the home computer, and finally the personal computer. He was following the crowd that had found a tool and were busy using it to do things—write programs to balance checkbooks, store recipes, play games, etc. I was with the crowd that was concentrating on building and making the machine better.

The nature of any trade show is to bring people together and force them to look at the world around them differently. Inside Brooks Hall each of these wide-eyed entrepreneurs saw that they were not the only ones with a computing widget that everyone had to have. In many instances they saw guys with better ideas than theirs. But they also saw others who didn’t have a clue. The exhibitors inside the hall got a chance to see how their prize was actually perceived by someone who was presumably looking for what they had to offer. Since this was seat-of-the-pants capitalism, the vast majority had built stuff that received varying degrees of acceptance. The ones with the most acceptance got to do it again.

I think of a trade show like a brain with hundreds of individual neurons and each encounter in the exhibit hall affects both. Each provides the other a different outlook, a new piece of information. These continuing interactions get assimilated by the participants and each develops a new understanding of the world assembled—in this case—within the confines of Brooks Hall. I didn’t participate in that first conference, but I was hired as an editor for the magazine. “TB” was part of the management team and I had to get his blessing before an offer was made. This was the magazine he would soon leave for greener pastures.

In the conference I attended the following year and for many years thereafter, I came to experience the process of assimilating large amounts of information in a very short period of time. I would have appointments every hour beginning when the show opened and ending when the lights were turned off in the exhibition hall. And once the lights were turned off, the process continued more informally in suites within hotels scattered around the exhibition hall.

When I did manage not to party until midnight, I would try to make sense of the notes I had taken during the day, adding details I remembered during a second reading, finding unanswered questions that I could ask of someone else the following day. I found rummaging around an information dump immensely pleasurable.

A story would eventually emerge from this fire-hose-feed information transfer. The first cut would lack the order that a careful re-evaluation of the story would impose during the editing process. I’ve always found news accounts written by reporters on deadline to have that quality of describing the facts as presented, not as assimilated and refined into an understanding of what this gathering was all about. From a fashion trade show there might emerge a trend not quite understood when propounded by one or two designers, but completely obvious when the entire hall seems to be following it.

The stories that eventually overlooked the inherent instinct in humans to socialize and to emulate one another. We are after all herd animals but little if any written reporting comments on the behavior of the herd as it transforms a large empty hall into a marketplace and then fights to win the hearts and minds of those within the space. Looking down from way above the exhibit hall below the observer sees a mass of two legged wildebeests, resting before galloping off in a new direction.