Manipulators
I find I only need to go to the big industry trade shows every-other year, but this last year at NAB was almost entirely worthless.
Personally, I go to NAB to SEE WHAT IS NOW AVAILABLE and to FIND OUT MORE ABOUT PRODUCTS. Back in the days of E3 there were two classes of people working the booths: company people and booth-babes. You didn’t expect much from the booth-babes, but they could swipe your badge, hand you some literature on the latest stuff and maybe point you towards a company person for more in-depth info. Plus they were pretty and pretended to not mind talking to endless waves of sweaty geeks.
NAB was at the other end of the spectrum, it’s named for the National Association of Broadcasters after all and is attended by many much-older engineers who don’t mind looking at a nice rack either–if it’s made by Winsted. Professional engineers (and sadly executives) looking for either in-depth technical info and/or the opportunity to schmooze and ‘network’ for contacts, other jobs, vendors, customers… That’s what it was AND IS SUPPOSED TO BE.
Now NAB is worth even less than E3 ever was because the mindless booth-babes are fully clothed and *don’t* have anything more than a flier with a web-address to hand out. Many of the people staffing the booths at this years NAB may have actually been full-time, regular employees of the companies–if you count lobotomized members of the marketing (redundant?) or maybe janitorial departments. As often as not they didn’t even have meaningful knowledge of their own company’s product line.
Again and again I’d ask somebody for information on something and they wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I’d ask them for at least the brochure on it, and at best they’d only have the generic full-line brochure (no specific information whatsoever). Next they’d offer to swipe my badge to get me the info, but as often as not they didn’t even understand what division the product I was asking about fell under, so they couldn’t specify it in the swipe system.
Even when one of these smiling badge-swiping simians could find the checkbox for the specific item I was wondering about the end result was not a detailed brochure in the mail the week after NAB; it was AN EMAIL WITH A WEB-LINK TO THE GENERIC INFO ON THEIR WEB PAGE. So what the HELL was the point of going to NAB at all??? Going to Vegas, sure, but I could’ve just browsed websites in the hotel’s business center, maybe printed a couple pages and had the same benefit as spending 2-3 days wandering around the show floors…
When everybody in the industry solemnly agrees the Internet killed this trade-show in 4 or so years, remember it is because THE TRADE SHOW ITSELF HELPED. When I walk up to a booth to find out more about something that I may well be about to spend several hundred thousand dollars on I want to speak to somebody involved in the design or AT LEAST the support of the product in question. NOT whichever vaguly attractive secretary some executive thought might put out.
Especially in broadcasting/production/VFX/post, we don’t have a Gizmodo.com to point out all the newest stuff, we have NAB–where companies made the conscious choice this year to NOT send their engineers, only MARKETING SHMUCKS (and executives… thank god!).