by Bill Davis: NAB Tips For Trade-Show Rookies

[Chris Hurd]

Originally Posted by Bill Davis

In the 25 years I’ve been regularly attending NAB, I’ve learned a few tricks. For instance, when I was starting out, trade shows were about seeing all the shiny things on display, because for decades the big trade show was the only place to get information directly from multiple manufacturers. So most attendees would end up flying home with bags and bags of of brochures and product sheets to study. But those days are gone.

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[John Nantz]

Chris - the paragraph you quoted was exactly the "life cycle" I went though. We, wife and I, went to two Vegas trade shows each year, the Winter Sports Ski Show (SIA) (since moved to Denver) and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), both held at the end of the winter months. Like you said, early on it was all about collecting catalogs and business cards on anything that looked interesting. However, it is expensive and time consuming to attend the shows.

To tag onto what you wrote about getting organized, even a few weeks before the show I would get a floor plan with the booth numbers, get a list of exhibiters and their booth numbers, figure out who were "must see" and "like to see" vendors then figure out where everybody was and how to get to them in an organized manner. With the ski show we had to do a lot of ordering so that took time. We had our open-to-by lists prepared before we even arrived. With CES it was different because that wasn't a show where one placed orders but being organized before arriving was highly important.

As for the seminars, we really didn't attend many of those because much of the content was already pretty covered in the trade magazines or via other sources.

It would have been really nice, though, to live in a place like Arizona and just drive there but coming from a long distance there is a lot of travel cost and travel time.