Sridhar Vembu’s Blog

We just got back from Supercomm in Chicago, where we had a booth. We had decent traffic, and this year, the telecom industry seems to finally coming out of the long nuclear winter, so the mood was optimistic. But on balance, I believe there are better ways to spend marketing money, to people who treat you like a customer, not as prey.

I now realize why companies are shying away from tradeshows, and prefer to spend their marketing budgets elsewhere (Google?).

First the absolute arrogance of the people who set up the booth. Not only do they feel nothing about yelling at paying (as in “paying extorbitant prices̶ customers; on top of that, there are all these rules like “No, you can’t plug-in the monitor yourself, you have to employ our staff at $50 for 30 minutes” kind of thing.

And Supercomm positions itself as the leading telecommunications show. Guess what they charge for internet connectivity to a booth? Upwards of $7000 - yes, that is no typo, it is SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. It is fair to say that if that price were divided by 100, they would still make money on the deal.

I know tradeshow industry has gone through a serious round of bankruptcies and consolidation, but if this is the kind of bitter taste they leave in the mouth of paying customers, they are not going to have very many of them for very long.

Yeah, the show itself was good for us. But I wonder whether paying this much money and then going through this much aggravation is worth it ultimately, in the Google era we live in.