The secret to a successful trade show? Don't be boring.
Trade fairs often comprise a huge share of many b2b firms’ marketing budgets. But lots of it is wasted on ‘blandstanding’. By creating an experience, brands can stand out from the crowd.
Loads of innovation on display at Tech Show London last week, a big event in the UK’s enterprise technology calendar with hundreds of firms pitching datacentres & sustainable hardware, devops and cloud-based software, data science and (of course) applied AI.
Some good speakers too. One talk I saw considered the skills gap in UK tech with one-eye catching stat that 739,000 (over half) of UK business feel they lack core tech skills, a major problem for businesses.
🚀 It slows ‘digital transformation’ i.e. essential commercial evolution
🔐 It increases the risk of being hacked, if people can’t patch the holes
☁ They can't make full use of the cloud, as they’re wasting time on admin
Many spoke of confusing cloud pricing, rapidly escalating costs with ‘bill shock’ and ‘egress fees’ often mentioned – and how to manage this as more operations become cloud based, not least AI.
In the pandemic-driven ‘race to the cloud’ as business went remote, and ecommerce boomed, it seems many businesses are now reviewing their cloud setups.
The big four ‘hyperscalers’ dominate, but with the threat of looming regulation, and changing buyer behaviour may level things out, based on people I spoke to at other large, non-hyperscaler providers such as Wasabi Technologies and OVHcloud . All see huge opportunity in a growth category.
Favourite stand by far was Sysdig with people flocking for a photo in the DeLorean, with an actor playing Doc. In fact, so busy, this was the best pic I could get... maybe I'll get a selfie in the car next time.
It reminded me of a stunt we did over a decade ago when I was working with adtech firm VisualDNA.
The company's product was data segments for online advertising - by tracking an anonymous consumer's web browsing activity it was able to make inferences into their personality traits. This means a company like Porsche or Red Bull wouldn't need to rely on demographics to deliver targeted ads, but could buy a 'thrill seeker' audience for example.
We secured a spot to do a demo at Mindshare's Huddle (dubbed its internal 'unconference' and rather than go blandstanding we dressed up our sales guy as a mad scientist doctor and did personality tests to conclude (somewhat unsurprisingly) that the creatives were mostly yellows and the media planners mostly blues. As a small start up it was cheap to do and created loads of leads as it went down a storm.
The point?
Rather than offering branded pens and plastic cups as ‘lead bait’, by creating a memorable experience it shows how b2b marketing doesn’t have to mean boring-to-boring.