Wrapup of CTIA in Las Vegas

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10118571.post-20651192849115612102008-04-03T22:07:00.000-07:002008-04-03T22:56:28.411-07:00Wrapup of CTIA in Las VegasThis week I was in Las Vegas at CTIA. If you are interested in full coverage of the show, then I recommend Ewan MacLeod's site SMS Text News at www.smstextnews.com. I was at CTIA for three objectives. #1 Pitch Retain for BlackBerry Enterprise Server for an award as an emerging innovation. Didn't win #2 AT&T Fast Pitch for Retain for BlackBerry Enterprise Server Didn't win #3 Best of Show award for Retain for BlackBerry Enterprise Server Didn't win Okay, with my three top objectives deemed failures, I was able to get a bonus for the show. Ewan MacLeod was kind enough to allow me to post a few comments to his blog at www.smstextnews.com. I feel that CTIA was a complete failure, not for me, even though GWAVA didn't achieve any of its objectives, no, it was a failure for the vendors at the show. I walked through massive halls with creative booths stuffed full of beautiful people. From that standpoint it was impressive. BUT...from all the people I spoke with I did not get any sense of purpose behind them being there. I got a sense of extreme randomness. Vendors were there hoping people would pass their booth and stop and let them scan their badges. That seems like a lot of money to hope random people swing by the booth. One woman stopped me in the aisle and asked to scan my badge, they were giving away an iPhone. They didn't seem to care what I did or who I was, just wanted my name. What a waste of time and effort and a complete failure, in my opinion, by the marketing team, that couldn't figure out how to better qualify a lead than to just random scan people passing by. LG Example LG is a good example. They had a massive presence with a huge booth. They had a live band, a DJ, lots of girls standing around, nude mannequins, a life size replica of the new Iron Man, Pod Chairs with JBL speakers inside of them that let you listen to music, and a bunch of display cases with phones. What were they attempting to say? "Hey, look at us! We are cool and tied into pop culture so we must be relevant!" Lots of people were in their booth but as I watched they seemed to be mostly taking pictures of the nude mannequins more than anything else. They easily spent $1 million+ on the entire production, but failed to actually say anything about their company. BrainShare comparison I'm speaking from experience here since just finished with BrainShare in Salt Lake City a few weeks ago where GWAVA had the biggest booth in the place. Of course the show was much smaller but the lesson learned is still the same. I built a huge booth, with a massive presence of people, but failed to identify beforehand how big my audience was really going to be. Of the 5,000 attendees at BrainShare, only approximately 400 were GroupWise admins. Less than 10% of the attendees were my perspective customers. My booth and my staff were out of sync with the actual number of prospects at the show. The good news is that GWAVA's Sales team is experienced with BrainShare. They were able to stay fully booked for the entire show with pre-scheduled meetings that kept them all busy. This is a case where marketing and sales were able to cover for each other. Sales was able to exploit the 400 contacts even though Marketing had over built for the show. Lesson learned If you are going to be a vendor at a massive show like CTIA or even a small one like BrainShare, you need to go with a plan. Putting up a booth, hiring attractive women, and having a magician do card tricks is not a plan. It is a marketing team that is clueless about how to maximize your presence and lacks purpose. Go with a plan. Know your audience, don't waste your time trying to cover up lack of planning with a large quantity of useless leads. This is a failure of a marketing team not doing their job. In future blogs I will comment on what I've done over my career to make this effective.Richard Blisshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06711443052326619281noreply@blogger.com