Avid says No to NAB 2008

Ron Lindeboom Paso Robles, California ©2007, CreativeCOW.net

What’s the world coming to? After decades as one of the NAB Expo’s most respected and important anchor tenants, there is to be no Avid on the floor of NAB2008? Was Chicken Little right?

While to some, the sky may seem to be falling, here at the COW we think Avid is only the first of what will be a major trend in the days ahead. We ourselves told NAB just last week that we wouldn’t have a booth at NAB 2008. A couple of years or so back, Sony did the same thing with the mighty Comdex expo -- eschewing their obligatory booth in favor of following numbers that showed that Sony could indeed say no to Comdex.

Like Avid, we have cut our own path and we can understand why they would want to look at the ways that their marketing dollars -- approximately two million that get spent for NAB if we are to follow educated guess -- find far better results for them than trying to communicate their message on the show's "battlefloor." Some company's message is far easier to present than Avid's, as much of their story is found in powerful media management, file sharing, metadata processes and other things that matter much more to high-end customers than to the new consumer traffic that grows at NAB with every year.

Many companies benefit from NAB but there are also some companies that know their market so well and how to reach it in so focused a manner that they don't need NAB as much as some other companies do.

We fit into that category ourselves and we get five-times the traffic that NAB does on their showfloor, every month. Don't believe that? Here's a page that will show you just how much traffic the COW does monthly. I'll wait while you check it out and come back.

Avid is basically saying that they will take their story directly to their customers and saving $2 million does a great job in giving them the money to send a lot of storytellers to the kinds of users to whom the Avid story and product-line is of great interest. They are also making a move that gives them a way to move outside the calendar that controls so many companies today.

We understand that as one of our very favorite things about the COW Magazine is that it exists outside the calendar. Chasing tradeshow announcements and doing the same kinds of pandering reviews means being perpetually out of date -- to say nothing of irrelevant, since everyone has the same news.  By the time it gets into print, it’s been all over the web and kicked at and prodded from a thousand perspectives.

No, we like to have original content, with stories written exclusively by COW members — stories that look more broadly at how the industry really works, where it’s going, and how to make money in today’s marketplace. That’s Cowtalk. We let CreativeCOW.net take care of the news — news that when announced, is tested and verified or debunked in real time, by the more than 500,000 visitors that come to the COW website every month.

Dowload our March/April "Portable Media" issue here

This is why the letters N, A, and B have almost never appeared together in the COW Magazine. We aren’t chasing news that our members have already told us.  We’re working to answer our user’s questions.

Don't get me wrong, we will use our newsletters and heavily trafficked web community to distribute the industry's news. But we will use Creative COW Magazine for what it does best. Avid is like this also, knowing full well where their market is -- and isn't.

Compare our March/April ‘07 “Portable Media” issue (see right) against the other magazines from that same time NAB 07 time period. The days of tradeshows being the best place to learn, well, most anything has long since passed.

It's the right thing to do
This is one reason we were thrilled to see Avid’s announcement that they were passing on The Big Show this year. They’ll have hospitality suites to accommodate those who need to make multiple big deals in one place — but they’re passing on a big booth in favor oncoming directly to you. Watch for road shows and other area-centric events that bring Avid to you, in settings where your questions can be addressed far better than on the battlefield show floor of NAB.

We’re not surprised to hear that Avid’s customer surveys reflect a desire to skip the show. Most professional customers simply can’t afford the major disruption to their business, while key personnel takeoff for Las Vegas. (Our belief is that it’s Las Vegas itself that has kept the show as popular as it is, when clearly most users really get what they need to know online.)

Avid is taking it a step farther, insuring that their customers see what they need to see by bringing Avid to their town, or by bringing Avid to their local pro reseller.

This is an approach that Avid found to be extremely successful in Europe — one of its most successful global regions under the leadership of Graham Sharp, now VP/GM for Avid Video. We asked Graham for some more details than were in Avid’s press release, including some of the specifics from his experience in Europe -- this is what he told us here at the COW:

“We found much better results by going directly to our customers,” he told us. “We took the money we would have spent on a tradeshow stand and visited many times more customers, with a much more personal experience.

“We wouldn’t have considered this for the US without careful research, but we weren’t surprised to see the same wishes expressed here that we’d seen in Europe.

“Meeting people directly, where they live and work, without distractions, is the right thing to do.”

Sharing the news
We’re also pleased to see Avid step away from the “magic curtain” approach. It places too much emphasis on the regal glory of The Company Behind the Curtain. Tradeshow launch success is partially measured by a company’s ability to conceal its news from its customers. The COW believes in community, the exact opposite of artificially creating distance between people.

The fact is that we like everything about Avid’s decision. It closes that gap between information and customer, it places the emphasis on sharing news rather than concealing it, and it reflects the decentralizing of information that’s the reality of how the world works today, right now, in digital time.

As stated, we won’t have a booth at NAB 2008. Why? Most people there already know our story, and the few who don’t add up to a far too costly number when viewing it on the bottom-line. Instead, we’ll be keeping all the plates spinning at CreativeCOW.net, while keeping our eyes just past the horizon watching for trends — and reporting them here in the pages of Creative COW Magazine.

Ron Lindeboom
Creative COW

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