A 2,000-Year-Old Industry That's Overdue for Disruption (and It isn't Prostitution)

This is the age of disruption.

— Sebastian Thrun

Q: How many industries have remained the same for 2,000 years?

A: Two. 

The first is the "oldest profession," prostitution; the second, the trade-show industry.

That's rather remarkable when you consider the Product Lifecyle Theory.

The theory assumes obsolescence and disruption are baked in, and that only continuity in consumer tastes can forestall a product's inevitable decline.

We know the tastes matched by prostitution haven't changed much—if at all—since Caligula's time. They continue unabated.

Perhaps the same can be said of trade shows. 

As the Ancient Romans did, people still want to meet "face to face" to swap stories and do business, pandemic or no.

The question isn't whether they'll want to continue to do so, but how much? How much will they want to meet face to face—and at what cost and inconvenience?

Show organizers are counting on the answer being a lot.

But their confidence may be based on a pre-virus worldview.

Businesspeople post-virus are favoring smaller, state and regional shows to get their "face-to-face fix," shunning large confabs and southern hot spots.

The days of large national and international shows may at long last be numbered—and their audiences easy pickings for some disruptor waiting in the wings.

I'm hardly the first industry-watcher to say tradeshow organizers' business model is overdue for disruption, and won't be the last.

But 2,000 years is a hell of a long time to grow without innovation.

You Cannot Download Experience

 

We event dinosaurs—who've witnessed and dealt with the long- and short-term effects on face-to-face marketing of recessions, travel-bans, terrorism, pandemics and the web—are frustrated by the industry's vivid demonstration of inaction and incompetence in reacting to Covid-19.

Experience stems from bad judgments. 

But in a youth-oriented, know-it-all society like ours, the lessons learned from bad judgments made in the past are considered trivial; and the dinosaurs who made them, annoying.

It's too bad you cannot download experience with a click.

The Party's Over

 

That's the great part of capitalism, gales of creative destruction.

— Larry Kudlow

Instead of wringing their hands over the walloping face-to-face has taken, eventpeeps should be celebrating Covid-19 with Larry Kudlow: "creative destruction" has decimated their industry.

And now, after three successive quarters of negative growth, it's time for a sober assessment of where the events industry is heading in 2021 and beyond.

It's heading to oblivion.

Yes, the industry plummeted off a cliff in February, once the organizers of Mobile World Congress called it quits. That event was the first of the big dominoes to topple; the rest of the western world's large confabs quickly followed suit—or wished they had.

But Covid-19 was only a catalyst, accelerating an already-irreversible downward trend. 

As a viable marketing channel, events had peaked before the virus ever left Wuhan, and were inching toward decline. That's for two reasons:

• Exhibitors are done with them. Events are all the things a CMO shuns when choosing a marketing channel. They're expensive, unproductive, unpredictable, unaccountable, unrepeatable, unmeasurable, unsustainable, wasteful and—sad, but true—too much about the salespeople having fun.
  
  
• Attendees, too. Events are all things an attendee shuns when choosing a means to educate and improve herself. They're all of the above—and noisy, to boot.

Eventpeeps predict the channel that's provided their livelihoods will one day rise, phoenixlike, from coronavirus's ashes.

But the hard truth is: it won't. It can't. Covid-19 has clobbered it.

The party's over.