commbasics

The vision of the market most companies have is akin to a many walking toward a cliff holding a full-length mirror in front of them. Everything looks great until they run out of land. I got some interesting feedback on my post regarding UBM’s #EELive event both negative and positive reactions.  I said I would have more to say on this and here it is. It’s not UBM’s fault if your industry conference goes bad.  It’s yours. UBM fought the good fight to deliver to B2B industry what it needed, which was an independent source of news and analysis for many years.  About five years ago, it decided to give their customers what they demanded, which was a place to repeat the same marketing collateral they send out to their customers, both on line and in person.  UBM found this a much more profitable business as they saw their marketing services eclipse editorial in revenue.  Today, editorial brings in about 7 percent of the total revenue and trade shows generate a w...

Wanted to give my homies at RTC a shout out about the upcoming schedule of EDA Tech Forum Events  announced last week, primarily because I wanted to point out that this is yet another evolution of marketing that I think we are facing. With travel budgets being cut dramatically, it's getting harder for engineers to get justification to go to many of the traditional shows unless they can show relevance.  Organizations like RTC Group and Techinsights are trying to provide that justification, but in very different ways. Techinsights has made a strong effort to compartmentalize their big event, ESC , so that attendees going for specific purposes can find what they are looking for more easily, and vendors can better target the right customers.  This way engineers can go to the bean counters and say, "Look, just what we need." RTC, on the other hand, is taking the conference to the street where you live with multiple sites and very specific topics, and with majo...