Let me take off my shoes and wade into some deep water here. There’s a lot of evidence out there that marketers are losing faith in print as an effective advertising vehicle, so naturally, as a publishing company, this is something that we think about a lot. If we had any evidence that an online publication was an effective vehicle for a trade show daily, we could abandon our very expensive printing and shipping of paper publications, deliver the content online, drop our advertising rates and still make a profit doing what we love to do best. We’d all be happy.
The problem is that despite the documented evidence that paper publications might be less effective as advertising vehicles in other contexts, we see a lot of evidence that paper still works for the show daily. Attendees still take them when we hand them out, and our advertisers still see more traffic at their booths than nonadvertisers do.
I’m not sure of all the reasons why our advertisers see more traffic at their booths, but I believe that it has something to do with how our publications are typically distributed. For most shows, our dailies generally reach show attendees at their hotels, either at the doors of their rooms, in the hotel lobbies, or outside as they board the shuttle buses to go to the convention center. These attendees peruse the magazines either while they’re drinking their morning coffee, while they’re waiting in the hotel lobbies to board their buses, or while their bus is winding its way through the traffic to the convention center. I suspect that having this quiet time with the publication adds to the “stickiness” of the marketing messages it contains.
New research on how memory works tells us that distractions interfere with the brain’s ability to convert memory from the short-term storage that lasts only a matter of seconds into long-term memories that can last a lifetime. A marketing message is more likely to be remembered if it reaches its audience at a time when they’re interested in receiving it and when there are fewer distractions around. With an online publication, those distractions are the email, the access to the Web, and the apps and files stored on the device. At the show itself, those distractions are conference sessions, the multiplicity of booths in the exhibit hall, the rush of so much to do packed into just a few days, and the inevitable noise and confusion of the event.
What it all comes down to is that there’s still no substitute for the simple act of handing a trade show attendee a paper publication at a time when he has the leisure and the inclination to sit down and read it. As a trade show exhibitor, an effective advertisement in a paper show daily that reaches the right person at the right time simply makes all the difference in the world to who’s going to show up at your booth. Call Consumer Electronics Daily News at 520.721.1300.
Consumer Electronics Daily News is a publication of the Oser Communications Group, which is solely responsible for its content. It is not affiliated with International CES or the Consumer Electronics Association and is not an official publication for the show. CES and CEA are trademarks of the Consumer Electronics Association.
