Three lines vanished off my calendar in three weeks. Mobile World Congress went first, on the twelfth of February. Facebook pulled F8 a week ago Thursday. Google canceled I/O on Tuesday.
By Wednesday morning two different clients had asked me the same question in slightly different words. What do we do with the booth budget.
It is a fair question. It is also the wrong one, because it assumes the booth was doing one thing that the budget can go buy somewhere else.
If your brand's presence for the year fit on a conference schedule, you did not have a marketing plan. You had a travel itinerary with a logo on it.
Here's the part that gets lost. A booth bundles three separate things, and most people are about to replace the wrong one.
One, concentrated attention. Four thousand people who care about your category, in one building, with nothing else to do. That is genuinely hard to manufacture, and you are not going to manufacture it with a webinar.
Two, accident. The hallway conversation, the person you met in line for bad coffee, the competitor who told you something over a drink he should not have. Nobody has ever built a channel plan that produces accidents on schedule. This is the real loss, and I would rather say so than pretend a virtual lobby fixes it.
Three, a deadline. Nobody lists this one and it is the only one you fully control. The demo got finished in March because the show was in March. The positioning got settled because somebody had to write the booth copy by a date. Half of what a conference produces is produced before anyone gets on a plane.
So keep the date. Ship the thing on the day you were going to announce it. Write the announcement you would have made from a stage and put it somewhere people already are, which for most of you is an email list you have been neglecting since October.
What I would not do is stream the keynote. A keynote works in a room because the room agreed to sit down. At a desk, forty minutes of a person talking through slides is not an event, it is a video nobody finishes. Cut it into the four things it actually says and let people read them.
Your quarter is not canceled. Your itinerary is.
You had a travel itinerary with a logo on it.
I have karaoke on Tuesday, at the same sticky-floored place in Southeast where the host calls everybody baby. Forty people agreeing to be in one room is a rarer thing than I used to think, and I have started noticing it. That is also what a conference was. The work, thankfully, was never the room.