It comes down to one simple thing, money - tradeshows are expensive for a
vendor to attend. Therefore as a vendor we all look to leverage the most
from a show. It has been proven that one of the most effective methods for
drawing in attendees is a live presentation.

Because there are so many booths and attendees have so little time you've
got about 8-10 minutes to get your message across as effectively as
possible. Over the years we have done presentations in several ways at a
variety of shows - but it is always a direct presentation about the products
and solutions. While the huckster style presentation may be entertaining and
it may draw a crowd and you get a great deal of leads, it is usually way
noisier and by the end of the presentation the crowd will most likely
remember the magician not the message. Case in point; I watched the
presentations around our booth and I still can't tell you what the vendors
were selling, but the gameshow at one was fun and magician at the other did
some entertaining tricks.

At many shows we try and work with the booths around us trying to ensure
that we are not attacking their booths with noise from our presentation, and
we also try and coordinate presentations so that we are not overlapping with
presentations around us, unfortunately not all vendors are willing to
cooperate. At one show we had a huckster style presenter from another booth
start his presentation in the middle of ours and was trying to get the
attention of people in our booth - trying to lure them away from our
presentation.

Unfortunately as more and more booths do presentations the ambient noise
level increases -  thus higher wattage amplifiers are implemented.
Amplifiers are a fact of life at a show. One possible solution is to limit
the decibel output allowed from a booth during, however this will require
monitoring/policing/fines by show management.

Robert Hartley
Senior Product Manager
Attachmate Open Systems Team


-----Original Message-----
From: Stan Sieler [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, August 23, 1999 2:57 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: HPWORLD 2000 proposal: NO AMPLIFIERS!


Hi,

As an attendee at HP WORLD 99 (and many prior ones), I'd like to
make a simple proposal that would make life nicer for all vendor show
attendees *and* vendors:

   Interex should ban (audio) amplifiers from the show.

This means *all* means of amplifying sound!

The goal is to reduce the sound level and to allow people to actually
hear each other!

(As a compromise, if a booth built a soundproof room, they should be
able to have an amplifier in it, *if* you can't hear it from outside the
booth.)

Yes, you could attempt to set a decible level instead ... but that
leaves it open to measurement problems, interpretation, and other
types of debate/indecision/impreciseness/failure.   I'd recommend against
this!

--
Stan Sieler                                          [log in to unmask]
                                         http://www.allegro.com/sieler/