Whatever happened to the notion of the virtual event? EW speaks to Ken Clayton, director at event badging and registration company, RefTech, and asks what role online showplaces play today.
There could well be a future for virtual exhibitions or the likes of them but anybody who understands the exhibition business knows that there is now and never has been any use for virtual trade shows.
There have been people punting the idea of virtual exhibitions for close to 15 years to my knowledge. The fact that none of the promoters has managed to make them work yet should be proof enough that the whole idea is a nonsense in the trade show market.
So why won’t they work? To answer that we need to consider why people go to exhibitions. It might be to see what’s new in their industry or profession. It might be to meet people in their industry that they haven’t met since the last exhibition. It might be because there’s a chance that they’ll make new contacts who could be of use. It might be to find a solution to a specific problem. It might be because there’s a chance of finding something as they cruise the aisles that they didn’t know existed; but which could be of use to them.
As a result, people are happy to give up half a day or more in order to visit an exhibition. There is absolutely no possibility that they will devote that much time to sitting in front of a computer screen wandering up and down the aisles of a virtual exhibition.
The surprise is that organisers thought it was worth investigating in the first place. It’s another example of the sort of problem that afflicts so much technology in the exhibition and meetings industries: virtual exhibitions could be wonderful, especially if teamed with a headset that enables you to ‘move around’ the virtual show.
Anybody anywhere in the world would be able to see the ‘Sacred silver used by the Huguenot communities’ event offered by the UK’s V&A museum in 2011. In that context, virtual exhibitions have huge potential but suggesting that this technology could be an alternative to a trade show is diverting resources down a dead end. Virtual exhibitions have no place in the trade or consumer show markets.
This was first published in issue 3/2013 of EW. Any comments? Email exhibitionworld@mashmedia.net
