So Avid won’t have a booth at NAB this year. As usual when an anchor exhibitor and sponsor exits, a few people are talking doom and gloom for the future of the show. A blog over at CreativeCow.net has interesting discussion about the issue.

On the one hand, I think the move by Avid may bode well for us - we’ve been trying to get Avid for a few years to exhibit at our small event. Because our audience of content creators is relatively new to the video editing industry, Avid could reach an untapped audience who hasn’t yet determined their loyalties - 99% of the NAB attendees already have. Dollars no longer allocated to NAB could be up for grabs.

On the other hand, Avid may find their “change of strategy” to meet with potential and current customers directly (through road shows or small meetings in the customer’s offices I’d imagine) may prove difficult. This strategy and argument isn’t new of course - many exhibitors who have pulled out of tradeshows have come to the same conclusion. The trouble is, a major tradeshow like NAB serves the attendees well for one simple reason - they can take 2-3 days and demo all of the products in one fell swoop. They can speak with all of the company representatives, get all their questions answered, and then make an intelligent buying decision while all of that information is fresh in their minds.

If the top 20 companies decided to take the road show model, and I’m a potential customer, I then have to attend 20 different events or have twenty different meetings in my office over months and months. At the end, when I’m finally ready to take all the information I’ve gathered and make a buying decision, I’d find myself saying, “Now did product X that we demo’d a few months ago have feature Y? I can’t remember now!”

Tradeshows work because they save people time - plain and simple. The pendulum of show participation swings back and forth for all industries. My guess: Avid will be back - just like IBM returned to CES after not participating for several years.