Are the Big Tech Events Ever Coming All the Way Back?
We recently caught a look at registered media / analyst lists for a major information technology tradeshow. Comparing it to a copy of the same event’s registered media / analyst list that we were able to track down in email archives - it was one fifth of the size, and the media skewed much more towards editors and video producers than reporters. To be fair, there were a couple of heavy hitters business press on that list that any tech industry exec would be thrilled to secure time with.
But we’re far enough beyond the Covid shut-down to question whether information technology events are ever going to come all the way back.
In some ways this YoY comparison is unfair because the 2024 version of some of these hasn’t happened yet (so ‘24 looks artificially “down”). But look how dramatically down from the heights of 8-10 years ago we are, in terms of sheer # of authors covering some of these high-flyers:
This is not a great trend for the information technology industry, where much of the relatively sparse product news (relative to consumer tech) has historically been driven by huge tradeshows where products are the news.
Event organizers to varying degrees have often misrepresented attending media / analysts (often including people they invited), and it’s also the case that many media / analysts never intended to attend, but wanted to receive the news coming out around the event and cover it remotely.
But it does feel like the same way commercial real estate is down and out in major metros and may never be the same, that the importance of big tech events is greatly diminished, and their role as tastemakers and the place to be if you needed to be noticed.
All of that said, we routinely hear great dispatches from users about events like KubeCon EU in Paris, where a great concentration of reporters / analysts that matter in cloud-native could be met for productive relationship-building and advancing conversations.
There’s no doubt that much is possible in-person, and that we all need to escape out of inboxes, Zoom and LinkedIn scrolls. But that sense 10 years ago that you had to be at a specific event if you wanted to be relevant in a specific category - that seems to be largely gone, and we’re not sure it’s coming back.
P.s. for any event you are invested in attending, or trying to capture media / analyst interest, keyword searching in TechNews for that event name is a great way to find everyone who is covering it.
