AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) came out in May of 1997. Unfortunately for all us marketers today, an AIM chat room is the model on which the 2020 virtual booth experience is built.
This may be a little bit of a marketer rant, but I’m not too thrilled with the experience — both on the user and the vendor side — of how virtual booths are being implemented at virtual events.
I give event organizers a lot of slack. In fact, I’ve worked in digital events and have helped produce multi-day conferences from 200 to thousands of attendees. One of these events (with 2,000+ attendees) was produced end-to-end in just 2 months after a speed switch from live to virtual because of COVID.
I know that events is a difficult, stressful industry with incredibly high stakes (mess up the event and you’ve…messed up the event! There is no do-over or “quick, pull down the ad and switch out the graphic” for an event!). And COVID has really amped that stress up by about 10000%, especially because many event organizers had to change their entire business model to be fully virtual – when many had never done virtual events at all!
So, I don’t take event production lightly. It is a grind, and I feel for event organizers, I really do.
That said…from the marketer’s perspective, it is ridiculous to pay thousands of dollars to *just* get a virtual booth and a list of emails for sponsoring an event.
I said this 4 months ago, when I was entering into my first virtual event sponsorship after the rug had been pulled out from all of us. It was an incredibly unsatisfactory experience: rushed, built on crummy technology, and with very little training. But I expected that, given the newness of everything.
Now we are 6 months in. Why are there not better virtual booth options yet?
Who is picking these virtual booth technologies?!
Glitches. Chat-only interfaces. No alerts when someone enters the room. Not being able to pull metrics on how many people downloaded a specific product sheet you spent time uploading to the virtual booth.
Virtual booths are like 1997 AOL Instant Messenger, except worse, because I remember that refreshing your friends list at least let you know who was actually online.
The virtual booth experiences across vendor platforms have proven that user experience is not a priority when vendors are picking booths. In fact, budget must have been one of the only considerations.
No reason to visit a virtual booth.
The biggest problem with virtual booths is there’s no reason to visit one.
None. Nada. Zip.
They’re boring. They exist to sell you something. You’re going to be bombarded with people trying to enter a “private chat” with you. Why bother? And why bother answering any of these faceless entities trying to chat with you until you pop over to another tab?
And on the marketing/vendor perspective, you can’t build relationships via a 5-second chat at a virtual event. And I haven’t seen ANY virtual booths choose a video STREAM option – wouldn’t that be the lowest hanging fruit? That we all cam together at least as you stroll the booths? Like at a live event?
Maybe digital matchmaking? Digital games? Something, anything, other than the completely uncreative attempt to recreate the experience of a “booth” that ends up looking like a 2-d version of the most boring Pokemon card in the world.
Now I have to pay more for a weird stunt (or speaking)!
So, don’t get me wrong. I am very much pro weird stunt. A well-done, attention-grabbing guerilla activation is *chef’s kiss*. A cyber one is even more *chef’s kiss*.
However, now that must be factored into your budget if you have a virtual booth. Now you must market your virtual booth harder than you’ve ever marketed your physical booth. At your physical booth, a tchotchke or cool giveaway or in-person speech or book-signing could draw a crowd. Your people had names, faces, voices. You could make a friend or two!
At a virtual booth? Sure, I guess you could make some crazy-looking video, but: budget, resources, and the chance that people even visit your booth to see it? Low.
You need to create your own trail of breadcrumbs to the booth and the only way I see it is in also speaking at the event. So budget that in too.
Last minute madness.
If you’re like every cybersecurity marketer I know, you’re not exactly just hanging out with a ton of free time on your hands. My schedule is packed.
Yet, at least twice, from 2 different vendors, I’ve been given access to the virtual room just 2 days in advance of the event. This is all the time received for set up, testing, getting the lay of the land. Plus…training the sales team on how the day-of operations will work!
This points back to the platform side of things. Are the platforms that are being chosen by these vendors literally “booked” until the previous event ends? Aren’t these…online? Why can’t we get demo environments or access to “booths” more than 2 days in advance?
Who’s tech support during the event?
It’s the event producer, right?
Haha! No!!! Of course not! Why would you even think that??
Nobody is tech support during the event, duh!
Even though you painstakingly provided all the user details, images in the right file types, and “set your booth up” correctly by working late nights after getting the criteria for the booth 1 week in advance and access to the booth 2 days before…something is wrong.
And too bad! Nobody is going to answer you. Even if the producers did, they don’t know how to fix it. So you’re stuck.
At a live event, you could mention a booth mistake to someone on the floor. Here, all complaints go into cyberspace.
But you still get a list of emails!
A guaranteed list of emails is not enough. And hear me out on this.
Just because we had a booth at a virtual event does not mean this list of people want anything to do with my company or are qualified. There are a lot of ways to get lists of cold leads. I could download one from ZoomInfo. I could buy one from one of those weird scammers that email me 20x day.
These options would be better because this would not waste MY TIME and my TEAM’S TIME sitting in front of a computer screen trying to catch people as they lag in and out of the booth!
(I’d also like to point out how long it takes to get email lists. No more handheld badge scanner downloads…now – if you even get the list of people who “visited” your booth – you must wait for the event producers to email it over…days later…)
Virtual booths are a major waste of time.
Overall, the issues with virtual booths are clear: the lack of alignment (or simple due diligence) from these industry event producers to provide ANY reason for the sponsors to sponsor a virtual booth, without also selling them a speaking spot.
It’s a lack of care in planning, picking their booth software vendors, and lack of support, training, and tech support.
I’d rather pay less, have my materials included in a virtual goodie bag, my name big on the screen, play my video in the “waiting room” before the keynote, and just get the email list delivered…anything except for this mega time-waster that is virtual booths!
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