Tony Hallett's After These Messages: Making a stand

This column was started as a way to comment on what IT and comms vendors are trying to say in their advertising in newspapers, on the radio, through the internet and, above all, on TV. Even that dubious quality mugshot you can see has me holding a remote control. (Yes, that's what it is.) However, one major way companies try to get across their message is at trade shows and events - and this is a form of promotion that only gets a cursory mention.

This week at the ITU Telecom World 2003 show in Geneva it's tempting to make all kinds of assumptions from the presence (or, in some cases, lack of presence) of major companies. These days the whole game goes beyond dolly birds tending stands and is about a pretty sophisticated model of getting the right buzz around a location - a location where partners, potential clients, the media and others should all want to be.

Plenty of marketing bigwigs question the viability of large shows these days – the reason for some of the absentees. Focused, select events are instead in vogue. But that means many of the industry's big shows give more of an opportunity for smaller companies to shine.

They do sometimes resort to any attention-grabbing trick - magic shows, freebies and, yes, the dolly birds again - but the minnows are arguably getting more attention now. Some are even getting better at exhibiting.

For the larger players, gone are the days when a five-story stand is a sign of innovation. Who were they kidding? It was always more just a sign of money to burn. Campaigns that are integrated, plugged in to media coverage of an event and perhaps services such as wireless LAN access, undoubtedly get more notice.

Some of the large vendors from East Asia are still managing to attract large numbers of visitors to pretty big constructions, at the ITU event and others, but they are often companies that also know consumer electronics and inevitably have cutting edge multimedia technology on show.

This year, Korean martial arts experts, a Malaysian puppet show and futuristic demos of tech in cars and in the home did a lot to pull in the punters. The overall show would have indeed been much poorer without the effort made by the likes of LG, NTT, Panasonic, Samsung and ZTE.

Could it be that they know something many of their American and European vendors don’t? More likely it’s a sign of another decade of growth for these companies. The tech bubble of the 1990s largely left many Far Eastern firms in the shade of Silicon Valley giants and European successes such as Nokia, SAP and Vodafone.

However, now there seems to be much more emphasis on usefulness rather than the technology itself. This plays into the hands of those with a history of serving up consumer electronics to the masses and is an approach all the Western ICT vendors are now grappling with, even for relatively complex offerings.

So put together a region in resurgence, wares that lend themselves to a flash stand (try looking at a server on a stand, then check out video over a mobile device – no competition), and a philosophy of simplicity and it wouldn’t be a huge leap for people to think they’ve been to ITU Telecom Asia 2004 a year early.