The CES2021 Event Experience “Sans” People

CES 2021 goes cyber
If the headline in the WSJ wasn’t shocking enough, The World’s Largest Tech Show Trades Las Vegas for Cyberspace, then the financial implications of that move are nothing short of staggering.

No 170,000 humans buzzing around the exhibits wearing their “paid for” event badges, and a severe booth-shearing of exhibitors from 4500 to 1500, turned the Vegas Strip into a dollar-starved wasteland of unsold CES chotchke. The economic impact of losing $291 million, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, was a bitter pill to swallow.  Not to mention the airlines and the near ghost town called McCarron Airport.

“All of that spending has been lost this year, and ‘just when we need it the most,’” said Alan Feldman, a distinguished fellow at UNLV’s International Gaming Institute. ‘I can think of no other convention of the size and scope and impact of CES,’ he added.”

Back in February, a CNBC headline shouted out the numbers and the threat worldwide: Coronavirus fears are battering the $2.5 trillion trade show industry. $2.5 trillion! That’s more than the GDP of Italy.

CNBC gathered its bodacious trillions from the research Oxford Economics conducted for the Events Industry Council’s 2018 report, Global Economic Significance of Business Events.

With the World Health Organization looking at June to September 2021 for vaccines to offer some respite from the pandemic, and then thereafter to December as a tip-toe return to live events, major disruption is in the cards for every event producer.

CES, the big daddy of all tradeshows, wisely decided to go cyber for 2021. Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), owner of CES, must be babbling in his sleep over lost revenue and battered prestige. And no Gary’s Book Club to boot! Yikes, what’s happening?

Disrupting the events industry
A year or two or three from now will tradeshows and conferences have reconvened their live offerings with throngs of attendees returning elbow to elbow at near-endless rows of exhibitor booths?

Or, will the pandemic have forever changed what it means to have an event?

Maybe a little bit of both? Maybe a lot of the latter?

Tradeshows, probably for the first time since the 1970s, have been disrupted beyond return. It’s looking more and more like the effects of plague-constrained events will be long lived; that words like cyber, remote, Zoom, and virtual will enter the event industry’s lexicon permanently.

Shapiro, in a Klaxoon interview in December, was resigned to the massive change as well as enthusiastic about new outcomes.  Expanding the CES footprint, enabling more people worldwide than ever to get to key notes and conference presentations without jet lag and without any financial sag, were big plusses for him. So much so, in fact, that he’s looking at a CES hybrid live/virtual event for 2022. If CES is going the hybrid route, most others will follow the CES model.

Bari Baumgardner, founder of Sage Event Management, sent me an email saying:

“The year 2020 was hard for live events. In fact, it was darn near impossible. In the weeks following March 13th, 2020, our company had almost every single event for 2020 cancel.

“We were faced with two choices: Close the business, or pivot.

See related:
The Future of the Trade Show Industry
Is the $2.5 trillion trade show industry too big to fail? Has COVID created online competition that will permanently disrupt, or maybe even doom, the future of “too big to fail” trade shows?