The online conference is absolute proof that marketing departments abhor a vacuum. For want of an exhibition where companies get to flex their corporate creativity designing super structures bristling with the latest electronic display systems to encase sometimes mundane pieces of technology, companies have been drawn to Zoom, Teams and many of the other conference enabling technologies that have sprung up in the last year. Why? If printers were keen to spend hours watching letterbox sized images in some kind of bizarre Celebrity Squares reboot, something would surely have existed before 2020.
It seems we are today in the middle of the first webinar season of the year. When in a different universe we might be greeting each other at Hunkeler Innovations Days we are instead enduring the droning on of presenters who would be dull and have nothing to say in real life and are now pursuing a career in online anaesthetics. Every monotone pitch is delivered by a man behind a desk in front of a fantasy digital background. At least with a bookshelf there’s some interest in trying to glimpse the household’s reading matter. With a Ted talk there is a chance of remembering a presenter and what has been said. With the talking head on a stick style, chances of recall are vanishingly small.
But marketing departments seem to love them. Just as they love email and other kinds of digital marketing. As if lockdowns were not bad enough we have to suffer poorly prepared presentations that serve no other purpose other than giving some marketing drone something to do, so avoid them having to do some imaginative thinking. Perhaps they can console themselves that 5,000 people registered to participate in a preview day for a virtual Drupa. That is not 5,000 watching every presentation, that’s 5,000 in total. Compare that to the 200,000 visitors that Dusseldorf was last year preparing to welcome. Now there are eight weeks to go until the online-only show opens. Eight weeks to transform printers into avid Zoomonauts. Good luck with that.
Suddenly my heart went thunk
The online conference is absolute proof that marketing departments abhor a vacuum. For want of an exhibition where companies get to flex their corporate creativity designing super structures bristling with the latest electronic display systems to encase sometimes mundane pieces of technology, companies have been drawn to Zoom, Teams and many of the other conference enabling technologies that have sprung up in the last year. Why? If printers were keen to spend hours watching letterbox sized images in some kind of bizarre Celebrity Squares reboot, something would surely have existed before 2020.
It seems we are today in the middle of the first webinar season of the year. When in a different universe we might be greeting each other at Hunkeler Innovations Days we are instead enduring the droning on of presenters who would be dull and have nothing to say in real life and are now pursuing a career in online anaesthetics. Every monotone pitch is delivered by a man behind a desk in front of a fantasy digital background. At least with a bookshelf there’s some interest in trying to glimpse the household’s reading matter. With a Ted talk there is a chance of remembering a presenter and what has been said. With the talking head on a stick style, chances of recall are vanishingly small.
But marketing departments seem to love them. Just as they love email and other kinds of digital marketing. As if lockdowns were not bad enough we have to suffer poorly prepared presentations that serve no other purpose other than giving some marketing drone something to do, so avoid them having to do some imaginative thinking. Perhaps they can console themselves that 5,000 people registered to participate in a preview day for a virtual Drupa. That is not 5,000 watching every presentation, that’s 5,000 in total. Compare that to the 200,000 visitors that Dusseldorf was last year preparing to welcome. Now there are eight weeks to go until the online-only show opens. Eight weeks to transform printers into avid Zoomonauts. Good luck with that.
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