Swagless In Santa Clara
Contemplating the lead-gen bling orgy and why we can’t have nice things
On a shelf in my closet is a gallon-size ziplock bag, busting at the seams with conference badges that date back to my first Usenix Tech conference in 2001. Newly added among them is another first: my badge from the 2014 Velocity Santa Clara conference; the only Exhibitor badge in my collection.
Below that shelf, on the floor, is a dusty gym-bag full of conference swag — baubles and shiny things that blink, and flash and beg to be fondled. I used to be one of those who went booth-to-booth collecting it all so I could bring it home with me like treasure, proudly offering it to apathetic nieces and nephews. And now, here it all sits— more pens and mints, and stress balls than I’ll ever have paper, bad-breath, or stress enough for. Maybe one day I’ll find a charity for writers who are stressed-out by their chronic halitosis.
For the last few years, I’ve avoided the vendor hall in the same way I would avoid the tall grass if I were a Pokemon. I vaguely remember a time when it was actually just a hall full of vendors, but now it is a jungle filled with obsessive-compulsive salespeople who’ve been given badge-scanners, and pointed in the general direction of the conference attendees with orders to collect them all.
Last month however, having joined their ranks, I returned to the Vendor Hall to man a booth for the first time and hopefully talk about engineering stuff. I can’t say I was excited exactly, but I always appreciate a new perspective, so I was sincerely interested to try out being inside a booth for once, instead of quickly striding by while avoiding eye contact on my way to the free beer.
My company is an atypical vendor. For one thing we quite intentionally break one of the cardinal rules of conference-boothery: we don’t have any swag. You read that correctly; not so much as a single logo-laden squishy ball. Our booth consists solely of a banner, a single screen displaying our product, and a table for giving demos using whatever laptops we happened to bring with us.
On the face of it, I agree that it seems unwise. Here you are, having paid for this space to stand in, and you’re hobbling yourself compared with everyone else by not participating in the swagfest. On the first day, I admit I was bothered by our lack of bling, and standing there, feeling ignored in a darkly-colored booth while thousands of brilliant engineers flocked tither and yon in search of ill-fitting t-shirts and cleverly packaged sugar-free gum, I began to panic ever so slightly. I felt acutely that we were losing at vendorboothing — that I was in the midst of a stadium-sized game of hungry hungry hippos wherein people were marbles, points were all that mattered, and I had been left with no realistic means of winning.
So yes, I’m ashamed to admit it, but within 5 minutes of the doors opening on the first day, I had transformed myself into everything I’ve ever hated. I stood in the hallway trying to slow the flow of traffic. I desperately begged people to talk to me. I chased people down who accidentally looked in my general direction. I was awkward and creepy and weird. I laughed at stupid jokes, and talked about the weather and sportsball. I heard myself say things — markety things — things the likes of which are almost certainly lifetime banishable offenses from every decent operations team in the world.
The turning point came sometime after lunch, when a man approached our booth. I’d seen him coming because he was quite obviously visiting every booth in sequential order. When he stopped in front of ours, he stood to face our CEO while looking down at a card he was holding. With vacant, disinterested eyes, he looked at our sign, then down at the card again, and then up at our CEO and said in a heavy Russian Accent: “you are not on list”. He then turned and walked away.
I found out later he was playing “Vendor Bingo”, and that we could have been “on list” for several thousand dollars. I couldn’t help but imagine, had we been on that bingo-card, the CEO of our company investing his time to explain to this man the whole of who we were and what we’d built, only to be handed a bingo card to sign, and in that moment I fully realized the colossal absurdity of everything that had been going on around me all day. The massive cultish insanity that marketers refer to as “lead generation”.
Ever fascinated by the absurd, I lightly interrogated a few nearby vendors about their lead-gen efforts. One vendor — after I shared my suspicion that we both might be standing chest-deep in bullshit — assured me that lead-gen was all very science. “Now we’re getting somewhere” I thought, and picking up one of their blinky refrigerator magnets, I asked him something along the lines of “Then why blinky refrigerator magnets specifically? I mean like as opposed to flashlight keychains? Has anyone done the math on what makes more leads?”. I was honestly curious, but this question seemed to anger him, and in lieu of an answer he asked what we were giving away. When I explained that we didn’t have any swag, he audibly gasped and responded: “How are you supposed to get people to talk to you?!”
C’mon, on what planet is this normal? I mean, is blinky refrigerator magnets how you form all of your substantive relationships with potential customers? Is that really the best means to initiate an earnest and contemplative discourse? By the numbers, what percentage of your current customers showed up for the blinky magnets and then stayed for your distributed golang-specific stack-tracing SAAS application?
I’m nowhere near the first person to rant about what the vendor hall has become. Nor do I expect an impassioned plea for sanity to have any effect on what goes on there. Many newer conferences eschew the hall entirely at this point, and I suspect its days are numbered, but for what it’s worth, people do actually stop at our booth to ask about the data they’re seeing on the monitor. Engineers wander by, see engineering, and stop to talk about it. The booth model still works if you don’t layer it with stuffed animals and dancing wind-up robots.
Can we infer something from the ridiculous notion that no one will talk to you about technology unless you gift them a branded jumprope? We already know the vendor hall has been so obnoxious for so long that it’s basically irrelevant, but if this is true, then it follows that the “lead-gen” circus is not just a huge waste of time, but actually introduces impedance between vendors and their potential customers. Let me rephrase that: your swag is probably driving away customers.
Don’t get me wrong, the swag is lovely and fun, and I like it too, hell, I signed up for like three raffles (two pebbles and an ipad), and I grabbed a lightsaber for my buddy Paul, but vendor to vendor, I humbly suggest that the people who engaged with you in a meaningful way, did so in spite of the luminescent cubes and battleaxes in your booth, not because of them — that, in order to talk to you, your real leads had to wade past tourists like me who were just there to sign up for the raffle, and wait in line behind the bingo players.
So maybe next time, leave the swag at home at see what happens. Years ago, there was probably a time when a branded hoodie could have meaningfully boosted your lead-gen, but I think it’s safe to say that time has past. Don’t take my word for it, if you’re the kind of vendor who can spring for a thirty-thousand dollar corner booth and eight grand in branded-digital-dice, then you’re also the kind of vendor who could make an effort to measure how many of those leads turn into customers, and compare that with how many customers you get when you aren’t air-bazooking t-shirts into the hallway.
Just a thought.
