RCKen

My Feedback: (9)

Gentlemen,
I normally do not participate in the discussions here in the AMA forums, and you all know why. However, since I have direct knowledge to contribute to this one post right here I do want to weigh in and post something that will add into your discussion.

Back "in the day" of print these conventions were "THE PLACE" for everybody to go to announce their new products. The big guys like Hobbico and Horizon would wait for Toledo to roll out new products and would do so in the magazines. And the "little guys" would sell their grandmother to get a booth at the convention and then they would beg, kick, and steal to get a magazine in front of their booth to interview (good) or take a picture (golden). The write-ups in these magazines were what all of us waited for so that we could read about all the new stuff coming out. Then along came the internet and in the infancy of the internet RCU and RC Groups would send teams to the shows and we basically replaced the magazines. The best part was that we were no longer limited by the constraints of print and we could do as many videos of big and little guys as we wanted to, it didn't matter. So we had coverage of lots of everything. And this went on for quite a few years. But then the vendors at these shows started figuring out that they didn't need the magazines, RCU, or RC Groups to announce their products, they could do their own product announcements using the internet. So the importance of these shows started to become less and less. They didn't need to come to the show to in order to find a vehicle to get the word about their product out. They could do it themselves just as well, and they could do it on their own timeline and not have to wait for a scheduled convention.

I completely lost track of how many times I have been to Toledo covering that show. But I can tell you this much. The last time that RCU was there at the show, neither Hobbico nor Horizon had any new products to announce at that show. That's how big a part the internet played for both of them. They had already announced all of their own products. Also, the show attendance continued to drop every year. The first time I went to Toledo on Saturday afternoon you could not move on the floor it was so crowded, we had to plan our movements very carefully. The last year we were there moving around on Saturday afternoon was done with ease. We finally pulled the plug on doing coverage of the show simply because of what has been said above, cost. The cost to send a team to Toledo, feed them, and put them up in a hotel compared viewerships on the videos that result from the show just wasn't worth it any more. And it all boiled down to their wasn't anything new from a lot of the vendors. If we were able to go and bring back lots of video that people can see stuff that is brand new then that would be a different story, but unfortunately that is not the case. So that's why we pulled the plug on covering Toledo.

Now, this is simply Ken's crystal ball. This isn't anything official from on high. But my prediction is that the Toledo show is a dying breed. I watched it decline in the over 10 years that I attended and I see how other shows are declining around the country. People are getting like you say above. What's it worth to spend all the money to attend when I can get a better bargain buying online. I'm not seeing anything new at the show now because I can see that online as well. So why spend all the money to go to the show. I don't know how long it's going to take for them to die, but I predict that we are going to see these conventions go away over the years.

Ok. Now I will get off my soapbox. Like I said. This does not mean I will start participating in the AMA forum. I only posted here because of the first hand knowledge of what we did covering The Toledo Show and how it related to the subject being discussed.

Ken