As the former marketing communications director for a firewall company, Eric Weaver remembers seeing decreasing returns from the budget and effort put into trade shows. As he tells it:

“We’d drop $30,000 on a booth, another $10,000 on shipping, $20,000 on personnel and maybe $5,000 on promotional schwag – and we’d do at least six or eight shows a year,” says Weaver, who now operates his own consultancy, Brand Dialogue. “But we noticed fewer and fewer leads …”

Though he considered the work really fun “in the context of working your butt off,” marketers became more predatory and attendees increasingly were unwilling to share their contact information. After spending more than $60,000 on a show, his company could come away with as few as 60 sales leads.

Contrast that with an eight-hour online event that Quest Software put on to introduce new tools to support Microsoft Exchange 2007.

According to Quest, more than 600 people attended the event, which included partners such as Microsoft and Unisys, and seven webcasts. The most popular session drew 352 people; attendees stayed in the sessions more than 17 minutes on average and rated the content favorably. The company figured its cost per inquiry about the event was $23, which it said was 30 to 40 percent more cost-effective than its other lead-generation methods.

For the record, no one interviewed for this story believes trade shows are going away or that online events will replace them. But some are concerned about live events’ effectiveness and their relevance.

A number of events have been canceled, moves blamed on companies axing travel in this tight economy. And shows that have gone on have suffered.

• The Consumer Electronics Show in January experienced a 22 percent drop in attendance.
• Germany’s CeBit in March was down nearly 20 percent.
• Even hot technology didn’t insulate Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, where attendance sagged, but not so dramatically.
• Meanwhile, CTIA was down 15 percent.

Joe Federbush, vice president of sales and marketing for event research firm  Exhibit Surveys, says yes, the economy is to blame. But Brian Sommer, president of marketing strategy consultancy TechVentive and a ZDNet blogger, argues that trade shows increasingly suffer from irrelevant content and just plain terrible speakers.

He’s not the only one questioning whether it makes sense to be spending all that money flying displays and people around the world, as IT Business Edge’s Kachina Dunn wrote recently.

There are charges of short-sightedness all around: Organizers concerned only with turning a profit this year, then being able to “flip” the show to a new organizer; vendors similarly laser-focused on a one-time sale rather than nurturing long-term relationships with customers and partners; and attendees more concerned with T-shirts and other freebies than anything they might learn from the experience.

Especially in this tight economy, everyone involved – show organizers, vendors and attendees – have to make a business case for their involvement in trade shows, according to Federbush.

He says show organizers have two responsibilities: to show not only that a lot of bodies will be there, but that they’ll be the target audience for participating vendors. To that end, shows such as Interop and Macworld press their case with statistics.

Sommer, however, sees the problem as show organizers who serve too many masters. Who is the show for, anyway? Is it for vendors and sponsors or is it for those who attend?

He argues that when shows take money from the public, but also from sponsors, they lose focus. Sponsors get to fill up the sessions -- often excruciatingly, he’ll tell you – and the whole thing turns into one long, late-night infomercial.

That stems from another problem, Sommer says: Organizers who are good at the logistics of a show – securing the venue, hiring caterers, etc. – but who know nothing about the subject matter. Through Google, they find the biggest vendors on that topic, then allow anyone who has a slide deck to speak. Others have said sometimes good content isn’t adequately publicized, leading to poor attendance – or perhaps people were put off previously by attending the same lame sessions as Sommer.

Vendors, meanwhile, have to choose the shows with their target audience from an increasing number of events.

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