We all go to trade shows in the belief that customers with money will come and see us and order at the show. Whilst this has rarely been the case, almost all manufacturers and other show sages will tell you that it is the case.

At Emotion, we accepted that a long time ago. Shows are for us, generally marketing activities that we have to do, with questionable returns.

So, we share our marketing budget between shows and other activities. At shows, we recgonise that the right people are there but, we also realise that when our potential customers are there, we are competing for time. (…that is for those who are allowed to attend. When we used our mailer to ask, “Are you going to IBC?” The results came back as follows – 75% No, 25% yes and many of the 25% are manufacturers).

For the few that attend, we are fighting for their attention because, every year, there more exhibitors and so, we have to vie for attention – not easy when the customers are spending less time at the show – rarely do they spend 5 days at the show – most are there for a couple of days.

So, it was a pleasant and ironic surprise that this year, we actually did business whilst we were at IBC. The irony? Well, we did business with people who weren’t actually at IBC. Friday was a long call and demo to a customer in Australia (guess where I am next week), Friday evening was an urgent email from a French customer – please send me a quote ASAP. Saturday was a customer from NY, can we please talk because I want to buy your kit and I need to review the options. Monday was an hour and a half on the phone (from the booth) to close a significant deal. Thank god for internet and telephone

Now…. about the show…

Quite a few of our customers came to visit us, especially at our G&T evenings. So, useful and meaningful discussions were had; and yes, we also spoke about what we actually do – Files and Audio. Cloud deployments was a much talked about topic at IBC. We talked with broadcasters and people at playout facilities that are looking to migrate to the cloud. This is a large subject and it is clearly much more than processing Audio. We were pleased to be a small company that customers thought was important enough to have as a part of their cloud strategy. We have a lot of follow up discussions planned and we’d love to talk more to any of our customers who are looking to move to the cloud – we are fortunate enough to have some of our customers using Engine in the cloud and we look forward to providing innovative solutions in this area. We would love to hear about your experiences or needs – you can reply to this email if you want to share. Dolby Digital and Dolby Digital Plus was another favourite topic at the show. As our customers embrace file-based workflows in all areas, using DD and DD+ in files is becoming of interest and is also a challenge.

What’s your take on Dolby Digital Plus and will your facility be using it in 2018? That’s our IBC wrap up for you. Let me know if you’d like to talk or see a demo of Engine – let’s solve your audio processing, scalability, and redundancy needs.