The Risks in Announcing Your New Product at an Event

Many vendors use the timing of an industry event as the gaiting factor for the launch of their new product. Without question, the ability to get a product in front of a concentrated audience of the target customer is extremely valuable.

But for most vendors, does it really make sense to *announce* the product at the event?

There's an irrational perception out there that new products announced at events are automatically swept into the limelight ... and closely covered by the journalists in attendance. CEOs and sales / marketing VPs who make large investments in their company's "presence" at the event generally assume that investment carries a guarantee of publicity.

But when you look at the news that comes out of events, typically the sort of 'perfect PR scenario' (an avalanche of media coverage) will only happen to a very select percentage of the vendors in attendance (usually those with the most established brand, the largest presence, etc.). For the remainder of the vendors in attendance, it is very easy to have a new product announcement at the event met with underwhelming interest.

What are some of the factors that lead to underwhelming coverage at events?:

• Journalists pulled in many different directions - despite your best efforts to set up on-site briefings with journalists at the event to demo your new product, be prepared for a healthy % not to show up. Why? Missed flights, different news priorities, oversleeping, forgetting, blowing you off, you name it ... for some reason, scheduling snafus occur at a much greater rate at events.
• Press list misrepresents the reality of who registered - the "pre-registered" press lists that events circulate to exhibitors are often not the list of folks actually registered to attend, but rather the list of journalists that have been invited. After the fact, when you compare the event's list of supposed "pre-registered" journalists with the list of folks that actually filed stories -- it's typically a very small percentage.
• You have no idea what huge announcements will be made by other vendors - Let's say you're at a large IT event. If a vendor of the IBM, Cisco, HP, Intel caliber pulls the curtains on a major new product -- already from the get-go, 75% of the available media coverage just got sucked out of the room, and now you're battling 100 other vendors for the remaining 25%. Major product announcements by major product vendors typically trump everything else (and do you want to compete against that with your product announcement)?
• Other news (not related to event) can supersede event coverage - Sometimes a journalist won't show up to the event because something more newsworthy has happened that their editor has assigned them to.
• Coverage you *do* get tends to be mere mentions in larger stories - The product stories that do get written at events tend to be more of the round-up variety, where numerous new products are mentioned in the same story. There are a few full-blown product stories, sure. But the majority of coverage that a company can reasonably expect is minor mentions.

It's great to parade your new product around at industry events. But when possible, vendors should try to time the announcement of the product for *before* the important industry event. By briefing your target journalists prior to, you dodge all of the scheduling woes, you don't have to compete with all of the other noise at the event, and the stories that do get written about you tend to be more in-depth. And often, if you mention during the interview that you will be demoing the product for the first time at the event, you will get another mention (as one of the new products on display) when that journalist files the story at the event itself.

Image courtesy of Stuart Yeates' photostream on flickr creative commons.