Trade shows – remember them? A blog post by Sean Hannam, Freelance Journalist with over 20 years experience in the tech industry

Trade shows – remember them? I’ve been a journalist in the tech sector for more than 20 years and have attended expos all over the world. But, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, apart from a few webinars and virtual events, my work diary is empty. I never thought I’d write this, but I really miss trade shows.

I’m not missing the hordes of international press all clamouring for a glimpse of the latest products, long days spent traipsing the halls of a soulless venue, back-to-back briefings and the lack of sleep. But I am missing the buzz – finding out first-hand about the latest trends and launches and the chance to network with industry friends and colleagues.

Virtual events and online launches are a good stopgap and they have some definite advantages over physical events, such as severely reducing your carbon footprint and expenses, but they can’t replace them completely. 

Over the past few months, secure digital assets platform PXN has been working with its clients in the gaming industry to help them come up with new and innovative ways to get their messages out there while the doors to physical trade shows and events remain firmly shut.

NVIDIA was due to host 10,000 developers at its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Silicon Valley, California in March of this year – instead, it moved the event online. Company founder and CEO Jensen Huang even delivered a keynote speech that was filmed in his kitchen.

PXN supported the NVIDIA conference by setting up a GTC Electronic Press Kit (EPK) area on its NVIDIA PXN system. This allowed virtual attendees to get early access to all the assets and information from the event, including the keynote speeches.

EGX Rezzed, the video games industry’s indie developer tradeshow, which was due to take place at London’s Tobacco Dock earlier this year, was postponed because of the Covid-19 crisis.  

Sadly, this meant that a lot of the exhibitors missed out on the chance to present their games to press and influencers. To help tackle this, PXN used its digital key distribution service to provide copies of the indie developers’ games to the media and influencers who were due to attend.

E3, the world’s biggest games convention, was cancelled this year. To make up for not being able to use the LA-based event to unveil its latest developments, video games company Ubisoft has announced its Ubisoft Forward (July 12), a digital showcase with exclusive news and reveals. Sony has announced The Future of Gaming to showcase upcoming games that will launch on PlayStation 5. PXN will distribute all the necessary information and assets from the events as soon as the embargoes have been lifted.

In the ‘new normal’, might we see a migration of more events to online, as well as larger shows reducing their size? There could be a healthy mix of virtual and physical events.  One of the main advantages of an online trade show over a ‘real-life’ event is that, hopefully, it’s easier to make sure you don’t miss key announcements. PXN is helping its clients massively with this. When one download link sent to press contains everything a journalist like myself might need to produce coverage of a major announcement, it’s hard to go wrong. 

The future for ‘real-life’ tech events is still uncertain, but now that the tech sector has had to turn to virtual shows, maybe this will start a trend. Exhibitors, organisers and attendees could start weighing up the benefits of online events versus physical ones. Just think of all that shoe leather that could be saved.