Novell Brainshare 2006: Booth Babes and Giveaways

Last week I attended the 2006 Novell Brainshare in SLC, UT. This was the first conference of this type that I have attended. It was an eye opening event for me seeing the benefits and disadvantages of attending a conference. Novell did a great job with the event as far as a sponsor is concerned. There was a lot of traffic through the sponsor hall and even an event one night in the sponsor hall. But the most interesting aspect of the event to me was Booth Babes and Giveaways.

Booth Babes, by my definition, are the attractive paid help that boost your booth from a nice piece of marketing to a magnet for bored geeks. Sure these girls might have some product knowledge, and might even know enough about the products to peak interest and boost sales. But the real reason for Booth Babes: stop a geek in there tracks and get them to your booth.

The best example I have is Tuesday night at Brainshare. In the sponsor hall there was Disco night. This included a 6 foot disco ball, music and all the food, beer and wine you could get. There is nothing better than a geek with three or four beers in him asking you about which platform is best to run your cluster solutions. You would think that with all of the giveaways going on (Plasma TV’s, PSP’s and iPods) that the giveaway booths would be stuffed with people. But the big buzz was coming from the Blackbird booth.

I have no idea what Blackbird software does. My brother-in-law claimed that they were the hottest Booth Babes and they definately attracted the most people at Brainshare’s Disco Night. Their Babes were dressed up in some great disco era outfits, showing off their assets and dancing to the music. Blackbird set their booth up so that anyone could take a picture with there Babes with a Blackbird background to boot. What amazed me was the line for getting your picture taken with these girls. It stretched back crowding the entire room on the south side. You could barely walk over there. I am not sure how many leads they got, but they sure attracted the middle-aged white males that made up 80% of the demographics at the conference.

So I guess the results of my conference experience is that Sponsors should spend their money on Booth Babes not Giveaways, if your objective is to get people at your booth. The ROI of both is questionable at best. I got a free jump drive and skype headset from companies I will never purchase from.

I had a good time at Brainshare and our company got quite a few good leads. I am sure we will go again and again because MySQL is used so much in Novell products. I may even attend again myself next year. Who wouldn't want to attend a conference held in SLC?