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Don Tuite formally announced his retirement on April 17 in Electronic Design magazine and it is a bitter sweet moment. Don and I converse regularly on social media and we both live in Redwood City so he's not leaving my life at the moment, but I remember when he first came to Electronic Design after many years as a working engineer.
We had a couple of phone conversations about clients and stories he was working on when we both discovered that we were in the same town. From then on, Don had an open invitation to come down, have coffee, walk in our nearby park, and even take one of our team on a flight in his private plane (which she called the thrill of a lifetime since she had always wanted to become a private pilot).
The conversations about technology, politics and social change is what I really enjoyed about Don's visits and calls. We never stayed on the subject very long. Once we got the business done it was on to other topics. It was the discussion of how media was changing, however, that got me thinking about my own public relations business and what value it had, and eventually brought me to the place that I knew I had to shut it down, fire all the clients and start focusing on what was needed to be said, not what a corporate committee wanted to say.
Most of the other marketers journalists I talked to during that time didn't have a lot of good things to say about me and what was forming in my head, but Don was one of the few who were not judgmental or dismissive. As a true scientific mind he response was always "you might be right."
His final column rightly reviews the changes he saw in the past decade and reminds me of the discussion we had a decade ago about Marshal McLuhan and adds the work of a mathematician that fed into McLuhan's work... something I never knew. It was a good justification of my decision.
So I get what the rest of you don't, the opportunity to continue my relationship with smart man and a good guy. Congratulations Don. Looking forward to what you're are going to do with your time.
Time for my annual review of spin metric from the Design Automation Conference (DAC), this year held in Austin, Texas for the first time. Last year I called the conference attendance as flat. I'm calling the same for this year.
This was a controversial decision and caused many companies in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry to stay home from the exhibit. But the final news release put on a big smile and said the event "exceeded expectations." That it did. Most everyone I talked to said it would be a "ghost town." "deader than a doornail" and other less than happy predictions. It was not as bad as people thought. It was not as good as some people say.
It is unfair to compare Austin's effort to San Francisco's last year. It's better to compare it the San Diego the year previous because of the similarities in logistics. San Diego and Austin are a lot cheaper to put on a large conference than San Francisco, but actually getting to the venue is about as tough. Not a lot of options for people out of town to get there and from overseas, there are at least two layovers.
With that comparison in place, this is what we have:
I also counted the number of booths available in the exhibit and noted that the plans were for the same number as were at San Francisco (could not find a floor map for San Diego). There were more than 20 unoccupied booths which matched up with the participation drop in exhibit staff.
Overall you might consider those number disasterous, but you have to keep in mind that there was a fairly significant psychological resistance to the venue that was unfounded in reality. Austin is NOT that bad a place for a conference. It's a great city. Factoring that in I call it a wash compared to San Diego.
The reaction I got from exhibitors from the Big Three (Mentor Graphics, Cadence and Synopsys) was quite positive. I had my partner Joe Basques walking the floor with an iPad giving me real time views and we both could see that all the activity was in those areas. In the cheap seats, with the startups and smaller players, there was more dissatisfaction with booth traffic. A few said the numbers were smaller but the quality was higher in leads, but most were not happy with what they got for the price.
For comparison, lets take a look over at DesignCon 2013. Everything was up 8 percent across the board. The number of exhibitors was just a couple dozen under the total for DAC Austin and I heard nary a derogatory word from any exhibitor. What's the difference? It's in the same place every year. The exhibits are smaller overall so the cost is less. It is easy to get to from the east coast and overseas. It's not in a peak travel/vacation time.
And here's the real problem: People only talk about the exhibits, floor traffic and parties. They don't say anything about the technical sessions. I actually had to ask people what they thought about them and universally it was "Oh, they were as good as ever."
DAC needs to consider all of that. In today's world of CDN Live, SNUG, NI Week, Design West and all the online events that compete for attention and attendance – smaller is better. The days when DAC was drawing 10,000 attendees is long gone. It's strength has always been the technical program that was funded by the exhibits, but it's the exhibits that create the most cost. It's time for DAC to go back to those roots and decide where they want to put them down.
Wow. The past few weeks have been pretty intense as I complete a white paper on Media in the 21st Century (gotta get it done because lots of people are aksing for it.) But in the past week, the conversation, from my audio interview with Kevin Morris of EE Journal has started to get a little heated. It sort of reminds me of a scene from the movie "The Man Who Would Be King." As Michael Caine and Sean Connery are recruiting followers, every tribe has the same thing to say about the tribe that harrasses them. ""We don't like the people who live upstream; they keep pissing down the river on us."
Nobody likes their closest competitor and it seems to be required that you blame them for serious moral turpitude. Only the guy on top has the requirement to be magnanimous.
I'm not really a competitive guy. I have a basic moral code that makes me try to see the good in everyone and everything. Most of the time it works (except in politics and soccer) and in the world of media evolution it is mandatory. Footwasher Media has taken a middle ground, which make people on both sides uneasy and sometimes angry. I was right with one side for a long time. In fact, I kinda blazed the trail to it back in 2001 demanding that everyone see that it was about to fall apart. Some of the people who don't like what we are saying and doing now were the same ones who said I was delusional more than a decade ago.
But I do understand the need to be competitive. The pie has gotten much smaller in traditional media than it was at the turn of the century and conventional business wisdom requires that you establish a moral high ground for yourself over the rest of the field that is still offering much the same thing you are. It's called differentiation.
But it's all so tiring because there will always be someone pissing into the river upstream from you. Sometimes you just have to dig a well.
The numbers came out for the 2012 DAC attendance and, as usual, the organization reported "record breaking numbers," but still wasn't putting it in context.
Total attendance for 2012 was 7,388 up from 6,350 last year in San Diego. That's great. But it's still down from 7,996 in 2009 when it was in San Francisco last...and during a worse economic period. Subtracting booth personnel, exhibit only and full conference participation was 4,684 and in 2009 it was 5,299. Booth staff was up this year by about 100 over the 2011 conference, but everyone really noticed the massively reduced floor space. In 2009, DAC took up Moscone North and South but the whole show was spread out liberally over only the south hall this year. And there was a nice size bowling alley between the meeting suites in the center.
So as I pointed out last year, DAC remains flat, at best. There was, however, a phrase that had never been used before in the press releases: "Biggest Event in Electronic Design." Oooo, really?
What else is there? Well there's DesignCon that has seen 30 percent growth year over year since UBM took over after the 2009 show. 2012 had 4500 attendees - still a far cry from the 8,000 at DAC this year - but they seem to be gaining. And since an average of 35 percent of the attendees each year claim that it was the first time attending DesignCon, the show might actually catch DAC in about 3 years. What about ESC/Design West, which I believe can qualify as an electronic design conference? Can't find numbers but it took over the entirety of the McEnery Center in San Jose, as well as the Civic Auditorium. There were also no meeting rooms down the center of the hall.
DAC is a great technical conference and the exhibits help defray the expenses of putting it on, but it might be a good idea to consider going back to it's roots and just focus on the technical portion. Next year it's in Austin. Good luck finding a seat on one of the few flights going there direct from the Bay Area.
When you've been in the communciation game as long as I have, you want to run, screaming, from the room when a marketing guy says, "We really don't need much media coverage. Our customers are engineers and they all talk to each other. So we just need to reach a few of them." I swear, if I had a dollar for everytime I heard that I'd be an angel investor (who could fire a long of marketing guys).
So when UBM TechWeb CEO Tony Uphoff tossed out a Facebook link to an article on word-of-mouth marketing I was immediately drawn to it. I was surprised to learn, however, that the age group most influenced by word-of-mouth marketing are teenagers, while adults will use word of mouth early on in their shopping process but rely more heavily on media when they make their decision.
That immediately brought to mind the axiom above. If it is true, that engineers make buying decisions based on what their peers tell them, without benefit of third-party input, than engineers have the research skills of high-school students.
I'm sure that's not what the marketing guys are implying. At least not what they wanted to imply. Maybe they should go talk it over amongst themselves.
If you are a company using social media, do you ever wonder why you don't seem to be getting any results? Maybe it's because you are doing it wrong?
How often do you even look at whether anyone is engaging in your site? How often do you respond to posts. do you even take the time to find out who, exactly, is looking at your content?
Social media works, but not in a vacuum. And, yes, I am saying most companies suck at social media.
Just got Gabe Moretti's email newsletter where he takes me to task for bagging on the EDA industry's lack of marketing acumen. Always like to know when people disagree with me and Gabe makes some good points. But there was one that popped out to me:
"Lou repeats the old mantra that EDA companies area really not making the tools that the costumers want, and that should they ever get smart enough to just do that they would become widely profitable. There is nothing farther from the truth than this statement. I agree that EDA could benefit form an injection of capable marketing know how, may be even using social media. We do not need to discover what is needed to take a design to silicon: we have done that for over thirty years as an industry and longer than that as in-house CAD departments."
To which I answer with an old adage, "If you guys are so smart, why ain't you rich?"
I'm off to check out a profitable industry. C ya.
UPDATE:
Just got home to find a big, steaming pile of DeepChip from John Cooley that talks about the acquisition of Azuro by Cadence. John, no great lover of EDA marketing people, calls it a "fire sale" and describes Azuro as a company that could not market itself properly, in spite of having great technology. As I was saying...
Just got the latest newsletter from Gabe Moretti. He opens with an overview of #DAC and gives a pretty good critique of the weak attempt to bring attention to embedded software at the conference, but about midway through he blames the media's lack of attention to the industry on parochialism. He specifically calls out United Business Media's scheduling of ESC Chicago at the same time as DAC.
"Finally, has anyone noticed that ESC20 is taking place in Chicago during DAC? Once again the EDA industry falls victim of parochialism, and the greed to make money at the expense of both users and vendors. People at UBM certainly knew the DAC schedule. So couldn't they schedule ESC20 around DAC?"
Let's call a spade a spade here. #EDA doesn't get attention from the media because they make no effort to explain themselves or their reason for being. The attitude that "a good product sells itself" is stupid marketing, especially when your definition is yours alone. In order to know if you've actually made something worth buying, you have to know what the market thinks is good. And you don't know that unless you invest in marketing... which EDA doesn't.
But let's just say UBM did make a conscious decision to rain on EDA's parade. Why would they think of doing that? Could it be that they make a boatload of money promoting an industry that actually pays for advertising and exhibit space from them? Could it be that putting a major conference at a transportation hub that can be easily reached by direct flights from all the nations of the world makes more sense than placing it at a vacation backwater that requires multiple stops to reach (San Diego doesn't make the top 10 of any business or vacation list I can find)? Could it be that there is more going on in other industries judging from the level of "news" I have seen coming from EDA companies the past few weeks, I think I know that answer)?
There was a time when mahor publication houses bent over backwards to cover the EDA industry. EE Times, at one time had four editors dedicated to covering the industry and only two to the much larger industry of semiconductors itself. Today, Electronic Products, Electronic Design, EE Times, Chip Design and a couple of online pubs all cover the industry and it's events, but not as comprehensively as in the past for the very simple reason that it is unprofitable to do so.
Just because you think you are important doesn't make it so. You have to demonstrate value, not assume everyone knows it. Trust me, it's not the media being parochial. It's the industry. Wake up and smell the coffee folks. And stop being so damned cheap.
Last week I went to the inaugural Smart Power Grid Technology Conference put on by ISQED. It was a great conference with about 100 engineers packed into a tiny conference room in a Santa Clara hotel. Lots of great information... if you worked hard to get to it. And as I watched about five presentations I came to the realization that these guys must have had the same presentation training. So I decided to go looking for the school they went to over the weekend. I found it. It was in the basement and a San Francisco cigar store. The sign, hanging from a single nail on the left side on the door, said “Crappy Presentation University” in 9-point type. So I went in. What luck! There was a class in session. Here are some excerpts:
After the lesson I went up and talked tot he instructor. I said I noticed that he did not use any kind of presentation technology to deliver the lesson. He explained that they guaranteed their students would learn to give ineffective presentations. If he actually employed any of the techniques they described, they would never learn anything, so they don’t use them.
Very instructive.
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