In the Flesh

I had to laugh at one of the visitors to the show floor at Web 2.0 Expo last week.

The scene: The expo floor of the Javits Center on Thursday afternoon. The show is winding down. A couple of exhibitors have begun taking down signs and packing up laptops, though officially the show will remain open for another half hour.

On business for a client, I've been here and there on the show floor, talking to potential business partners. When I return to my client's booth, I find a middle-aged, pot-bellied man standing in front of our demo station, talking to a buddy of his. The pot-bellied man has set his laptop on our table and he's instructing his buddy, who's ill-shaven and looking a little worse for wear in his black suit, about which companies he should go call on. The pot-bellied man is unabashedly treating our booth as his private conference area.

I ask him if he'd like to see a demo. He says sure. I take control of our demo station, and I show him our demo: CRM software integrated with a Wiki. It's been wowing people all week.

He nods, but he's not really interested. I ask what he does. He offers to show me. He flips open his laptop, positions it in the middle of our demo table, and starts running online ads. You've seen them: video ads featuring a well-dressed model who wanders in from the side of the screen, blocks the Web page you're trying to view, and starts talking to you. He has a long list of demo links. I watch nattily dressed salespeople blocking the Web pages of several national retail brands.

I point out that my client sells software primarily to IT people, and that IT people have a low tolerance for anything that smacks of marketing, let alone anything as out-and-out slick and salesy as this. He slaps his business card on our table, makes perfunctory social remarks, and moves on.

Later, it occurred to me. I've always found ads like that intrusive, presumptuous, and annoying. And what kind of person would create and peddle ads like that? Someone who is himself intrusive, presumptuous, and annoying. Someone who would take over your booth at a tradeshow and use it as his personal office, blocking your computer and carrying on.

"By their fruits, ye shall know them." I had just seen a grating interstitial ad in the flesh.