If you want to score at the trade show, start playing long before the doors open
The Penalty Problem
I have always found penalties fascinating. And somehow unfair.
Ninety minutes of movement, strategy, missed opportunities, brilliant passes, mistakes, intuition and collective effort can suddenly be reduced to one player, one goalkeeper and one ball.
One kick can decide everything.
Perhaps that is what feels unfair to me. Football is a game built through movement, yet the final result can sometimes depend on a moment almost detached from everything that created it.
And despite appearances, a penalty is certainly no guarantee of success. Research published in Scientific Reports found that at World and European Championship shootouts, even elite players scored only around 72% of their penalties. Almost three kicks in ten failed.
Pressure can change those odds even further. Research reported in Nature found that when missing a penalty meant immediate defeat, the conversion rate fell to just 52%.
So there is courage in taking a penalty, certainly. Bravoure too. There are skill and preparation. But there is also an uncomfortable amount of chance.
And chance is precisely what companies should be trying to reduce when they invest considerable time, money and energy in exhibiting at a major trade show.
Research from the Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) suggests that around 90% of trade show attendees pre-plan their visit, with 64% searching specifically for booths they want to visit.
And perhaps even more interestingly, Gartner found that only 2% of B2B buyers begin a purchasing process without any vendors already in mind.
Two percent.
That should make anyone planning their IBC communication, you would think.
Long before somebody walks onto your stand, they may already have read your news, encountered your technology, watched an interview, followed somebody from your company on LinkedIn, discussed you internally or compared you with competitors.
Or they may have done none of those things.
And that matters, because by the time they arrive in Amsterdam, you may already be on their list.
Or you may already be off it.
The game has started long before the referee blows the whistle.
The last-minute kick
And watching companies communicate in the frantic weeks before a major trade show, I sometimes wonder whether we nevertheless do something remarkably similar to taking a penalty.
For months, technology has been developed. Engineers have solved problems. Sales teams have spoken to customers. Projects have evolved. Partnerships have been built. Ideas have matured.
Then IBC approaches and suddenly everybody remembers communication.
We need a press release. We need posts. We need interviews. We need visibility. And preferably now.
Everything that has been built over months is suddenly expected to score with one kick.
That feels a little unfair too.
Nothing wrong with urgency. I actually enjoy it. Communication has to be able to react because companies, markets and people do not conveniently organise themselves around editorial calendars.
But urgency should be part of the game, not the game plan. Because communication works much better when there has been a build-up.
An idea introduced months ago can become a technical article. That article may lead to a conversation with a journalist. A project gives the idea credibility. A customer story makes it tangible. A short social post brings one particular aspect to a completely different audience. Sales picks it up and uses it in a conversation. Someone comments. Someone else shares it. A question comes back that gives you the idea for the next piece.
And suddenly communication is moving. Not every pass scores. It doesn’t need to.
Communication accumulates
That is perhaps where companies sometimes misunderstand the value of communication. We want to attribute a measurable result to every individual activity: what did this press release generate? How many leads came from that article? What was the return on this post?
Useful questions, of course. But they can miss something important. Communication accumulates.
People encounter companies gradually. They recognise a name. Then an idea. Then perhaps a technology. They see somebody from the company explaining something intelligently. Later they encounter a customer story that validates it. Eventually they meet the team.
And by then, something has already happened.
Recent Gartner research makes this cumulative effect particularly interesting. B2B buyers reported using an average of seven different information sources during a recent purchase.
Seven.
That is why I have never really believed in looking at a press release, an interview, an article, a customer story or a social post as isolated pieces of communication. They encounter each other.
One creates recognition for the next. A technical article adds substance to something briefly introduced on social media. A customer story provides evidence for a claim made in an interview. A press release gives a journalist a reason to start a conversation. That conversation may result in something entirely different.
And eventually, somebody walks onto your stand at IBC and says: “I’ve been seeing what you are doing.”
That sentence did not begin at the stand.
IBC has already started
This is particularly relevant before any tradeshow like IBC for example.
The people walking through the doors in Amsterdam in September do not begin thinking about the industry when their badges are scanned. They are thinking about it now. They are reading. Researching. Comparing. Talking to colleagues. Following discussions. Making lists of companies and technologies they want to investigate. So the communication game around IBC has already started. The question is whether you are playing it.
For me, this is also where integrated communication becomes interesting, because the best ideas rarely belong exclusively to “marketing”.
Engineering knows where the real innovation is. Sales hears the questions customers repeatedly ask. Management knows where the company wants to go. Customers provide the evidence that something actually works. Journalists often see connections or contradictions that those inside a company no longer notice.
Good communication moves between all of them. And when the game becomes more sophisticated, having good players is not necessarily enough. Even the best football teams have coaches.
Not because the coach can pass better than the midfielder or score more reliably than the striker, but because somebody needs to watch the whole field. That is how I see specialist communications consultancy.
The job is not simply to produce a press release, an article, an interview or a LinkedIn post. Those are individual actions. The interesting part is understanding how they can work together.
When should an idea be introduced? Which story deserves depth and which needs only 200 words? Should the technology speak first, or the customer? Can an interview extend the life of an announcement? Can something apparently short-lived, even an actuality news item or press release, be revisited months later from a different perspective?
Sometimes the best communication opportunity is not another piece of content at all, but recognising that something already created still has somewhere else to go. That requires someone to keep looking across the whole field.
Keep the ball moving
Of course, penalties will still happen.
A project concludes unexpectedly. A partnership is signed two weeks before the show. A journalist suddenly has an opening. Something happens in the market and you have a legitimate reason to join the conversation.
Take the penalty. But don’t build your season around getting one. Because even that apparently isolated kick is influenced by everything that came before it: preparation, observation, experience and an understanding of the opponent. Chance never disappears, but preparation changes the odds.
The same applies to visibility.
By the time IBC arrives, I want the companies I work with to feel that something is already in motion. News has travelled. Ideas have circulated. Interviews are arranged. Customers have reasons to visit. Journalists recognise the story. The people on the stand have things to talk about. Then the show itself becomes another part of the movement rather than the moment on which everything depends.
So perhaps communication is less about scoring and more about creating enough intelligent movement that scoring becomes increasingly likely.
Make the passes. Look for the space. Keep the ball moving.
And please, don’t wait for the penalty.
