Vendors without a message

There was another flurry of conversation this week about another IT convention with some booths featuring scantily clad girls to entice eye and foot traffic. I have to say, it’s the number one reason I avoid IT conventions.

The mentality that goes behind these sorts of booths must be along the lines of:

1. We couldn’t come up with any new product or original idea this year.
2. How will we get IT people to look at our stuff?
3. Oh shit, yeah, all IT people are geeks.
4. Geeks rarely, if ever, get laid.
5. Therefore geeks get toey.
6. Therefore geeks will look at girls.
7. By extension, geeks will look at what the girls are standing next to.
8. Let’s put our unoriginal and bland stuff next to scantily clad girls!

It’s a shit-poor 80s advertising mentality, and it’s time to start shaming any and all vendors who resort to this stuff. Here’s three reasons I can think of without straining my Sunday morning not-yet-sufficiently-caffeinated brain:

1. Not all IT people are men.
2. Not all female IT people are lesbians.
3. Not all male IT people are heterosexual.

Using “sex sells” is getting to be a fairly tired meme, quite frankly. Unless people are actually going to a sex convention, the likelihood of a significant portion of a group of people being similarly impressed by a small number of people acting like bimbos (or even himbos) has significantly diminished over time. Hell, even the gay community, often considered to be more focused on sex than most other groups of people, isn’t going to be impressed by that sort of stuff any more. (As an example, check out what I wrote about Mr Australasia Bear 2011.)

The problem with the “sex sells” mentality is that intelligent people see through it in about 3 seconds. This is the teens, not the 80s or the 90s. Some might say we’re jaded, but others would (rightly) say that we’re more interested with facts and actual features than window dressing and flim-flammery.

So a message to all you vendors out there: if your marketing people have an 80s “horny geek” mentality, it’s time to sack them. They’re dinosaurs, and they’re not doing you any favours. They’re actually making you a laughing stock. People are talking about you, but not in the sort of way you want. Rip down their playboy centrefolds on their cubicle walls, throw out their “Miss Firefighter 2011” raunchy calendar, delete all those pornographic emails they send back and forth to each other all day, and get in people who actually know what they’re doing.