Are Booth Babes Going Away? (Video)

Michael Steinhart, Editor in Chief of The Enterprise Cloud Site, went to this year's New York Cloud Expo, and saw only one booth with beguiling, scantily-dressed females trying to attract people to their employers' display. But Michael says one booth with babes was one more than last year, when the same show had no booth babes at all. So we wondered: Are booth babes going away? And if they are, is it because of political consciousness or tight budgets? Since Michael has put more time than we have into thinking about these questions, we fired up our webcam and had a little conversation with him about the future of booth babes at IT conferences and trade shows.

Comments

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, the only people who really give two craps about booth babes are a) hypersensitive gender warriors and b) tech writers on a slow news day.

I'm confused.

[BenFenner]

This year the expo had more booth babes than last year, which raises the question "Are Booth Babes going away?".

Say what now?

Marketing

[Karmashock]

Booth babes are pretty.

Pretty is attractive.

Attractive is good marketing.

Its not just about sex. Its about hiring some attractive people to represent your company. Because your engineers are probably unshaved smelly cave dwellers that probably don't make a good impression at conventions. So how do you make your engineer or software developer seem credible? Put a 21 year old aspiring model next to him that smiles and makes eyes at everyone that gets near the booth.

Is it dumb? No more dumb then the people buying your products. Which isn't an insult against them... people are just like that. Get over it. We're not robots. We're semi intelligent social opportunistic primates. And even women like having attractive women around.

Open a women's magazine. What do you see? Is it lots of half naked men? Nope... half naked women.

As to getting the attention of gay men... All respect, but they're by definition a minority. Were they not the species itself would be in some trouble. So while it might make some sense to reach out to any demographic, the reality is that its probably a marginal issue at best.

All of that said, possibly there is something to be said for not having such aggressive marketing at conventions. Rather, put your unshaved cave dweller out there sans smiling boobs... and just see what happens.

It will either be fine or it won't. And we'll learn something either way.

Booth babes don't work well on straight geeks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most geeks learned early on that babes aren't interested. The more attractive a female was, the more likely she was to snub any geeks that approached.

So, geeks associate hotness with unattainability (and, in some cases cruelty), and as such their feminine wiles don't have the same effect as they might on a grown-up football player.

Geeks respond better to fellow geeks with a common cultural background and a solid technical understanding of whatever is being advertised.

The market is simply adjusting to what actually works for this demographic.

Re:Booth babes don't work well on straight geeks.

[tnk1]

The thing is, booth babes aren't there for geeks, they're there for non-geek distributors who are salesmen that probably had a much better relationship with hot girls in school.

That point aside, I think you underestimate how male geeks can be, despite the possibly bad experiences they have had with attractive women. Put enough boobs in the room and even the bitterest of male, heterosexual geeks is going to notice a lot more than they might even let on.

Of course, the world is nothing like it used to be. Geeks used to be outcasts, and now attractive girls whose greatest technological achievement is working their Twitter account and watching Anime regularly call themselves "nerds". You can still be an outcast as a geek, but being a geek no longer makes you an outcast by definition.

Re:Booth babes don't work well on straight geeks.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

So, geeks associate hotness with unattainability

As a geek, I've always associated hotness (which is almost always partly synthetic) with misplaced priorities.