It’s official: an all virtual SEMA 2020, branded as SEMA360

It’s hard to imagine that anyone didn’t see this coming. But after a late-August announcement, it’s now official. An all virtual SEMA 2020, operating November 2–6 under SEMA360 as a fresh new brand, will replace the live SEMA Show 2020, which had been scheduled originally for November 3–6 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

It’s entirely understandable. To say the least, SEMA and social distancing are unlikely terms to appear in the same sentence.

The sponsor of the SEMA Show, the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA), shared the sad news about the live show’s cancellation in an early August announcement, citing “COVID-19 and concerns that event facilities and services will be unavailable.”

Currently, Google is showing the status of the Las Vegas Convention Center as “temporarily closed,” although parts of the facility have been used during the pandemic as a COVID-19 testing center.

While some upcoming trade shows remain on the official convention calendar of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, tradeshow organizers have frequently followed the pattern this year of continuously monitoring conditions while formulating contingency plans for online events, and cancelling live shows at relatively late dates.

The Digital Signage Expo, for example, for now remains on the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority calendar, scheduled November 12–13. Information about the scheduled live event remains posted on the show’s website, with COVID-19 preparedness information highlighted.

Meanwhile, in planning SEMA360 as a virtual SEMA event with the hope of returning to the live format in 2021, SEMA President and CEO Chris Kerstine says that “SEMA360 is the ideal solution to bring the industry together, at a time when we’ve all been kept apart. The platform allows qualified buyers to interact with manufacturers, see innovative new products, check out top SEMA Show builds, and take in industry-leading educational offerings.”

Of course, only time will tell how successful the virtual SEMA format will be.

The tradeshow industry has attempted for many years to integrate virtual components into exhibitions, with mixed results. But SEMA appears to have made a special effort to overcome the pitfalls of past virtual tradeshow experiments that were likely driven by efforts to mitigate some of the substantial costs of a physical tradeshow presence, in contrast with the urgent necessity to develop alternatives in the wake of COVID-19.

As stated in the SEMA press release announcing the virtual SEMA event, “Show organizers gathered input from industry members who registered concerns with typical ‘virtual trade show’ solutions. The result is SEMA360, a simplified platform where SEMA will help manufacturers create a straightforward brand presence that will reach quality domestic and international buyers. With a focus on helping the industry grow their businesses, participating resellers will have access to product offerings and demonstrations, and manufacturer personnel.”

According to SEMA, the major features of SEMA360 will include:

• A simplified platform for manufacturers to showcase new products and innovations
• Efficient interaction between manufacturers and resellers for quality business exchange
• SEMA vehicle reveals from world-class builders
• Industry-leading education focused on professional development and new strategies
• SEMA’s unrivaled media contacts amplifying news, products, and innovations to a world-wide audience

Based on my experience with SEMA—an organization that is still looking ahead toward the hope of being able to stage the traditional, live SEMA Show once again Las Vegas in 2021—the virtual SEMA will likely yield a mix of pros and cons for the various constituencies the live event has traditionally served.

For the sheer purpose of simply connecting buyers and sellers, a virtual SEMA format could theoretically present some advantages. One has to do with an issue that the SEMA show has struggled with for decades. As an industry-specific tradeshow that’s supposed to be about creating business opportunities within the industry, SEMA has become too popular with the general public for its own good, compared to tradeshows in many other industries.

To illustrate the difference with one of the starkest possible contrasts, it’s easy to understand how an event like the World of Asphalt Show & Conference will have highly limited appeal among those who are not stakeholders in some way in the asphalt industry.

But SEMA, on the other hand, is a show about aftermarket parts that can be used to build phenomenally cool cars and trucks. And if you choose any random American household, there’s a much higher probability that you’re going to find someone in that household who is really into cool cars than an individual who gets excited about asphalt.

The universe of people who would like to go to SEMA has always extended well beyond the population of automotive industry buyers and sellers. And many of those everyday non-industry car enthusiasts and truck lovers who have wanted to go to SEMA to check out all the cool builds have gone to great lengths over the years to do so, like bugging a distant cousin who happens to own an automotive repair shop to acquire some extra passes.

While the show has never been officially open to the public—with the exception of the SEMA Ignited “afterparty” event that gives owners of the custom builds on display a chance to fire up their engines and show off what their cars can do—anyone who has ever been to SEMA knows that many of the attendees packed elbow-to-elbow into the exhibit halls don’t really have a professional reason to be there.

The virtual SEMA event, however, might make it easier to maintain a “strictly business” focus, enabling buyers and sellers to interact more productively without having to deal with all the distractions of an excessively large crowd.

Within a ginormous attendee base that, according to SEMA’s estimate after the 2019 show, exceeded 160,000—that’s across all categories, including buyers, sellers, exhibitors, and probably a healthy number of folks who aren’t necessarily part of the industry—the SEMA show also draws about 3,000 media personnel each year.

There will likely be pros and cons to how the virtual SEMA event will change the game for automotive journalists and content creators as well.

Some media professionals have complained about the extent to which the SEMA Show opens its doors to online content creators who might have very limited audiences, including bloggers, social media influencers, and YouTubers.

For example, one automotive writer, whom out of courtesy I’ll refrain from naming, has lamented that so many “fake media” crowd the press events and make it difficult for “legitimate journalists” like himself to get close enough for good photo opportunities.

In a comment on a September 2019 post in a Facebook group for media professionals who attend the annual show, SEMA spokesman Juan Torres indeed confirmed that the media pass is “one of the most abused categories for credentials.”

But let’s keep things in perspective. In the overwhelming biomass that crowds into the exhibit halls every year, 3,000 media personnel, regardless of whether some might assert that a substantial proportion of them aren’t “legitimate,” amounts to a drop in the bucket—less than 2 percent of all SEMA attendees. So, clearly, if SEMA is overcrowded, media personnel aren’t significantly responsible for that overcrowding.

A more likely explanation for the problem that some media attendees complain about—if it really is a problem—is that SEMA, for the most part, doesn’t really limit “press events” to the press. And most of the folks snapping photos while, for example, Mopar unveils their latest Hell-something crate engine, aren’t the folks with media badges.

If anything, it might be helpful for show organizers to designate specific days or hours as media-only time slots where press can more effectively engage with industry executives and PR personnel and have a less obstructed eye and ear on the products being launched and the announcements being made.

But with some exceptions for isolated parts of the show that are press only, most of the media events take place during regular show hours in the exhibit halls. And, generally, any attendee, media-credentialed or otherwise, is free to walk up and view a press event at will.

And that’s part of how the SEMA360 event could potentially change the game for media personnel covering SEMA. For an online-only press event, the playing field would theoretically be leveled. Obscure bloggers or low-audience YouTubers would have the same view of a press event that a journalist from a major print outlet or automotive website would have—all without the business expense of traveling to Vegas, paying for hotel nights and meals, etc.

Yet that strength is also a weakness. If everyone has the same point of view, grabbing attention with a different perspective, or creating a stunning photo of a customized car by capturing it from an unusual angle or exploiting a fluky quirk of lighting, becomes more difficult.

However, even more important may be the loss, with a virtual event, of the more impalpable qualities of the spectacle that is SEMA. Especially from a content-creator’s perspective, the veritable circus of the surrounding atmosphere, with the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd, may be even more vital to the effort to create something compelling than the wares themselves that are on display.

And that’s not even to mention the great things that can happen outside of business hours when some of the best minds of an industry are gathered in one place. It might be a cliché, but I know from experience that it’s true: random social gatherings after hours at a professional event can end up being some of the most productive moments for generating exciting new ideas.

It will be fascinating to see how the virtual SEMA solution ends up playing out for 2020. But, hopefully, SEMA360 won’t have to be a “forever” substitute the real thing.

Sure, 2020 has been most educational with regard to what technology can help us accomplish in spite of the need for physical separation. But the experience of interacting virtually has also affirmed that face-to-face meetings still offer that intangible “something” that a Zoom meeting can never quite equal.

The same distinction holds between live tradeshows and virtual events—which is why, even though we’ve had technologies for many years that could theoretically save us all the expense of congregating at distant destinations, the size of the U.S. business-to-business tradeshow market continued to grow from $11.4 billion in 2012 to $15 billion in 2018, according to Statista.

And I, as a hopeless junkie for SEMA and other tradeshows automotive and otherwise, long to see the exhibition industry return to that growth trajectory once we’re finally beyond the previously unimaginable succession of crises that has been 2020.

So will I see you at SEMA 2021, with the live show returned to all of its non-socially-distant, elbow-to-elbow, unmasked glory?

I certainly hope so.