The last couple of NRF Big Shows have been a little predictable. I’m hoping this year shakes things up a bit.

Now, in fairness, maybe I’ve just been going to the thing long enough that I’ve become jaded. That’s entirely within the realm of possibility, and I own that. However, with the size and scale of the thing, you’d think there’d be a dozen times over the course of the event where an attending analyst would want to be in 10 different places at one time. And the last few years that hasn’t necessarily been the case. The pull tends to only come from two directions: session or floor.

We usually visit a couple dozen booths on the floor – each – and come back talking about 2-3 things that really caught our individual eyes. How can that be?

A lot has to do with what we highlighted in our recent Vendor Connect newsletter, an article entitled “How To Have A Big Impact At NRF “. It’s part of a series we do for vendor members of our community, and has included other installments such as “How To Give The Best Analyst Briefing ” and “Making The Most Of Analysts At User Conferences. ” Within the NRF-specific one, we recommend that vendors share expertise, rather than a sales pitch. We also recommend that any demos given to passersby are time-boxed, ideally no more than 5 minutes. We give reasons why, helpful dos and don’ts – all based off our collective experience having attended the show for a combined 40 (50?) plus years. If you’re interested in reading the full text, just shoot me a note.

However, the full list of reasons we come back with only 2-3 things we each got jazzed about is lengthy. Yes, the show is enormous and no one can see everything on the show floor in the allotted time each year (we’ve tried). There’s also the fact that a lot of vendors either haven’t seen (or don’t agree with) our suggestions on avoiding the lengthy on-floor demos that all run into a blur. Some sacrifice content for glitz. Others have outstanding content but fail to have the necessary hook to lure passersby out of the aisle to see it. It’s a delicate balancing act, after all. But perhaps most importantly, exciting yearly updates are difficult to come up with – and that’s something we can all empathize with.

What I’m really hoping is that – this year – this becomes less of a problem. We’ve already had a number of pre-show briefings with technology clients planning to showcase practical applications for the Internet of Things, a topic which, just 12 months ago, seemed a lot more what I called “buzz-ness than business. ” If these pre-briefings, combined with the findings in our most recent IoT Benchmark Report that retailers really are ready to start investing in practical use-cases of IoT technologies within their 4 wall – if these prove true – I’m hoping that our annual NRF Big Show Debrief Webinar will be very exciting this year. I’m hoping that we have a lot more cool technologies that we saw on the show floor to share, and not just eye-catching stuff left over from the CES show in the newly redesigned iLab.

Tune in to our webinar on February 1 to see what we saw!