This year's vendor floor at the Employment Management Association conference featured a few old friends and an interesting mix of newcomers. For the most part, the older and more mature players have realized that trade shows no longer work. The events of the past year have taken all of the mojo out of the time honored rituals. But, sometimes writing a check and showing up at the conference is the closest thing to marketing imagination available.

To our surprise, nearly half of the vendors were newspaper companies. We'll be damned if we can figure out why the Boston Globe had a booth at a San Francisco trade show. (They've also established an accounts office in our town). The Globe was hardly alone. Dayton, Ohio's newspaper (long understood to be a recruiting hotbed and certainly on everyone's shortlist as a national player) was represented. They were touting their consistent reach to the "28,000 regular web visitors in the tri-state area".

The LA Times also had a booth. The aggressive salesperson made sure that visitors understood that newspaper ads were "in the job hunter's faces every day".

We saw the Washington Post, The Atlanta Papers, The Philadelphia folks and on and on. Literally 50% of the vendors were there to sell hard copy newspaper advertising. Many of the newspaper booths made note of the fact that they were a part of the CareerBuilder network in their literature. Their salespeople, however, always referred to CB as "our temporary national partner".

An additional 20% of the vendors appeared to be advertising agencies who were pitching their ability to help a customer figure out which newspaper ad to buy. The remainder were criminal background checking, drug test and other forms of screening companies.

Most gave away nice pens and, like the carnival workers who invented this sort of midway experience, encouraged the few passers by to "grab some more goodies".

Sadly, there were few attendees at the conference and, as usual, the vendors were given limited time and located far away from the rest of the conference.

It was like a "Twilight Zone" episode in which the narrator is thrust back in time to a ghost-town world from 20 years ago. Both attendees came away with a pocketful of office supplies from interesting relics trying to breathe life back in to their operations by finally investing in marketing.

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