What’s is our Conference Session Vendor Ratio?

I just read a great blog post by Dave Lutz of Velvet Chainsaw, a conference, meeting, and trade association consulting firm.

He makes the point that many vendors/suppliers don't attend the conference-education sessions in the conferences for which they exhibit their goods and services.

This really intrigues me because it cuts to the ideational health of an industry. Vendors control a large part of the information bandwidth in an industry. They’ve got sales people out talking to folks, they do a ton of content marketing, they produce the most webinars, white papers, and conference sessions in many industries. If they’re not learning and up-to-date, if they’re not hearing how ideas are connecting to practitioners, if they’re not hearing pushback from those who are debunking faulty information, a whole industry can suffer.

How Are We Doing?

How are we doing on this in the workplace learning industry?

I'm going to investigate this at the conferences where I speak. I'd love to hear what others know about this. Please let us all know in the comments below.