LAS VEGAS — For 10 years now, more than 30,000 visitors have wandered through an instant, temporary city devoted to flesh and flash, and above all, cash.
Showcasing more than 400 exhibitors at the Sands Expo Center, the five-day AVN Adult Entertainment Expo winds up tonight with a glitzy awards show.
It's one of the most unconventional conventions in a city that attracts about 5.7 million people to 24,000 professional gatherings each year.
But the dirty secret about this porn megamall is that it's all business, at least during the day. All the usual convention priorities prevail: commerce, technology, networking, seminars, market segments, meet-and-greets. And, oh yes, sex.
The business may be pleasure, but it's still big-bucks business. AVN, named for Adult Video News, is the flagship event of an industry driven by figuring out how consumers get what they want, exactly what they want (even what they never knew they wanted). And they want it now.
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Exhibitors at this year's AVN pondered a paradigm shift about how content is delivered, offering seminars on the latest in digital and high-definition delivery, building and improving Web sites and combating piracy.
The show was once part of the massive but now-defunct Comdex computer show.
The AVN expo is explicitly a guy thing. As the doors of the two-level, 1.85 million-square-foot venue opened at 10 a.m. Wednesday, hundreds of eager men made a beeline to meet and greet (or just gape at) their favorites, who sported vivid names (and little else).
At enormous, glaringly expensive booths representing adult industry studios, including Vivid and Wicked, the equivalent of the mainstream's Warner Bros. and Paramount, the most popular women made eye contact, posed and undulated for cameras. Competing DJ beats blared, punctuated by an occasional recorded moan. The fragrances of rubber, leather and perfume pervaded the air. Sensory overkill made the whole scene somehow unsexy, sterile, even anesthetic.
Miami-based Bang Productions has set up an elaborate carnival setting, with unprintable variations on traditional fairground games such as ring toss and beanbag throw, in addition to the standard starlet photo ops and autograph signings.
"The fans love what we put on for them every year," said Penn Davis, Bang's 35-year-old owner. "The main purpose of this kind of interactive, themed setup is that all the retail store owners, distribution company owners get this one opportunity each year to see how strong a brand is with their own eyes. You can advertise all you want to, but only here can you watch what the fans line up for."
Freely displayed flesh is the bait, but the real meat of AVN is technology. It's long been acknowledged that delivery and consumption of erotica have driven innovation and commerce in most new media since the time of cave paintings and hand-illustrated scrolls.
On the outskirts of the showroom floor, the expo's loudest buzz gathered around FyreTV, a Miami startup that is taking video on demand to a new level. A low-cost, subscription-based service for streaming adult movies over a broadband connection, FyreTV is the brainchild of clean-cut 30-year-old Estafano Isaias, who was meeting with studio moguls eager to get their product carried into thousands of homes via his hot new home-delivery service.
Meanwhile, a Sands custodian named Maurice was taking his sweet time changing trash bags on the expo floor. "This is a job," he says. "But it's the one I look forward to."