Author: Antony

The erection of temporary marketplaces can be a wasteful business, and exhibitions require a lot of materials that are often difficult to reuse or are outdated by the next edition of the event. So even before we look at the hefty carbon footprint that accompanies thousands of international visitors transporting themselves to an event, organisers, venues and exhibitors need to operate according to a more sustainable agenda.

Clearly, being sustainable means much more than separating plastics from your cardboard when you’re taking the bins out. It means changing management systems, operating within a new framework that will probably mean revisiting your current procedures and, ideally, obtaining independent accreditation attesting to your company’s sound green credentials. It sounds like hard work, but let’s not forget, the result can be positive PR, new business and a higher profile.

Ever alive to public perceptions, the industry has been keen to be seen as green.

Indeed, the industry has embraced green principles (which involve a great deal more than lessening the environmental impact of events) in a variety of new and innovative ways.

In one example of a modern venue’s commitment to sustainability, Amsterdam RAI received goods by boat for the first time in 2011. The electric-powered vessel Mokum Mariteam arrived at the exhibition venue fully laden, and left it with an equally full cargo of waste materials. The idea came about thanks to fruitful cooperation with waste disposal company Icova, one of the founders of Mokum Mariteam, and it soon became clear that this type of clean and quiet freight transport method was ideal for supplying materials-heavy events such as exhibitions.

The venue divided its sustainability goals into seven themes: energy and climate; mobility; water; waste; employees; procurement; and social engagement. Key initiatives so far include using carpet waste as a combustion product in the cement industry, and a novel waste separation process.
 
“Our aim is to be a successful business that contributes to a sustainable society and ensures a good balance in all the choices we make,” general manager Hans Bakker claimed. “We believe that sustainability adds value to an organisation, and including it in the company policy will generate more clients and greater engagement among employees.”

Amsterdam RAI has also installed 1,632 solar panels on the roof of one of its halls, providing 360,000 kilowatt-hours, equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of around 140 households. Over 60 per cent of the 12,000sqm roof surface is now covered in panels, the maximum load possible weight-wise considering the roof construction and the use of rigging during events. These solar panels also translate into a CO² reduction of around 150 tonnes a year.
 
Large and active centres such as RAI’s hall are central to Amsterdam’s economy and are popular sites for municipal sustainability programmes, but investment in solar technology like this does not come cheap. More precisely, it costs the not inconsiderable sum of €500,000 (US$675,000); RAI raised the money courtesy of Triodos Bank, its house banks Deutsche Bank and Rabobank Amsterdam, and a loan from the Amsterdam Investment Fund, a city council initiative that supports investments in sustainable energy projects. 

With this installation, Amsterdam RAI took a step towards its goal of being a clear front-runner in the conference and event industry in Europe with regards to sustainability. All future developments, such as the RAI Amtrium conference facility, were also to be equipped with solar panels.

The venue has continued its drive to become part of an elite group of sustainable global convention centres and tourism operators with the achievement of the EarthCheck Gold certification, a sustainability benchmark in the business tourism sector. It became the first exhibition and congress centre in Europe to achieve this status, and in doing so threw down the gauntlet to other European venues. The Gold Coast Convention Centre in Queensland, Australia, had been the first centre to achieve Gold status earlier in 2013, but as RAI showed Europe was not to be left behind. Of particular note was the advance of both businesses in improving waste separation and recycling.

“Attaining EarthCheck Gold certification is not an easy task,” said CEO of EC3 Global and EarthCheck Stewart Moore. “It requires commitment from the entire personnel to achieve better results in terms of sustainability each year. The challenge is to continually prove the integrity of an organisation’s operational practices and then be willing to have everything checked and measured by an independent third party.”

Developing such a culture, and maintaining it, continues to be an elusive target for the industry, despite being so keen to present itself as resourceful in tackling matters of waste.

In time, Amsterdam RAI won the first ever sustainability award granted by global exhibition association UFI. It wasn’t the only company vying for the title, as it was selected from six shortlisted finalists, including South Africa’s Cape Town International Convention Centre, Germany’s Messe Frankfurt and Switzerland’s Palexpo, home to the Geneva Motor Show.

Commenting at the time, UFI MD Paul Woodward explained that being truly sustainable is rooted in reality, working with proven results rather than simple adherence to green practice and ideals:

“In order to promote the full scope of sustainability within the exhibition sector, this first Sustainable Development Award competition aims to reward a broad, realistic approach to the topic,” he said. “This theme was especially challenging as only those companies with a significant history and proven results in this domain could qualify for entry.”

[X-HEAD] Declaration of independence

The industry was in need of standardised accreditation in the effort to prove its sustainability to the marketplace. Exhibition organiser UBM Live Amsterdam committed to applying the UK-derived BS8901 standard early on. Its use of the standard, which subsequently evolved into the international standard ISO20121, ensures a comprehensive approach to sustainability applications that UFI claims will “significantly influence the scope of a company’s operations in the future.”

International ISO20121 standard is first and foremost a management system. It is essentially a way of working that helps a company consider how – at every decision point – to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The decision by UBM Live Amsterdam to apply this particular standard to its operations is linked to the fact that it is well recognised in Europe.

Meanwhile, across the pond in America, the APEX/ASTM Environmentally Sustainable Meeting Standards accreditation was achieving greater prominence. This standard comprised nine individual standards, or sectors, and addressed the scope of the event planning process; less a management system than a framework to operate within. Another standard, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), was seen predominantly as a checklist to aid disclosure – a tool to help companies feed back on their levels of sustainability.

The key obstacle to organisers and venues was in the requirement of a third party to provide this accreditation. While self-auditing and formal disclosure has its merits – after all, most international events take place under the watchful eyes of thousands of visitors and exhibitors – without an independent body confirming that our events are becoming more green, why should we be believed? Parallels will be drawn with self-auditing show attendance – namely that unverified figures aren’t worth the paper they’re written on – which at best demonstrates a desire to be seen as progressive. But third-party accreditation immediately introduces a problem that is complicated to resolve. The first venue or company that wants to be accredited typically gets accreditation at a price that makes it an affordable prospect for others in the industry. Often referred to as penetration pricing, the industry could then be tempted to start paying for this new service if the costs are not prohibitive. For a small outlay, a company could hoist aloft its green credentials for all to see. 

As such standardisation becomes commonplace, the pattern of demand changes. Accreditation becomes necessary to compete on even terms, and, for anyone unfamiliar with basic economics, this increased need leads to an increased price. And in order to cover the price, the cost will ultimately be transferred to the clients using the venue or company. Costs need to be recouped somewhere. Suddenly, there is a question of whether being seen as green or more affordable is preferable. The need to overcome this deterrent inherent in introducing and maintaining this accreditation poses a very real problem for an industry that comes under heavy criticism for its perceived profligate use of materials and energy. Short of controlled pricing and oversight of the assessments and the assessors – in much the same way as schools are inspected – the benefits risk being outweighed by the costs. 

Ultimately, independent verification seems to be the only way to truly certify a venue or organiser’s green achievements. If your company goes to all the effort of conforming to sustainability standards, then why leave your credentials open to debate?

As the exhibition industry has pressed on with improving its sustainability, companies looking to display their green sheen have needed to demonstrate both innovation and accountability. Given the cost both in terms of finance and manpower, it was important to know what was wanted from accreditation before setting off on a sustainability drive.

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, a frequent and rarely justified criticism of international exhibitions and business events was that they leave a heavy carbon footprint when the doors close and the attendees, exhibitors and service providers head home. Viewed in isolation, an event does consume a great deal of natural resource; the disposable materials used in stand design, the promotional material, and of course the fuel for flights and other transportation all mount up. 

But these accusations are easily countered. What would the alternatives cost? How many individual flights would be required to replicate the meetings and opportunities we create at an exhibition? And at what cost to our working and personal lives? Sustainability is about much more than clever waste disposal. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) needs are part and parcel of what we understand sustainability to mean today, but a truly sustainable culture provides much more.

Far more complicated is the counter-argument to claims that the exhibition and meetings industry is full of unnecessary expense, that the experiential elements that define our exhibitions and events are all too often surplus to requirements.

When the recession hit in 2009, the global meetings and events industry came under just this kind of misplaced and misguided scrutiny. Face-to-face meetings were seen as expenses that could be eliminated, and the rhetoric within the media was driven largely by infamous but isolated incidents of abuse.

In the United States it soon became clear that the industry lacked the type of advocacy necessary to communicate the positive impact of face-to-face interaction to the people instituting measures aimed at reducing what was perceived as ‘unnecessary’ expenditure.

As Nan Marchand Beauvois, vice-president of National Councils and general manager of the US Travel Association, points out, those same financial companies that fomented the global financial crisis were now criticising the meetings industry for holding meetings in Las Vegas – meetings they claimed were unnecessary and frivolous.

“It was kind of the perfect storm, and our industry in the United States was caught in the middle of it,” she says. “What resulted from this is that a week after our elected officials were saying ‘don’t have meetings in Vegas because it was frivolous,’ these companies are bankrupt and they’re spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on entertaining in Las Vegas.”

The impact was significant. The meetings industry in Las Vegas “pretty much shut down. Many business events were cancelled, hotels went from 90 per cent occupancy to 50 per cent. The exhibition industry did not escape either. Companies, both selling or buying, reduced the manner and frequency of their attendance.

At that time the US Travel Association got together with all the other associations in the meetings industry; all were agreed that something had to be done. It was the first time that the CEOs of SITE, MPI, CIC, IAEE and others 

said, collectively, that the decline had to be arrested. It could not go on: more than US$100m of cancellations had taken place within six weeks of negative comments by President Obama.

President of Maritz Travel, David Peckinpaugh, underlines the real-world consequences of this sort of political posturing: “Our company was managing a meeting for [insurance giant] AIG at the luxury Montage Hotel in California, which had just accepted TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Programme] money; government money. What hit the news, before the Vegas uproar, was the fact Tiffany boxes were left in rooms, but TARP money was not used for those.

“However, as you know, when something gets in the press it can be quickly spun into a very negative light,” says Peckinpaugh. “In this case incorrectly stating that public money was being inappropriately used for AIG to wine and dine a ‘boondoggle’ for its employees.

“Our company lost $140m in terms of business in the next 60 days,” he says, adding that nearly 500 people were laid off.

So in 2009, the Meetings Mean Business campaign was formed with the goal of protecting and defending the industry from attack. At the time simply called ‘Council’, it had a PR campaign targeted at elected officials in Washington, and took full page adverts in the Wall Street Journal and in USA Today. The industry was, literally, as Marchand Beauvois says, “putting its money where its mouth is.”

Fast-forward to 2014 and the industry leaders had redoubled their efforts and relaunched the campaign with a focus on creating one voice to extol the undeniable value that meetings, events, trade shows, incentive travel, conferences and conventions bring to all sectors of business, government agencies and the economy.

“Today it achieves its goals actively engaging with stakeholders, the media and – crucially – key policymakers, a proactive campaign was built around three pillars: creating personal connections, driving positive business outcomes and building strong communities,” says Marchand Beauvois, adding that in the US, elected officials might not necessarily understand the industry’s positive impact. “We had to educate our lawmakers so they understood the value of our businesses, and also that any of the laws that they were able to put in action are good for our industry. That was important for us.”

It’s a matter that should, after all, resonate with a community that has itself come under intense scrutiny for its own ‘frivolous’ meetings. “Government meetings in the United States have been under attack for three years,” Marchand Beauvois points out. “The budgets for federal agencies travelling to meetings has been cut 30 per cent and the trend is that it will stay that way and not increase.

“Some of our biggest supporters are from states that benefit primarily from the industry,” Marchand Beauvois explains. “Senators and congressmen from [Las Vegas home state] Nevada, for example. We probably have 22 very strong supporters, but we have a lot of work to do because every time there is an election we may lose an elected official so it’s an ongoing process to make sure we educate our elected officials.”

As mentioned previously, sustainability is not just about the broader issues of being green, watching your carbon offset and recycling. It’s not even about being socially sensitive. It’s about changing the way companies appeal to their clients and those whose lives they affect with innovative initiatives, engaging and bringing benefit to their surrounding communities, and creating a greener and more environmentally friendly approach to business.

Despite the prosaic but necessary adherence to paper standards, optimisation of procedure and certification, sustainability is ultimately about using our imagination. True social responsibility and sustainable development starts with a vision and a passion for making the world a better place in which to do business.

“We need to be socially responsible,” says Amsterdam RAI’s Ids Boersma. “From the venue operating angle, especially on the conference side, we have already seen the organiser asking us for our social responsibility programme, or asking how sustainable we were. We started working towards it in 2008, setting clear goals, targets in various fields, whether it is energy, waste reduction, water usage, or charity and diversity.

“For a venue it seems slightly easier – there are a lot of invisible things that people don’t see but that we still do. We generate power and use the heat that comes out of it,” he says. “We changed all our light bulbs, replacing more than 10,000 [strip lights] because that saves energy. We serve healthy food. All our coffee is organic. There is a long list of things you can do as a venue operator.”

According to Boersma, this public transport initiative exemplifies the business benefit that being sustainable can bring. RAI’s initiative meant that for €7.50 (US$8.68), visitors could travel to Amsterdam and back. “In Holland that is quite a good deal, I can tell you,” said Boersma.

“We invested in having people come to the shows by public transport. Then we researched that and saw that we brought more people to the show because of that alliance we had with public transportation providers. That was a cost, but it paid back.”

UBM Asia’s executive vice-president Michael Duck claims that corporate culture must be changed from the top down, if the industry’s sustainability drive is to succeed. UBM’s ‘NGO’ event series, which began life in Brazil, engages communities over issues such as venues, freight forwarders and stand contractors, and seeks to get people in the corporate social responsibility arena to meet with Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs).

“The idea and the plan is to work with these communities in terms of giving something back,” says Duck. “The venue gives itself for free. The stand contractors give the stand for free, in terms of building them. The marketing, and the floorplans and also the promotional elements are given by our company and we bring these communities together. We harness these commercial resources.”

UBM duly progressed to hosting more NGO events, initially in Brazil and London (where it was called Responsible Business), later in India and in the US; the latter event held in San Francisco was called Business For Better.

“It’s a real journey to become more sustainable. It starts with a vision and a passion,” says Ids Boersma. “You have to involve your people. You have to know that what you have done so far was just a small step, there’s still a giant leap to be made.”

For an industry that gathers together so many, and uses so much non-reusable material so many times a year, the effort must be made. While all of the impacts of an exhibition are generally measured in the hope of seeing an increase or enhancement (be it in economic, social, cultural or political terms), one area that all stakeholders must focus on in order to drive a decrease in impact is in the negative environmental effects of exhibitions. 

“Measuring the positive impacts from the perspective of stakeholders is important to long-term sustainability,” comments Vivid Interface’s Geoff Dixon. “The industry must increase collaboration in order to reach a clear understanding of the direct and residual effects from these events.”

Through collaboration and the use of modern technology, systems that assist in creating efficiency in evaluation will continue to be developed by the industry, and for the industry.

The impact of the online world required the exhibition industry to look beyond the ordinary exhibition model, to re-evaluate what it is that exhibitions provide the markets they serve. Rather than be transposed into a new, confusing medium, our view of exhibitions had to be rewritten entirely.

Embracing the online world enabled exhibition organisers to add new value to their events, events that could now live longer in the public’s consciousness; we could accommodate vast communities that were inconceivable with a three-day physical show; the rich experience, dialogue and dissemination of content that we could offer had moved leaps and bounds beyond where it once was.

For an industry built on data – a defining element of a leading exhibition – the reach of online giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon was enough to make even the most hardened international organisers salivate. Theirs was now a world waiting to be profiled, separated and categorised for their marketing pleasure.

Companies in this market were succeeding and succeeding big. The American online bargain company Groupon became very successful on the back of a simple model offering coupons to subscribers, giving them discounts on promotional third-party company offers. These companies use Groupon to offer their services at discounted rates proportional to the number of people who take advantage of the promotion.

For example, a company may provide a flight in a helicopter over London for US$400, but if enough people sign up for the flights through a Groupon promotion, the price drops significantly.  

Sounds simple? Well evidently simple ideas are the most effective. In January 2011 the company issued around 30 million shares of stock to a group of third-party investors in exchange for US$946m in cash. The IPO price of $20 per share valued the firm at US$12.7bn, making it the second-biggest Internet company listing behind Google, valued at US$23.1bn in 2004.

However, at the time of writing Groupon shares trade below $7, valuing the company at a third of its initial public value, something in the region of US$4.5bn. This is the problem with overnight Internet sensations, or untested trading models: they are awfully prone to overnight devaluation.

Look closely and you’ll notice that what companies are buying into isn’t another online name-check: it’s actually Groupon’s huge database of clients. These firms take an initial hit in profits in exchange for access to millions of potential buyers. The company launched in Chicago in 2008, and by the end of 2014 92 million people around the world had downloaded its app. Yet this still comes nowhere near the might of Facebook with 1.44 billion active users. The fact that online companies have access to a potential and profiled database of so many is enough to make marketing directors’ heads spin. 

A question soon emerged: was the future of event creation going to come from the search engines or the exhibition companies? And this is where organisers needed to exercise caution. There was a very real possibility that search engine firms would enter the space typically dominated by exhibition organisers with carefully focused databases and direct access to their audiences and reach.

“In the expo industry we work with a list of maybe 10,000 clients,” says ITE founder and industry veteran Roger Shashoua. “Facebook has a list of one billion names it can market events to directly. Someone working on a site such as Facebook would be able to target two million visitors rather than the 10,000 we can.”

This is the crucial point. While virtual events were never going to replace physical shows, their reach was already far greater than that of the organisers with their physical events. Whoever finds the holy grail of how to cater for and monetise these huge online communities stands to make a fortune.

None the less, organisers are a necessary element in that equation. “The search engines may have the potential client lists but they don’t have the knowledge needed to run a physical event,” Shashoua points out. “You can never rule out someone from the other side telling you they need you.”  

Clearly, the sheer number of people declaring a shared interest or profession online, making associations via LinkedIn and so on, makes the act of searching for a like-minded person in a hall of 2,000 people redundant. If you want to single someone out, you find them online first. To paraphrase Reed Exhibitions’ chairman Mike Rusbridge, the days of chance encounters are now behind us. 

The ideal exhibition model for many began to take the form of a modest capacity venue where buyers meet and hopefully shake hands with business partners they’ve already met online. In many cases signing the paperwork happens on the show floor.

Shashoua calls online the ‘final frontier’ for exhibition organisers. The advent of the online age presented the industry with new, digital, territory to colonise. There was little in the real world that had yet to be tackled. “Everything has been done: Russia, China, Brazil, India and Asia – nobody was there and almost everyone is there today,” he says. “The days of creating a group from scratch and building 100 per cent organically to rival the great companies are over.

“The only market left was the Internet. No one had yet found the way to fully exploit the potential of the Internet in regards to the exhibitions field.”

As evidenced by the stratospheric growth of Groupon and its Noughties dot.com contemporaries, the Internet was seen as the ideal breeding ground for entrepreneurs in the exhibition industry: “a level playing field for everyone”, says Shashoua.

“Entrepreneurs are driven by huge rewards and recognition in the industry. For an entrepreneur to succeed, a complicated market has to exist,” he said. “The market has to have a high barrier of entry with enormous risk, but the rewards have to be huge. An entrepreneur needs a situation where he or she can operate quickly and adapt to new situations when corporations cannot.”

Entering a market in which the exhibition industry has not yet fully emerged is a risky activity, but if time has shown exhibition organisers only one thing, it is that there is no such thing as an entirely straightforward market in which to organise an event. Be it political, economic, social or technological, environmental or legal, there are any number of complications that can be an exhibition’s undoing.

Political instability is among the most terrifying of them. It cannot be ruled out, and can take place at any time in any part of the world. While unrest may be commonplace in certain parts of the Middle East or Africa, anybody who witnessed London in flames during the 2011 riots knows that social or political flashpoints can erupt in countries that we would ordinarily deem particularly stable. 

National or localised crises occurring just before or during their exhibitions are understandably every organiser’s worst nightmare. When an organiser gathers a large group of people, it takes on a huge amount of responsibility. To put this in context, the exhibition industry’s two largest organisers, Reed Exhibitions and UBM, currently run 900 shows around the world between them. There is rarely a time when these companies are not exposed to instability in one or more of their theatres of operation. 

The Arab Spring of 2010 was one such regional crisis, or more accurately a series of regional crises, that escalated very quickly. To the chairman of the Egypt Expo and Convention Authority, Sherif Salem, the surprise was very real. In Egypt, he claims, nobody expected the situation to explode. “The protests took everybody both in Egypt and abroad by great surprise, and nobody knew what would happen,” he says. The escalation, in Salem’s words, “brought society to a standstill.” Banks and shops closed and traffic was restricted; Salem had to put everything on hold and wait helplessly for the outcome.

In 2008 the international director of UBM’s Built Environment, Eliane van Doorn, 

was directing the company’s pharmaceutical and food ingredients portfolio when her job took her to Mumbai, India. As van Doorn sat in a taxi reflecting on her press conference at a local hotel where she had just addressed the impending launch of UBM Live pharmaceutical shows CPHI and P-MEC, she was given news of a devastating terrorist attack: the Oberoi and Trident hotel complex at Nariman Point, where her press conference had just concluded, had been stormed by terrorists in an act that led to the deaths of 32 staff and guests. “There were two hours between the Trident hotel press conference and when the shooting started so we had a little angel above our heads,” she says. Immediately, she entered crisis mode. 

“We spent the whole night trying to reach our participants, telling them to stay put. We didn’t know what was going on,” she says. “We were in direct contact with the police and military. We decided in the middle of the night to postpone the event for one day, which meant having to reach out to 30,000 people in one night, but luckily all the telephones worked.” Van Doorn and UBM decided it was too dangerous to open the shows, so the events were postponed until a year later and refunds provided for everyone involved. “It was a hectic time between dealing with exhibitors and contacting [then UBM chief exec] David Levin who had to make a big decision, as this would be a great loss.”

Having a local office meant the organiser was able to make concerted decisions quickly, and ensure the involvement of all the right groups. “If needed, we could talk to the police and get extra security,” she comments. “If you are a foreign company going into a country cold, you will never have these connections.”

By virtue of their unpredictable profession, event organisers have an inbuilt coping mechanism for sudden situations and possess the right mental tools to deal with the unexpected. In van Doorn’s words, and at the risk of stating the obvious, they are used to organising things: “In situations like that it really helps to have that quality to put everything in place, sort priorities and see what you can do,” she says. “Some people were in a complete panic and screaming and crying, while others were calm and did what they had to do. But the ones screaming and crying are part of your team so you have to deal with that too.

“It’s our job to be alert in what we are doing. We had to postpone because of SARS and Katrina. We had to deal with the bombings in London and Madrid. Things can happen and you have to be alert and keep your head clear.”

Two years later in Bangkok, director of the Exhibition Department at the Thailand Convention and Exhibition Bureau (TCEB), Supawan Teerarat, was tackling problems arising from the 2010 ‘Red Shirt’ protests, which saw hundreds take to the streets in anger at the Government. More than 80 civilians and at least six soldiers were killed in the ensuing military crackdown, and while the trouble was for the most part confined to a few specific areas of Bangkok, the international press coverage discouraged organisers from bringing business there. 

Teerarat set up a ‘war room’ involving all of the stakeholders in the exhibition industry: the Thailand Hotel Association, the Police Authority, Tourism Authority, Airport Authority, customs department, venues and the Thai Exhibition Association (the private counterpart to the public TCEB). “We teamed up and discussed short-term and long-term problems. The short-term problems came from the communications in the world news, so we talked closely with the organisers and gave a statement from TCEB with an update every day. We wanted to provide as much information as possible,” she explains.

Global coverage of a dramatic situation such as this is hardly good for business, and for associations such as TCEB much of the crisis management is concentrated on broadcasting reassurance for foreign organisers that the problems are isolated and will not encroach on the day-to-day running of an event.  In this instance, TCEB needed to communicate the fact that the protests were local and would not affect the internal workings of the country. “We had contact with the Thailand Hotel Association, members of which were accommodating the exhibitors and visitors, so we set up a TCEB assistance desk at hotels and airports to give information and help with the transfers,” Teerarat adds.

Both organisers and associations must make up-to-the-minute information available. “You must give information updates to your exhibitors, because the big concern will be that they don’t know what is happening,” says Teerarat. “Tell them how to get to the airport and what is happening at all times and they feel more secure. Will it be possible for you to relocate a large group of people if necessary or get them home if they want? Organisers should have that plan, especially if they have a local partner. Nowadays there are many bodies like TCEB and these bodies should be a focus point.” As with van Doorn, Teerarat emphasises the importance of local connections, strongly recommending the approach of making local partnerships.

The 2010 uprising in Kyrgyzstan began one week before the eighth edition of ITE’s Bishkek Build, the only show that the organiser stages in the country. The uprising claimed the lives of 88 people, and Yuri Borodikhin, group director of ITE Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, recalls postponing the show at the eleventh hour, with the equipment of some exhibitors already onsite.

“It was a much worse situation than [the] Tulip Revolution of 2005,” he says. “There was a lot of looting and people were setting buildings on fire such as the police stations and banks. Criminals were released on the streets and the police had all but disappeared because protesters were attacking and beating them.

“We were worried because March and April were such difficult times in Kyrgyzstan,” says Borodikhin, referencing the fact that demonstrations had become commonplace since the 2005 revolution. “People were really disappointed with the new regime and thought it was worse than before. During the day it was just demonstrations and so on. But that night there were beatings and it was obvious it wouldn’t settle down in time for the exhibition. We decided to push back a month this time, refunding those who decided to cancel.”

Again, communication with the exhibitors, especially those from overseas, was at the crux of the crisis management. “We were in constant contact with our clients,” says Borodikhin. “We wanted to avoid risking anyone’s life. Of course we hired extra security to make sure that if anything happened we could protect our clients and exhibitors from harm.”

In all instances, the arrival of a new government should catalyse organisers into arranging support and permission before anything changes. “You have to react very quickly and apply for a letter of support from the new minister. You have to have some Government support and someone to come and open the show. In Kyrgyzstan by law you have to have Government support from the appropriate ministry,” says Borodikhin. In every crisis, there is opportunity. 

[X-HEAD] Airborne industry paralysis

When it comes to generating a crisis, there is nothing that scares an industry dependent on air travel quite as much as the outbreak of a killer disease. In its first decade the 21st century was afflicted by a trio of highly publicised outbreaks of potential pandemics in the form of bird flu (H5N1), swine flu (H1N1) and SARS. However, not one of these had the Hollywood cachet that accompanied Ebola’s fearful presence on the front pages. More than 11,000 deaths were attributed to the disease by the Centre for Disease Control by the time this book had gone to press in 2015. The whole thing was a gift for over-excitable newspapers looking to sell copies.

Ironically, given that bird flu and Ebola are both associated with and carried by winged animals (chickens and birds, and fruit bats, respectively), one of the greatest impacts created by the global media’s inflated and scaremongering coverage was felt by the flight industry. Airlines are particularly susceptible to international scare stories. Terrorism, volcanic activity and any number of events over which we have little to no control are all too often ladled over the front pages with hyperbole. The impact that widespread coverage of the Ebola crisis had on the exhibition industry, for which air travel is a necessity, was very real, even if the actual threat to air travellers was minimal.

“The risk of Ebola transmission on airplanes is so low, WHO does not consider air transport hubs at high risk for further spread of Ebola,” said Dr Isabelle Nuttall, director of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Global Capacity Alert and Response. “Unlike infections such as influenza or tuberculosis, Ebola is not airborne. It can only be transmitted by direct contact with the body fluids of a person who is sick with the disease.”

This statement, released in August 2014 by the WHO, confirmed its view that the risk of transmission of the Ebola virus during air travel remained low, and underscored the official advice against travel bans to and from affected countries.

It was a sentiment reiterated by the United Nations, which cautioned against flight restrictions into and out of Ebola-affected countries in West Africa on the grounds that such limitations in fact prevented critically needed aid workers and supplies from reaching the affected areas, as well as exacerbating the economic and diplomatic isolation of the region. “The current limitations on flights into and out of these countries, and the restrictions placed on aircraft originating from these countries transiting through airports in neighbouring countries, though understandable, are not warranted,” commented chief UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric. “It is not an optimal measure for controlling the import of Ebola virus disease. The measure does not reflect what is known about the way in which the virus passes between people.”

But the media did not respond in kind, and nor did some air travel authorities. In late August people travelling from or through Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, were banned by Kenya from entering the country, while Cameroon suspended all flights from Ebola-affected countries.

While the airlines and media responded to the outbreak with measures that potentially exacerbated the situation, the business events and exhibition industries opted to provide insight, rather than dynamite.

“Inevitably, and as with earlier H1N1 outbreaks and other health scares, the media coverage can be highly sensationalist and disproportionate to the actual risks involved,” says the CEO of ICCA (an association for the global conference industry), Martin Sirk. “Irrational knee-jerk reactions are likely to be more damaging for our industry than the outbreak itself, so we should all encourage organisers and delegates to access factual information from WHO and other reputable bodies, rather than relying on the media.”

Threats like this must be put into perspective; thankfully, it is becoming increasingly easy to gain access to travel or crisis information that makes it simpler to understand the scope of such issues, allowing exhibitors and visitors to make up their own minds as to whether or not to attend an event. While caution is always the best advice, history has shown that today’s extensive media coverage can make an issue like this appear much more widespread than it really is. 

The real victims of these grave and tragic issues are poorly served by journalistic hysteria; and although there is no real comparison it is still worth pointing out that the impact on the meetings industry of ill-conceived inflammatory coverage can also cause considerable damage. Understanding and diligence by organisers are key to limiting the damage caused by such outbreaks of irrationality.

In the history of the modern exhibition, there is no guaranteed way of dealing with force majeure, and when a bad hand is dealt to the team behind an event, what is crucial is that the correct numbers are in their phone directory.

The dawn of the 21st century saw a lot of organisers moving into nascent exhibition regions in the Middle East, Russia and South East Asia, for very different reasons. Although not as large a proving ground for shows as China, Latin America or India, the stock of these three regions has been steadily rising on the international stage.

Stability in a region where neighbours are making headlines with tales of civil unrest pays dividends, but this stability is not confined to politics. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is very much an economic stronghold, sitting beneath only Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in terms of productivity. It is one of the world’s wealthiest countries, with a GDP for 2014 of around US$401.65bn and GDP per capita of US$25,772.

While other markets around the world look less certain, the UAE’s combination of abundant natural resources, a stable political climate and strategic investments delivering diversified revenue streams has for some time been attracting foreign direct investment.

It’s easier to arrange exhibitions in the UAE than in neighbouring countries for many reasons besides its strong economy. It is widely regarded as a more cosmopolitan, modern and open market, with 200 different nationalities living in a place smaller than a single state in the US. One spokesman for an organiser active in the UAE pointed out to me that far from being bound by “restrictive, insular tradition” in a way that damages the reputation of some other places in the Middle East, it has more diverse nationalities and cultures than the whole of the US. Other concerns over the import of business to the region are addressed by free trade zones, wherein Emiratis are not required to have 51 per cent business ownership, aimed at attracting general business.

One thing the UAE has in common with a lot of the exhibition markets growing in popularity is the ease with which it can be reached by source markets in an age when air travel is increasingly affordable and convenient. The UAE is situated eight hours from two-thirds of the world’s population, and as a busy travel hub it is ideally placed for international exhibitions. It may not have a large domestic market, and consumer events are tough to get off the ground, but its function as a portal into the Middle East is a clear selling point.

Industrially, the UAE is a big player in construction, IT, energy, healthcare, finance and education, and the success of trade exhibitions in these sectors reflects this. One of the UAE’s leading exhibition centres, the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (ADNEC), is home to many of the region’s leading shows. DMG’s Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference (ADIPEC) is one to mention. The largest event for the industry in the Middle East began life as a biennial in 1984, a platform for oil and gas professionals to discover new ideas and debate core industry issues in a place which sits at the very heart of the oil and gas industry.

Energy aside, technology and security also have proven strong markets capable of attracting international, rather than just regional, exhibitors. Epoc Messe Frankfurt, which has been present in Dubai since 2002, has been successful here with its three-day security, safety, fire and rescue event Intersec, a show that draws a thousand exhibitors from more than 50 countries.

The former chief of defence and commander-in-chief of the Dutch Armed Forces, General DL Berlijn, helped organise the Dutch pavilion at ADIPEC in 2012. He calls the Middle East “strategically important” for the sector because it brings together players from all over the world. “The UAE has proven to be a place where people want to meet, and Intersec has proven to be a platform for people to network, a good place to establish new contacts from all over the world,” he claims.

While development seems to be at the heart of Dubai, it is clear that the level and intensity of development increased further once it won the rights to host Expo 2020. “The speed of infrastructure development in Dubai is remarkable,” commented president at DMG Events Middle East and Asia, Simon Mellor, at the time. “Throughout the economic crisis Dubai kept building, albeit things slowed, however, the pace has increased and the skyline is again filled with cranes. There are many factors driving this demand, from the Government-backed tourism drive, to the successful positioning of Dubai as the Middle East’s trading hub, but Dubai’s successful bid to host the world Expo 2020 certainly contributed to this growth and opens opportunities for the emirate.

Large-scale infrastructure development took place, not only for the event site itself, but across the city, as roads, services and hotels are all built to service the huge demand such an event puts upon a city. Of course, anyone who has kept up with the pace of development in the UAE knows Dubai is well placed to meet these demands. The Dubai Business Events team was keen to drive home the point that the many infrastructure projects put in place for Expo 2020, including the site itself, are as much for the years post-2020 as they are for the Expo. Such is the impact of a single Expo event, some 169 years after the Great Exhibition filled Sir Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in London in 1851.

This all applies predominantly to trade shows, the global B2B exhibitions. With such a small population and local market, consumer shows are a struggle. However, with a growing population and a time-rich, affluent society, it is only a matter of time before this changes.

Markets do not progress from emerging to developed overnight. There are no quick bucks to be made from a speculative or committed entry into an emerging market, and exhibition organisers must be prepared to play the long game. Long before the spades enter the soil to start the construction of a major exhibition centre or the office of a global organiser, local support for the industry both in terms of provision of service and the generation of willing attendees must be evident if a show is to make any money.

And once established, as has been the case in many more countries than just China, the risks that face an exhibition organiser can be unpredictable; mere private whim can see the government decide almost overnight that they want to take a lot of that newly established business back for themselves or for the public or private sector companies run by their own nationals.  

In Africa, bold moves are being made to develop an exhibition industry by – among others – the 120-year-old British organiser Montgomery. Many organisers have dipped their toes in Africa’s water, the majority quickly removing them again until conditions improve. Montgomery is not one of them. As Damion Angus, the firm’s managing director explains, you need to be truly passionate about the continent if you are to make your business work there.

For all its appeal to exhibition organisers, Africa has no shortage of obstacles to success. And we’re not talking draconian customs and excise law, insular local business practice or language problems. Africa has been and continues to be afflicted by civil war, disease, terrorism and even good old-fashioned piracy. A successful exhibition in some parts of Africa requires a great deal more than contacts and square metres.

Active in Africa since 1967, Montgomery has built a mature local business with brands spanning six core sectors: mining, building and construction, food and hospitality, packaging and printing, and marketing and security. The organiser’s business is based in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, and from South Africa it has gone to Botswana, up to Zambia in a joint venture with fellow UK organiser Clarion’s local business Spintelligent, and on into markets beyond.

Aside from overcoming socio-political problems that have all but disappeared in developed markets, getting a worthwhile return on beginning an exhibition business where the market is still so small is a deterrent in itself. The SADC region is composed of small markets; for example, Botswana’s tiny population of just 2.2 million makes it difficult to run large shows. And at the region’s heart sits South Africa, the best known and most popular location for international events in Africa. It is home to the best venues and infrastructure for organisers, is accommodating for international visitors, and is seen as an attractive destination for tourists carrying either a suitcase or a backpack. It casts a long shadow over other market opportunities.

The global organisers that are present on the continent use South Africa as a platform with which they hope to entice the whole of Africa. However, inter-Africa trade is pretty small, contributing less than ten per cent of total business at exhibitions; instead, most of the trade is conducted with Western Europe or North America. Trying to get the rest of Africa down to South Africa is, in the words of Damion Angus, a pretty difficult thing to do.

One of the market’s key strengths remains its potential for resource-based events. Montgomery runs the second biggest mining show in the world – South Africa’s Electra Mining – which it used to enter both Botswana and Zambia. Truly global organisers are always looking beyond the borders in which they operate, at further markets for their events. When Montgomery explored joint venture opportunities in South Africa, it was doing so with a mind to replicating any success in new African markets, notably West Africa where it ran a security show titled Securex.

Sadly for this particular region, security is certainly a prudent field in which to have a stake. The Arab Spring at the end of 2010 caused no end of problems across the whole of the Maghreb region, the part of North Africa bordering the Mediterranean Sea, as well as neighbouring Egypt and further east. Libya was one such example of a market that was turned upside down by war. Once appealing to international organisers, it was left in a state whereby it was practically impossible to land a plane carrying either exhibition freight or visitors, such was the war damage sustained by airport runways.

The dogged global exhibition organiser presses on regardless of these setbacks. “We did run a number of shows in Libya, in the oil and gas and infrastructure sectors,” says Angus. “To be honest, despite the issues with early partnerships, Schengen visas, Gaddafi and ultimately war, we found Libya a very lucrative market for the time we were there.”

In the same period, neighbouring Egypt had two rulers and “a couple of uprisings”, as Angus laconically points out, adding that long term it will be a good market. In fact, Angus maintains that there are a lot of good long-term markets in Africa, so long as organisers are willing to accept that there is a high degree of risk that goes with them. “One needs to have a long-term outlook if you are going to take them on,” he suggests.

In extreme cases of course, as we almost saw with Reed Japan’s shows in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the market just will not follow. 

Montgomery staged a show in Nigeria in 2014, following the much-publicised and terrifying Ebola crisis. Despite registering a number of cases, Nigeria actually managed to control the situation remarkably well, according to Angus. 

“But obviously a disease like Ebola is so horrific that nobody is going to take any risks on contracting it however slim they are, and this had an impact on the shows we have there as well as in South Africa,” he points out.

Montgomery later ran a food show in Johannesburg and had people wanting to pull out for fear of contracting the disease. “It was crazy, if anyone in Nigeria thought they were coming down with Ebola they’d probably jump on a plane to the UK rather than head to South Africa,” says Angus, pointing to a common misconception about Africa – the fact that many people treat it not as a continent but a country.. 

“It was pretty much down to us to phone exhibitors and reassure them, in order to keep them involved. Obviously we lost a lot of internationals, but we still ran the show and had a good event,” he says, echoing Tad Ishizumi’s positive sentiments about 2011 Tokyo.

Montgomery launched the packaging event Propak East Africa in 2013, or rather tried to launch it; the Westgate shopping mall terrorist incident, in which at least 67 people lost their lives during a three-day attack, rocked Nairobi just a few weeks before the show. Montgomery had little option but to postpone it.

So with civil war, active terror cells and often overly sensational media coverage to contend with, exactly how does an organiser turn a campaign to enter these territories into a profitable endeavour? Is it always possible to turn small cogs in an emerging market, and sit back as it gears up for international business? 

“We certainly looked at Africa and decided that the smaller countries are not worth going into at the moment,” concedes Angus. “Instead we try to focus our attention on the ones that we think will be winners. You have to pick which countries you are going for with care.” 

Angus believes that an organiser operating in an emerging market should always be early when launching an event: 

“By the time you wait for things to be right, two or three other organisers are already there and going for it. That’s why launch shows in difficult markets are never very profitable ventures,” he explains. Daring organisers such as Montgomery probably enter their target market before they really should do, but such is the competition for the emerging markets that they must get their marker down in time to ensure longevity. “We probably go in earlier than we know we should be, but that’s purely a result of competition,” he says. The battle for the emerging markets is indeed an intense one.

Success is dependent on keeping conversations going in all of the smaller markets present in an overall target market. While it may have operationally exited Libya, Montgomery has maintained its conversations with existing partners and major stakeholders; in this way it can continue to assess the situation, and as soon as it feels the country is returning to stability – an environment in which it is viable to run an exhibition – it will start putting plans in place to launch again.

Being poised for action is of paramount importance for success in a latent market. “If you look at some of these markets where you could do a rebuild-type show, you almost have to have your plans ready to go, waiting for the opportune moment to dive in,” says Angus. “I agree when people say timing is everything. I don’t think there’s an exact science to it; it’s on a gut feeling. Have enough local conversations and get a strong enough exhibitor base willing to also take that risk, and be there first.”

And of course, a smaller family-run firm such as Montgomery needs to be fleet of foot among the giants that are milling about, observing any progress that they could hope to emulate and snap up territory and geographic markets for themselves. Another player keen to make its presence felt in Africa is the giant –British organiser UBM. David Gallacher-Olsson, commercial director of market development at UBM EMEA, says Africa is one of those really interesting long-term markets where you have to get beneath the surface. 

“There is a way of working, a way of thinking about Africa that goes beyond the normal. It is, after all, 54 countries with differing cultural backgrounds, and therefore it has differing dynamics,” he says. “For example, there isn’t a standard for pharmaceutical ingredients across Africa, which therefore makes the intercontinental trade of pharmaceutical ingredients very complicated. It has some challenging climates and cultures, so therefore it makes running trade shows across Africa very difficult. Obviously there is a lack of large-scale venues, which UBM needs as we run large-scale shows.

“So yes, if you do want to get into Africa it’s about timing and treading carefully. Certain companies have had a go and it’s worked out very well for them. I think we’ve got to choose our time wisely.”

Angus maintains that, as is the case with all emerging markets, you have to take the long-term view. 

“If you’re doing this just to have a pin in the board and say ‘we’re here’, then you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. You need to be pretty passionate about the continent and really enjoy working in the countries themselves, if you are to make it work,” he explains.

When all is said and done there are gains to be made in Africa. The likes of Informa, Clarion or Spintelligent all set out as successful businesses to venture across Africa and they are managing to make it work. But as Angus says, without passion, the chances of emulating their success is slim.