Author: Antony

  • Making a connection

    Making a connection

    In Leonard E. Read’s charming story of the Fifties I, Pencil: My Family Tree, the author makes the clear point that nobody knows how to make a modern pencil. Today we inhabit a world that has long since left the realm of craft and solo endeavour for the joys of communal production. 

    Industrialisation in the 19th century put community and the development of a collaborative marketplace at the forefront of human achievement, a process described by Read as “the spontaneous configuration of creative human energies.” 

    In this new world it no longer mattered what you knew but who, and how they could help you to achieve your goals.

    Writer and journalist Matt Ridley, author of books including The Origins of Virtue and 2010’s The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, took Read’s idea and indirectly explained why it applies to the exhibition industry.

    “Who knows how to make a computer mouse? Nobody. Literally; nobody,” he explained to the crowd at TedGlobal in Oxford, UK, during his intriguingly named presentation ‘When Ideas Have Sex’. “There is nobody on this planet who knows how to make a computer mouse. The president of the computer mouse company doesn’t know; he just knows how to run a company. The man on the assembly line doesn’t know, because he doesn’t know how to drill an oil well to extract the oil to make plastic.

    “We all know little bits but none of us knows the whole. What we’ve done in human society, through exchange and specialisation, is created a way to do things that we don’t even understand,” he says. “This is not the same with language. With language we have to transfer ideas that we understand with each other. With technology we can do things that are beyond our capabilities. 

    “We’ve gone beyond the capacity of the human mind to an extraordinary degree,” he said, adding that the debate about whether some racial groups have higher IQs than others is completely irrelevant in this collaborative world. Instead, he argues that what is important to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas and how well they are co-operating; not how clever the individuals within that society are. 

    “We’ve created something called the ‘collective brain’. We’re just the nodes, the neurons, in this brain,” says Ridley. “It’s the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating of ideas between them that is causing technological progress, incrementally, bit-by-bit, even when bad things happen.” 

    And how better to gather an industry and foment the creation of new products than in the fissile, buzzing environment of an exhibition floor? Every encounter, planned or otherwise, is a step towards facilitating someone’s new idea and – through interaction and the sharing of skills and projects – to enhance the industries the exhibition serves.

    “I am sure that because of the connections people are making and the ability to meet and mate [ideas] as never before, technology will advance and therefore living standards will advance,” says Ridley. “Because through the cloud, through crowd-sourcing, through the bottom-up world we’ve created where not just the elites but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate, we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation.” 

    There are of course many forms of forum and congregation that enable the sharing of ideas. And as is prevalent throughout nature, many result in the survival of the fittest. But for every perfectly conceived idea there is also a demand for ideas from the fringes, specialised creations that hold appeal despite lacking more general success. Returning to the nature theme, the world has room for both fast-multiplying rabbits and sexually reluctant pandas, just as the omnipresent and everlasting cockroach may share space with the rare and peculiar platypus.

    Exhibitions and trade shows facilitate this co-existence of ideas and concepts. While exhibitors experience a price differential at most exhibitions depending on the size, position or extravagance of their stand, anybody can take their place on the show floor. This brings benefits to visitors in a way that television or other above-the-line marketing does not. A person exposed to an Audi advert on television is unlikely to check an alternative car simply by chance, but they might do by walking the floors of an exhibition. 

    Some have expressed doubt about the continuing relevance of international trade fairs; as Miladin Šakić, former president of the Belgrade Fair, once put it: “there existed opinions without support, that trade fairs would be overcome and die out as unnecessary institutions”.

    But today nobody is asking ‘why and what for, these trade fairs?’, according to Šakić. “On the contrary, due to the rush of that progress [industrialisation], much space has been created for the activity of trade fairs.” Surely he is right, and the live event medium holds an enduring appeal.

    Šakić gives two components particular to exhibitions and trade shows that nobody and nothing has been able to replace so far. Firstly, trade fairs have remained outstanding places where the results accomplished in any branch of economic activity can be compared and judged peacefully and without prejudice. Secondly, trade fairs have kept their position as “important instances for open dialogue, for the realisation of programmes in the manufacturer-trader-consumer line, and for talks and agreements, again without prejudice, among citizens of various nations.” 

    The latter, Šakić says, means that in a sense, trade fairs effect the role of ambassadors, “bringing people together and in promoting economic, commercial, and other relations between peoples and nations.”

    Exhibiting due care and consideration 

    Of course the benefits of exhibitions are mitigated by several factors, and for uninitiated exhibitors, these events could be seen to present something of a gamble. They worry that the profile of the event may not be correct for their company, despite the title or apparent target audience. Expenses may outweigh the likely value of leads gained as a result, there is the big issue of return on investment (ROI) that we will address later in this book, and it may not be the right time of year for buyers. The natural cycle of an industry must also be carefully understood. There is no sense in showcasing summer clothing at a spring/summer fashion event in Paris, as the lead times on orders and the fashion industry cycle dictate that this is the time to stock up on winter garb. No matter how bizarre the outsider may feel watching models showcasing fake fur coats in the blazing heat of early Paris summer, or sporting swimwear and summer playsuits on a freezing winter morning in London, that is the industry norm.

    While most exhibitions are about lead generation and signing deals, there is much else going on besides. The show floor offers a chance for networking, industry insight and awareness; and an exhibition’s education programme plays an increasingly important role given the modern opportunity for exploiting such content digitally, shining a light on the event through the Internet. 

    The ability to make a connection at shows is the live event medium’s strongest card.

  • Caravans to palaces

    Caravans to palaces

    Exhibitions and tradeshows have come a long way since caravans in the sand were circled by the Bedouin and other nomadic tribes that gathered to share products from the various areas and regions they had crossed on their travels.

    In Europe the medieval guild fairs helped to define towns, giving them a platform to celebrate the craftsmen and women who called them home. 

    Today, soaring towers of commerce, great palaces dedicated to enterprise and trade, have replaced the tents and market squares that once stood in their place. And none exemplified this shift to dedicated events in quite so spectacular a fashion as the Great Exhibition of 1851, held at the Crystal Palace in London. 

    The event was organised by civil servant and inventor Henry Cole, motivated after an inspiring visit to the Quinquennial Exhibition in Paris two years earlier. Cole, who hailed from the picturesque town of Bath in south-west England, had returned from France disappointed that a show which purported to be global had so few international participants. 

    Believing that there was an opportunity to combine the 1850 and 1851 editions of the exhibitions of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) – a body to which Cole belonged – he set about creating a larger international exhibition, with the backing of Queen Victoria herself through the presidency of Prince Albert. The event was to be housed in a mighty structure, the purpose-built Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, with many of the exhibits going on to become the inaugural collection of the South Kensington Museum, subsequently the Victoria and Albert Museum.

    The Crystal Palace became one of the world’s iconic man-made structures, and at the time was a centrepiece for the prowess and magnificence of the British Empire. Nine months in the making, Sir Joseph Paxton’s phenomenal ultra-modern building rose to prominence as a glass showcase capable of displaying more than 100,000 products from 14,000 exhibitors from the British Empire and beyond. It measured half a kilometre in length and was 124m wide, thus giving an exhibition area of just under 89,000sqm.

    Around 300,000 panes of glass, at the time cut to the largest size ever made, went into its creation, extravagant use of glass being a signature of Paxton, who had been building greenhouses for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth. It was the largest composition of cut glass that had ever been assembled, and this use of glass on the sides and the roof – enabling people to see into the building from all around – is what gave the building its moniker, courtesy of playwright Douglas Jerrold, a contributor to the satirical British magazine, Punch. 

    Paxton based his designs on the structure of the regia lily. Using artistic themes for  exhibition and convention centres continues today, with the cidra tree-inspired Qatar National Convention Centre and the Amador Convention Centre in Panama, the latter designed to represent a harpy eagle in flight – the country’s national bird.

    As to what visitors could see inside the Crystal Palace, author H. Beal wrote at the time in his essay, ‘A Visit to London During the Great Exhibition’, that: “The first section of the articles will comprise raw materials and produce. The next great division into which the Exhibition will be classed will be that of machinery of all kinds, illustrative of the agents brought to bear upon the products of nature, in order to bring them in to a manufactured state. In this section will be seen all varieties of steam engines… 

    “In a word, every one may be able to see how cloth is made for his clothes, leather for boots, linen for shirts, silk for gowns, ribbons, and handkerchiefs; how lace is made; how a pin and needle, a button, a knife, a sheet of paper, a ball of thread, a nail, a screw, a pair of stockings are made, how a carpet is woven… In addition to this, the machinery will be exhibited in motion…”

    On her arrival at the exhibition, Queen Victoria was seemingly delighted to witness a buzzing hive of activity in full flow, surrounded as she was by wide-eyed visitors and apparently overjoyed exhibitors, all coming together in some of the most awe-inspiring surroundings in the British Empire. 

    “The sight as we came to the centre where the steps and chair (on which I did not sit) was placed, facing the beautiful crystal fountain was magic and impressive,” she recorded in her diary. “The tremendous cheering, the joy expressed in every face, the vastness of the building, with all its decoration and exhibits, the sound of the organ… all this was indeed moving.”

    The building occupied much of Hyde Park until it was taken down, rebuilt and enlarged on London’s Penge Common (then a wealthy suburb), where it remained from 1854 until destroyed by fire in 1936. During the destruction the trustee board director Sir Henry Buckland is said to have exclaimed that the building would live on in the memories “of not only Englishmen, but of the whole world.” Sir Winston Churchill himself was attributed as saying that the Crystal Palace’s destruction resounded as “the end of an age”.

    But this, as we know, is not the case. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was by no means the first coming together of exhibitors and buyers/exhibitors, but it remains to this day as the super-exhibition that started it all. The appetite for celebrated and giant showplaces was whetted by what had been achieved in 1851.

  • Making an impact in the modern age

    Making an impact in the modern age

    On 11 March 2011, employees of Reed Exhibitions Japan, one division of the world’s largest international exhibition organiser, were gearing up for three exhibitions scheduled to begin in April, buoyed by the fact that the growing events were set to be 30 per cent larger than in 2010.

    The event trio included one of the world’s largest exhibitions in the field of liquid crystal and plasma display manufacturing, the 21st FineTech Japan, as well as the second high-function film show FilmTech Japan and the inaugural light and laser technology event Photonex. With 820 exhibitors and 60,000 visitors expected, of which 5,000 were travelling from overseas, these exhibitions were the first of 25 shows Reed had planned for Japan over a three-month period.

    But this was all about to change. At 2:46pm, as post-lunch meetings got underway, screams began to ring out and terror set in as the Reed office on the 18th floor of a 50-storey skyscraper in Tokyo began to sway alarmingly. Not one employee managed to stay on their feet. When the listing settled Reed hastily evacuated the office. Since all means of transport – public and private – had ceased, employees walked for five or six hours to get home; others stayed in nearby hotels, or gathered together in public buildings and parks. 

    Hours away from the stricken Japanese capital, Reed Exhibitions Japan president and chairman of the Japanese Exhibition Association (JEXA), Tad Ishizumi, was making every effort to get home from a business trip. Unable to reach his wife or any of his colleagues on their mobile phones, he resigned himself to spending another night at his hotel, his isolation compounded when nobody picked up the office phone. Flicking on the news channel in the hotel, reports showed devastation in the Tohoku region and scenes of chaos in Tokyo. Ishizumi was so worried he didn’t sleep a wink.

    The following day he managed to get back to Tokyo and confirm his wife was safe. He contacted his executive staff and when he found out that both the office and employees were secure, he attempted to relax a little.

    But it was at that moment, while wondering if there was anything that could be done for the disaster-stricken area, that his concerns ballooned. Reed Exhibitions Japan had 25 exhibitions to organise by the end of June. Worried that he might be forced to cancel them, he called an emergency meeting. There was a palpable air of tension among the 30 executive staff who assembled for the meeting early the following Monday. In the back of his mind Ishizumi felt the same way they did, but he made an effort to act as composed as possible and set about issuing instructions.

    “First, let’s get the facts straight,” he said. “We will telephone the 2,000 companies exhibiting at the 25 pre-July exhibitions, and tell them we intend to hold the exhibitions as scheduled. Depending on their responses, we should be able to get a clearer understanding of their damage situation, their intention to exhibit, and opinions about holding the exhibitions.”

    At seven in the evening, as soon as the company had finished calling Japan and Asia, the employees set about contacting Europe and then America, where the day was just starting. By the following morning, they had finished. “We were only able to speak to fewer than 1,000 companies, but it was enough to be able to attain our objective,” Ishizumi says. “To start with, around 20 per cent of exhibitors answered that they were considering cancellation because they were certain of a sharp drop in visitor numbers. Some companies among them were even indignantly saying, ‘At a time like this, you should show some self-restraint and cancel the event!’”

    But others were keen to uphold their commitment to the show, despite the potentially low turnout. Sixty per cent of the corporations said they would exhibit as scheduled, including 16 companies from the disaster-stricken area itself. “They told us they had sustained damage but since FineTech is vital for business, they would exhibit in the hope of recovery,” he says. “This made us feel that we should hold the exhibition after all.”

    Small or medium-sized companies account for the majority– of exhibitors at most exhibitions, and for many these events are the biggest opportunity for sales. It’s the reason such companies register a year in advance and invest considerable resources in making their involvement a success. Cancellation comes at a real cost, and the world’s leading organisers understand this. Exhibitions are a gathering of companies in the same industry and if, for example, one company claims that the exhibition is cancelled, this rumour can be all over the industry in no time with the consequent risk of one exhibitor after another cancelling. 

    “Something obvious that tends to be forgotten is that exhibitions are not only about the organisers, but for the exhibitors, the visitors, the venue and the supporting companies as well,” Tad Ishizumi explains. “That is why they register a year in advance and invest money, time and energy. In short, among different types of events, exhibitions have stronger commercial significance and a higher level of seriousness. If we keep this in mind, exhibitions must not be cancelled so easily.”

    By promptly distributing correct information about the effects of the earthquake, Ishizumi hoped to prevent just such a situation developing.

    What he couldn’t account for, however, were the growing problems at the nuclear power plant at Fukushima. The severity of the situation was worsening and organisers throughout Japan were cancelling their shows. Indeed, the number of cancellations increased dramatically, as exhibitors grew fearful that the halls would be empty and perhaps even without power. The mood of self-restraint grew stronger.

    Ishizumi came off the phone to his colleagues, now aware that 80 per cent of the 180 overseas corporations scheduled to exhibit at FineTech had requested the event’s cancellation – to his mind the result of excessive and exaggerated reports in the overseas media of problems at Fukushima . One exhibitor announced that “The food and water in Japan is covered in radiation, and going to Japan is like going to die. We are cancelling our participation.” In addition, Ishizumi had cancellations from another country saying, one potential exhibitor saying “We heard many countries are repatriating their own citizens because Fukushima is close to Tokyo. Holding the exhibition is crazy.” 

    In an effort to overcome initial fears that Tokyo was near to the Fukushima plant, Ishizumi  commissioned maps to visually convey the fact that Tokyo was actually 230km away and 400km from the epicentre of the earthquake. The company also explained that the Japanese Government had set the evacuation zone at 20km from the power plant – the US Government, with its highly cautious stance, had set it at 80km. This clarification changed the mind of some considering withdrawal. He also presented a report from the Nikkei, Japan’s most influential economic newspaper, explaining that the radiation level in TokyoS–S would not pose a threat to health.

    Despite this, the pressure was made worse by the fact that many observers from the exhibition industry, politics, government and other industries were watching FineTech with intense interest. Since almost all exhibitions in Japan had been cancelled after the earthquake, the success or failure of FineTech would be seen as an indicator for the other international exhibitions and conventions that were to follow.

    The company more than tripled its telephone invitations from 3,000 influential buyers in Japan to 10,000 people. Ten staff members responsible for FineTech in Japan and 20 part-time workers made one phone call after another from morning until night, urging attendance at the exhibition. Ishizumi had to curb any possibility of a drastic reduction in the number of visitors.

    “Before we knew it, it was 10 o’clock in the morning of 13 April; the first day of the exhibition. When the doors opened we were astonished. Tens of thousands of people began piling in. It was overwhelming. We had been choked by a deep anxiety that the visitor numbers would drop, an anxiety that would not vanish until we actually saw it happening.”

    Three days later at 5pm, as the show organisers closed FineTech’s doors, the dust began to settle. Where the number of visitors had been expected to reach half of the previous year at a stretch, it instead increased daily until it reached 55,323 people: a figure on a par with the previous year. 

    “When I spoke at the reception party about what we’d achieved for the FDP [Flat Display Panel] sector, and the economic recovery of the Tohoku region, there was a huge round of applause in the middle of the speech – something that is not customary for Japanese people,” says Ishizumi.  “Almost all the exhibitors signed contracts for the next exhibition. Two hundred companies that had cancelled their participation at the last minute, or hadn’t been scheduled to exhibit, told us they regretted not exhibiting, that they had decided to participate next time, and signed contracts for the next exhibition on the spot. During the show period alone, there was actually an increase of 10 per cent from this year to next year in applications for exhibit booths, reaching a total of 1,450 booths.”

    The show must go on, he explains: “Exhibitions revitalise every industry and bring benefits to the exhibitors and to the visitors. This is linked to developing the economy of Japan and the reconstruction in Tohoku. If we had exercised self-restraint, it would only have delayed the reconstruction. Instead, we needed to be even more assertive about holding shows than in the past. 

    “Small or medium-sized corporations account for 70–80 per cent of exhibitors at most exhibitions, including FineTech. Unlike major corporations, their selling powers are weak even if they have excellent products, and for many the exhibitions are the biggest opportunity for sales. In order to meet their expectations we must not cancel any exhibitions unless there are extraordinary circumstances.”

    The schedule was maintained, everyone involved was kept informed to the best of Reed’s ability through constant updates and the efforts of a round-the-clock team: remarkably, the event was an enormous success. Those in the industry who at first had held their breath now gave Reed Exhibitions Japan the praise it deserved.

    This success story has since become a topic of conversation throughout Japan’s exhibition sector and beyond, and qualifies not just as one of the global exhibition industry’s greatest examples of how to work together to overcome adversity on an unprecedented scale, but as one more celebrated example of the significance of a global exhibition to the market it serves.

  • Make 2019 the year we captivate our audiences

    Make 2019 the year we captivate our audiences

    Happy new year to you all and may your 2019 be equally as newsworthy a year as 2018 was. Some big deals went public in the closing weeks which is both aspirational and reassuring for those in the industry hoping to follow in their footsteps. It appears that buyer confidence is high and the clever money is on us all witnessing more industry-shaping private-equity acquisitions before the fireworks bring this year to a close.

    However, we also witnessed some major show collapses in 2018 and as surely as we can be bathe in the triumph of companies such as CloserStill Media (sold to Providence for £340m (US$431m) on 19 December) we must also address the concerns of exhibitors questioning the role of trade shows in catering for an audience that is evolving far quicker than we are.

    According to the recent UFI & Explori Global Visitor Insights Study, which used multinational data from more than 13,000 trade show visitors, audiences are bored by the traditional trade show model. A quarter of American visitors said the events they attend are actually getting worse. They want events that are less sales-led, more engaging. In UFI CEO Kai Hattendorf’s words, “the ability to source new ideas and solutions is most closely correlated with overall visitor satisfaction”.

    To counter this disinterest, exhibitors want more creative brand engagement solutions from organisers. Look at the preamble that led to the cancellation of Cebit and Interbike, and the withdrawal of Swatch Group’s 19 brands from Baselworld, all of which saw lead exhibitors ask the show director to be more inventive, to provide means of engaging their audience that couldn’t be measured in square feet. It’s the reason why suppliers such as Freeman and GES are evolving into full-blown experience specialists.

    The model hasn’t changed, but the audience has. So how can we go about accommodating them? I have been covering this industry’s successes and failures for a decade now, and the more I try and predict how events will adapt in the next three years, the more I am drawn to the fact that we should be looking at how the publishing industry overcame its own sea change.

    Many of the world’s leading trade show organisers grew from multinational business publishers. It wasn’t a big leap for companies such as United Business Media (UBM) or the Daily Mail Group (DMG Events) to gather their advertisers and place them in a large room instead, with exhibition stands and sponsorship taking the place of adverts, buyers taking the place of readers. Publications with an overseas presence had an open door to replicate these events using their little black book for that region too.

    When print revenues slipped into seemingly unarrestable decline as the readership moved online and advertisers sought to reach them there instead, companies presumed the medium in which their adverts were printed would simply switch from ink to binary.

    But it didn’t. Instead a backlash against advertising and soliciting emerged and rapidly went into full swing. Adverts could be dodged, windows closed. Browsers subverted the model by halting pop-ups, allowing ad-blockers to conceal adverts destined for a third of potential customers using personal computers or smartphones, as they sought to improve the user experience in a manner that had not previously existed. According to a 2018 report by eMarketer, 32% of users in Germany, 28.7% in France, 25.2% in the US and 22% in the UK enabled ad-blocking technology this year.

    The problem for advertisers bound by tradition is that when the well ran dry, they quickly found themselves seeking a drink elsewhere, and before long they arrived at the fresh water river of editorial.

    The role of a good publisher, is to keep these two apart. I’m not prone to making analogies, but here’s a good one. Advertisers don’t belong at this river; they muddy the water. Muddied water sends silt downstream, and when this deposit eventually reaches the surface, the river will cease to flow; it soon becomes stagnant and drinkers leave in search of fresh water elsewhere.

    In trade shows, this is the inexorable result of what we like to call pay-to-play, and it’s something we can’t afford to do, not if audiences are increasingly depending on our events for education, inspiration, perhaps even accreditation. Events are evolving, enriching, but to pass off advertising as bonafide content is to deceive the very community that you claim to serve. And if it’s not good enough for successful publishers, then it’s not good enough for successful organisers. If a speaker stands onstage and spouts slogans, or a workshop directs participants to hand over their emails, this discredits and devalues our events.

    Of course, this is taking a rather naïve stance. Subterfuge is clearly a solution. While an advertiser cannot rightly authorise the content, they can request exposure in exchange for a parallel, bountiful, advertising campaign. But how long can this fast-buck culture last? Not long, if you’re paying attention to the headlines. Exhibitors want better solutions than this. Have we forgotten our roots in business publishing, the desire to provide a community with engaging, genuinely informative content?

  • Doing away with pay-to-play

    Doing away with pay-to-play

    Chris Day, the senior marketing director for both MJBizCon and associated publication Marijuana Business Daily, recently told Steph Selesnick (my collaborator on The Exhibitionists and regular contributor to this blog) that you have to come at it from a very clear credibility standpoint.

    “Most of our editorial and programming team come from a traditional news background, that’s where they were before they came here; I come from ad agencies,” he explained. “We’re very clear on who does what. So when I work with a partner or a sponsor, it’s easy for me to say there’s no pay-to-play here, that I’m not guaranteeing them any kind of seat, and actually if they name-drop me to the editorial team, it’ll probably hurt them more than it will help them.”

    Selesnick, a former organiser herself, points out that the pay-to-play model should be ineligible for speaking arrangements at events. “It’s bait-and-switch, if you have something to say, say it. If you want to share knowledge as a supplier, then there are places to do that properly, to show that you’re a thought leader. Educate people so that they want to do business with you as opposed to proclaiming you’re the best.”

    Just as today’s culture of click-bait and pop-ups has led browsers to provide ad-blocking software, the role of a organiser is also that of an ombudsman, curating the content and ensuring falsehood and thinly-veiled solicitation is kept from the stage.

    However, removing pay-to-play is just one part of improving the visitor experience at trade shows, and there are other ways for exhibitors to tap into content in a way that keeps the water fresh. To quote Day again, “Creativity emerges once people get over the notion of ‘what do you mean I can’t just have a spot onstage?’. Do it in a way that engages folks whether its on the show floor or engaging people elsewhere, instead of doing the same old boring thing.”

    In online publishing, the space vacated by traditional advertisers soon allowed viral marketing, multi-platform, multi-media campaigns and influencers to flourish (cold shiver, but who could have expected a six-year-old YouTuber to net $11 million last year just unboxing toys). Companies started thinking about what they could really achieve with this exciting new medium; they stopped trying to apply traditional thinking to a non-traditional medium. Well, the successful ones did; for every Netflix there was also a Blockbuster Video that completely failed to grasp the medium.

    To my eye, and in my experience, several methods will cross over to tradeshows from publishing quite nicely. Click-bait doesn’t naturally transfer to trade shows, but contributing to research, funding initiatives that add value – not logos – to the event will be well perceived. Aiding visitor immersion through enriched experience and supplying the means (accreditation programmes, education) to improve the visitor journey would afford exhibitors some stakeholding in the event that extends beyond the flimsy walls of their booth.

    Technology also broadens the offering of course, largely because it introduces actionable data and therefore insight that didn’t exist before. A digital presence also gives exhibitors an online space to engage the community they’re after, but it is not the be-all and end-all that was feared a decade ago.

    When you combine large-scale organiser consolidation with large-scale event collapse, as is seemingly the case in our industry, a trend appears; there are going to be a lot of smaller shows with tremendous reach. And smaller shows are a lot easier to reimagine than large ones, so let’s keep an eye on those that are experimenting, get back to the drawing board and keep our exhibitors and visitors, advertisers and readers, coming back for more.

    So when it comes to covering 2019’s events, I hope I can find plenty of success stories that warrant waving in the face of doubting marketing executives. The exhibitor pays the bills and I hope this is the year of giving them what they want.

  • An ovation for innovation

    An ovation for innovation

    One thing that has always endeared me to the global exhibition industry is the fact that the events you create foster innovation on a definitively industrial scale. The SMEs that typically comprise the bulk of your exhibitors are more often than not pushing innovation to an audience of buyers seeking competitive advantage through fresh partnership.

    So naturally when I was invited to take part in a two-day workshop, created by Future London Academy, exploring innovation in London with a delegation of business event stakeholders from our industry; I jumped at the chance. This two-day investigation into innovation gave me a chance to compare and contrast the work being done in our industry with that taking place in a handful of progressive business in one of the world’s leading service industry hubs.

    What struck me most of all throughout the event was quite how much our business has in common, schematically speaking, with the businesses around us, in fostering innovation to bring value to our clients.

    Take for example a consultancy we visited named Space Syntax, dedicated to integrating people and space in creating clever design strategies for cities and venues. Think heat maps and physical visitor behaviour; it’s a familiar topic for anybody involved in the creation of visitor flow, show floor layout and the logistics behind large-scale international events. Only in this case, their client base was large architectural firms and municipal governments.

    Or consider the Visa Innovation Centre in Paddington, where the focus shifted to fostering innovation in a large organisation. Many similarities became apparent in the approach of both international event organisers and Visa, which (as observed by a fellow participant) is in essence a collection of enterprises able to establish a comprehensive payment ecosystem. You might be surprised to know that like some large international organisers, Visa embraces start-ups and brings them under their overarching corporate umbrella, capitalising on and nurturing their creativity in the pursuit of the building the perfect customer experience.

    And then there was the R/GA Accelerator, which demonstrated its focus on projects that showcase the value of technologies including IoT and augmented reality in helping companies achieve competitive advantage. Stadium crowd management and engagement, visual visitor identification and registration, all likely harbingers of future technology for the exhibition industry in particular.

    Future London Academy event director Ekaterina Solomeina put it well when she told me: “It’s difficult to know what you don’t know, but to be ahead of the competition, and to constantly innovate, you need to be aware of the new market opportunities, the latest methodologies and most promising technologies that can take your business to the next level.”

    The event also gave me a good chance to see how these companies outside of our industry view the things that we do – and to a person they were very keen to work with an industry that (moneymaking aside) does its utmost to boost trade and create jobs in cities all over the world.

    It’s good to zoom out once in a  while.

    I’d like to give thanks to my chums at the Thailand Convention and Exhibition Bureau for their kind invitation to join them on this innovation tour, quite an eye opener.

  • Organisation membership burning you out?

    Organisation membership burning you out?

    When AIPC, ICCA and UFI sought to unite and identify areas of common interest for education and research, what they in effect set out to do is give us all a little of our time and energy back.

    Many of you will be members of several international associations, as your air miles and familiarity with Outlook’s Out of Office tool will attest. So with a chance to speak to International Association of Convention Centres (AIPC) President Aloysius Arlando, who also serves on the board of UFI, I wanted to delve a little deeper into how such an alliance will give event attendees greater bang for their buck.

    Members are facing organisational burn-out

    “At its simplest level, many of our members are facing organisational burn-out, where they can’t possibly belong to and participate in the number of associations and events they feel a need for in order to keep up with the full range of industry information and activities,” he explained to me at the end of July.

    “Through collaboration, we can make a wider range of content and relationships available to these people without them feeling they actually need to join all these – and that gives them a better return on the time they are able to realistically invest.

    “Having said that, creating more broadly accepted and recognised standards also offers a greater sense of comfort and security for those trying to choose amongst alternative practices and credentials that may in fact not really be all that different.”

    It’s a fair concession. Anyone who has played a role on an association committee knows how thankless a task it can be to produce research or insight only to be beaten to the line by a similar committee at a similar association. Conference attendees also face diminishing returns by having to sit through the same presentation. On the editorial side, I’ve had to politely decline plenty of stories based on reports that had essentially been released by a counterpart elsewhere in the world.

    Sending the right message

    “From our perspective, the risks come in several forms,” says Arlando. “First there is the inevitable duplication of effort and expense that comes from multiple organisations doing variations of the same thing in order to compete, and that is not perceived as a good use of resources by our members, particularly when they belong to multiple organisations and see it first-hand.

    “However, there is also a risk of demonstrating we are more concerned with our individual success as associations and less so on the overall advancement of the industry, which is a poor message to be sending to the outside world. It risks inconsistency in core areas, and that isn’t healthy for anyone.”

    Strength in unity through newly pooled resources

    How about strength in unity; in what way will the newly pooled resource mean these associations have more influence in getting ministries of trade and investment interested in supporting international business events?

    “For some very practical reasons,” explains Arlando. “No government is interested in polling 20 different organisations to get a sense of what consensus is on any particular issues and simply the fact that a group like the G3 represents a wider range of industry interests makes it more credible.

    “It also allows us to better align our messaging and create more consistent measures to back up what we’re saying – and that helps us in making assertions about things like strategic values that will resonate with governments that are trying to justify industry investment.”

    As an example, Arlando says it has been tough to sell the economic development values associated with meetings and conventions in the face of strong hospitality lobbying. “However, add exhibitions into the equation the direct economic connection becomes more obvious,” he says.

    We in the tradeshow industry have always known our value, and now we have a commitment to share it with our friends in the plenary halls.

  • Talk the talk

    Talk the talk

    In the UK at least, the fortunes of international destinations all-too-often lie in the hands of overpriced London agencies, typically staffed by eager-to-please affable types who pronounce their names unconventionally. And, sadly, seem to know nothing about the global exhibitions industry.

    Press trips tailored for holiday, not business

    I can count on one hand the number of times my press trips, tailored for the business event audience, made even a passing reference to the industrial character of the city we were in. (And you may be surprised to know they weren’t in the more advanced markets.)

    Instead, they typically put us on a plane, show us the sights and showcase fine food and hospitality, which would be wonderful if I was on holiday. But as I’m updating an educated audience and not my Instagram account, it instead does the city or town a great disservice. When organisers choose the next location for their international event, it is not on the strength of the views from their potential rooms, but on the industries that those hotels support.

    There is a clear reason many press trips take this format. Convention and Visitor Bureaus traditionally set out to achieve goals dictated and financed by the tourism ministry. So on the surface, this approach sort of makes sense; these goals are by and large fixated on attracting large conferences and events, which typically move between locations and are therefore subject to a different kind of pitch.

    In reality, however, it betrays the fact that people don’t quite get what we in the exhibition industry do, outside of bringing the circus to town. And if they don’t get it, then how are the clients that pay these agencies fat stacks to put them on the map going to know any better?

    Not my circus, not my monkeys

    Wouldn’t it be great to see more destination marketing agencies use these opportunities to focus on the underlying market conditions, the blossoming industrial clusters and academic support networks, specifically to reach organisers of business events – and more specifically organisers of international trade shows.  Let’s not forget, unlike large peripatetic conferences, trade shows tend to hang around once they’ve selected a market that can sustain their event.

    In Germany, this year’s Bauma drew more than 620,000 visitors from 200 countries (by its own account), which is mind-boggling (in part because it’s four more countries than even exist according to the United States – and more than can call themselves card-carrying members of the United Nations). It’s as if everyone in Montenegro decided to visit Munich and consider a career in construction.

    When I consider the number of leads, capital and careers generated by this enormous crowd meeting with the 3,700 exhibitors from 63 countries vying for their custom; well I take immediate solace in the fact I’m here to provide you with words, not numbers.

    Bauma owes its success in part to Munich’s central European location in Germany, which enjoys both a reputation for excellence in engineering and logistical benefits of belonging to the world’s largest trading union.

    By equal measure, if you’re in the energy industry, it will come as no surprise at all to know that the next edition of DMG’s Gastech takes places in Houston, the US city currently undergoing developments in industrial gas complex development estimated at $50 billion. In fairness, anyone who reads a newspaper may have picked Texas out as a place where a company involved in oil could make money. The prevalence of widespread fracking in the US has recently removed North America’s reliance on OPEC, and Texas is synonymous with oil, so there’s a strong likelihood that there is business to be done here.

    Silicon Valley, or Tallinn?

    So ten years ago, when you were asked about nations that would evolve to become leaders in digital technology, the wood producing nation of Estonia would probably have raised eyebrows. Be honest; you were thinking about the pine trees surrounding Silicon Valley, not the ones surrounding Tallinn.

    But today Estonia is ranked first overall in the InterNations survey for its digital infrastructure and is now home to unrestricted internet access and online government services, and as a result, many of the world’s leading online financial and transactional technologies are being developed here.

    There are many markets home to smaller or more nascent markets that would present mutually beneficial opportunities for organisers. We just need to hear about them, in order to help tell you why you should be there.

    Business events, the word is key

    My company works with several trade promotion organisations that I would describe as having ‘got it’. Those that recognise business events are a function of trade and investment and not tourism, which is perhaps the least significant beneficiary of the whole trade-show ecosystem.

    We are in the game of delivering business events, and that word is key. Trade shows by their very nature leave a legacy that is both lasting and lucrative. And success is more likely where partnership and support are forthcoming.

    Agents in all branches of our far-reaching ecosystem need to walk the walk if we are to get where we want to go. Particularly those responsible for promoting their clients to us; we deal in trade, not tourism.

  • Improving exhibitor satisfaction and loyalty at the big shows

    Improving exhibitor satisfaction and loyalty at the big shows

    It won’t surprise anyone to say that when UFI and Explori teamed up to analyse the email survey responses from exhibitors at 1,040 trade shows, asking how they would improve their event experience, the majority asked for more people to attend their stand, followed by an increase in overall visitor numbers. Exhibitors pay good money to be at the biggest events.


    What might surprise you however, is the fact that venue shortcomings (quality of food outlets, parking and ease of build-up/break down) and organiser shortcomings (communication, exhibitor manuals etc) generated 20 and 16 per cent of suggested improvements respectively.

    As we discussed in part one of this feature, the findings of UFI and Explori’s Global Insights report indicate a correlation – not a causality – between the size of an exhibition and exhibitor satisfaction. Small events (1,000 to 3,000 visitors) typically contain 13 per cent dissatisfied and disloyal exhibitors, while large events of more than 25,000 visitors have 18 per cent. Chief executive of consultancy JWC, Jochen Witt, addressed his concerns about drawing any connection between event size and satisfaction in my precursor to this piece, but what can we do to ensure that as shows get larger they don’t lose sight of their clients’ basic needs?

     Increasingly sophisticated tools for exhibitors

     In his review of 2017 for Exhibition World magazine, CEO of Informa’s global exhibitions division Charles McCurdy wrote that buyers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their sourcing habits, and that larger organisers with the greater likelihood of using digital solutions are well placed to enrich their experience. “They are better equipped to get ahead of trends as long as they can go deep into their verticals,” he commented.


    “The use of technology-based marketing and sales tools, and the data generated and managed by them, allow for competitive execution at a scale and in ways that weren’t available to our industry even five years ago,” he wrote. “Given this new reality, larger organisers need to be able to apply the benefits of data-based market insights on a broader scale than most organisers.”


    But are we making the most fo this new advantage? Many exhibitors already realise that setting up a stand and hoping for the right people to walk by is not the best way to engage in trade show business. They want more and organisers are ante-ing up in kind.


    “Look at all the programmes that surround big shows such as the Mobile World Congress,” Kim Myhre, MD at experience design lab MCI Experience said. “There is a lot of interesting stuff going on, from implementation in scientific research, to automotive applications, to the use of mobile technology to enable refugees.
    The opportunity to crack a large show such as Mobile World Congress (mobility is everywhere) or CES Las Vegas (its scope has expended far beyond consumer electronics) into five or six parts is evident, he said.

    Being sure of your proposition

    “The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas was feeling that pressure this year. The organiser of CES was going to cap attendance. It has become too big, too unruly. Organisers must get to the issue of what the purpose of their trade show is, its role within industries, driving change and innovation.”
    Another problem with size is that the return on attending an event is diminished by virtue of big show physics. “Event directors can simply run out of logistical capacity,” says Myhre. “If the queue for a taxi is two hours long, and your choice of hotels all triple in price, then your exhibitors and visitors are presented with a challenge. Once the scale impacts the quality of the experience, you’ll see erosion.

    ”The risk for exhibitors is that as the show gets bigger, a show becomes too fragmented. This happens when many different markets are being served under one roof. Exhibitors fight to get from hall seven to hall five, then hall four and eventually hall three. They spend a lot of money to do this, and expectations rise. In serving the purpose of bringing that community together, a show organiser can create a situation whereby its exhibitors get a little lost in the crowd.

    In which case, it may be necessary to simply focus on the exhibitors themselves. There is an old saying that it’s one thing to lead a horse to water, another thing entirely to make it drink.


    “Exhibitors are not necessarily using trade shows to maximum effect. They are not very good at exhibitions,” says Myhre. “They don’t do the relevant marketing or preset meetings, many still offer candy instead of a solid proposition, and some still hire models to stand in front of executives.”

    Exhibitors can do much to make the experience more valuable for themselves, but the organisers – with all the tools available to them – are uniquely placed to achieve this.

  • Could event size count against exhibitor satisfaction and loyalty?

    Could event size count against exhibitor satisfaction and loyalty?

    In the world of professional conference organisers, much is made of the importance of brand ambassadors in generating interest – and ultimately attendance – in an event.

    But while in that world the ambassador is typically an eminent professor in the field in which the event takes place, our brand ambassadors are the paying customers; the exhibitors setting out their stalls on the show floor.

    It stands to reason then that event directors can use them to great effect in building the reputation of, and noise surrounding, our exhibitions. A successful event can turn a marketing team of three into a team of three hundred, carrying that success into future editions.

    But to do this we must first ascertain what they specifically think about our events.

    One of the most interesting elements of UFI and Explori’s Global Exhibitor Insights study, supported by SISO, was the concept of hostages and apostles. The relationship between exhibitor satisfaction and loyalty is key to predicting the future growth of a show and its resistance to disruption.

    A satisfied visitor may not be a loyal one

    In the report, Explori plots global exhibitor responses on a Boston Consulting Group-style matrix based on the two axis ‘satisfaction’ and ‘loyalty’, or in real terms – their likelihood to return for future editions.

    By placing each exhibitor into a defining quadrant, organisers can infer their future behaviour around the exhibition in question.

    Apostles are those brand-championing exhibitors you aspire to fill your events with. They are highly satisfied and loyal, most likely to return to an event with little persuasion, in addition to encouraging others to exhibit and attend.

    Hostages are the largely unsatisfied attendees who nonetheless remain loyal, possibly due to a perceived lack of a viable alternative to attending your event. Mercenaries meanwhile are highly satisfied, while displaying little or no loyalty, satisfied with the event but non committal, perhaps because they see the event as unimportant.

    And then you have the Disaffected; exhibitors who have reached the point of toxicity, due in no small part to neglect. They are fast on their way to becoming ex-exhibitors, likely to actively recommend against your event to others.

    So why is it that, according to this report, 37 per cent of exhibitors fall into a negative category?

    Could size count against exhibitor loyalty?

    The findings indicate it may be related to the size of the show. Small events (1,000 to 3,000 visitors) typically contain 13 per cent hostages, while large events of more than 25,000 visitors have 18 per cent hostages.

    Jochen Witt, founder and CEO of consultancy JWC, says that while the numbers may indicate a correlation, it is premature to draw any conclusion from the survey results.

    “Firstly, one could argue that the difference is in the normal range of statistical deviations; one would have to look at the number of the exhibitions and exhibitors surveyed,” he said. “Also, rather than the absolute number of visitors surveyed, the criterion for differentiation should be the numbers in relation to net rented square metres or per gross square metres, or visitors per exhibitors.

    “Take, for example, a show of 40,000sqm net with 20,000 visitors; of course it is likely that exhibitor satisfaction is low. If you measure exhibitor satisfaction against the number of visitors without taking into account how big the show is (square metres or number of exhibitors), results are naturally distorted.

    Witt also explained that we would have to dig deeper and differentiate between B2B and B2C shows, between investment goods and consumer goods shows, between regions and so on, before making accurate judgements.

    While the observations we make from the Global Insights report data is up for debate, what is for certain is that a deeper understanding of where exhibitors sit on the matrix – and more importantly why – can help event organisers understand the environment they will be selling into in the next cycle, and help them set targets accordingly, regardless of event size.