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Once a location and market has been established, there is the far-from-straightforward matter of exactly where an exhibition organiser is to stage its next event.

Of course the true level of choice varies greatly depending on the region. At one point in the not-so-distant past, a particular exhibition venue in Lagos, Nigeria, could lay claim to being the most expensive in the world at which to rent space. This was not as a result of the excellence of its facilities, nor its service levels, but was a direct consequence of that familiar real estate maxim, location, location, location. With so little viable space for trade show or convention space in West Africa, and an absence of competition, making money from events in Lagos meant going through this venue.

But if we could create an ideal location for our exhibitions, regardless of connection to a specific local market, where would that be?

For today’s time-starved delegates and attendees, it would probably be located at an airport. Buyers would save money on hotels and exhibitors would save money on transportation. Naturally, the airport would need to be a regional hub servicing all of the major carriers and benefiting from multiple connections.

It would also help if our fictional ideal airport was in a highly populous country that granted access to a large blossoming economy that enticed domestic buyers and exhibitors before even considering international attendees. But of course this isn’t crucial. Dubai has no real local industry to speak of, but as a major hub for the Middle East it ensures for itself a broad catchment of business events.

A strong regional reputation for tourism and high-quality service sector standards would be a plus. Cities such as Bangkok and Vienna lead the way in these respects.

We’ll need flexible shipping and customs laws that present as little an obstacle as possible to our exhibitors, and we need to afford them a broad selection of competitive logistics firms to choose from. On that note, union involvement in the US, where archaic and inflexible regulation and concepts such as drayage confounds even the brightest show directors and exhibitors, is a deterrent.

The same goes for shipping ourselves; we’d like accommodating visa regulations please. The less time we spend filling in forms during our lunch breaks the better.

We’d also like a national or regional government with a genuine understanding and appreciation of the benefits of a strong exhibition industry. This goodwill can manifest itself in many ways, be it through subsidies, subvention schemes or simply the establishment of well-supported regional and national bureaus able to complement our efforts with local promotion and information for organisers and exhibitors alike.

This pays dividends when it comes to taking our shows abroad. An active state department for trade and investment can make or break an international pavilion. As you’ll see later in this book, Germany, home to the state-owned Messe, demonstrates the clear advantage that a working partnership with the public sector brings.

A region that is home to a good number of ambitious small and medium-sized businesses in a competitive market will also help, as it is these companies that typically fill the bulk of exhibition stands.

Finally, there are the perks. A city known for its food, nightlife or scenery is considerably more appealing than one that is not. The exact location of the venue relative to cultural attractions also matters. I know many people who curse the trend of building venues miles out of town. If you’re leaving your office for a week to conduct business, you’re likely to swap your coffee for a drink in the city at some point, no easy matter when you may have to spend an hour or so simply getting into town.

However, you do not want to present attendees and delegates with too much opportunity for mischief, or to depart from the event’s own social calendar entirely, because much of the networking – an essential benefit of attending such events – is done over a beer, or sat together in front of the celebrated sights and experiences a city has to offer.

These trends in exhibition socialising are interesting, and continue to divide opinion in the industry.

Market squares were traditionally located in the centre of town, as was the infrastructure of civic and political administration. This has had some interesting consequences, especially for those regions which were formerly under Communist control.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, many of the cities in Eastern Europe constructed their exhibitions infrastructure well away from the sensitive corridors of power in the capital. While Prague, for example, is by some margin the Czech Republic’s destination of choice for visitors carrying both backpacks and briefcases, it is Brno, the country’s second largest city, that was conceived to house the country’s international events and visiting communities.

The reason for this is at least partly attributable to a residual fear of espionage. The arrival of tens, or hundreds, of thousands of visitors from around the world presents quite a challenge for civil servants and secret service agencies responsible for the observation and controlled transit of unknown persons. In the wake of the Cold War, a time of heightened fear and the presence of overseas counter-intelligence and secret service units in East European capitals, the need to control large numbers of overseas travellers was paramount.

In Tallinn, the capital of the former Soviet state Estonia, there exists a remarkable hotel formerly tasked with hosting delegates and international travellers for the express purpose of spying on them.

The Sokos Hotel Viru is now one of the largest conference hotels in the city, but as the natural home for business visitors to the city during the years of the Second World War and Cold War paranoia, it was also the hotel of choice for resident Soviet apparatchiks. Today, the hotel includes the enigmatic KGB Museum, essentially a single large room that showcases the sinister surveillance strategy of a police state; it has lain untouched since the last bug was (possibly) removed from guest suites.

Something else to consider in all this is the significant matter of logistics. Capital cities tend to be rather busy places even without the influx of thousands of visitors for a major exhibition. One notorious example will illustrate what can go wrong without adequate logistical planning.

When the 11th edition of India’s biennial Auto Expo took place at Pragati Maidan in Delhi, showcasing new cars to a nation of more than a billion inhabitants, anybody in Delhi actually using one may as well have handed their keys over and sought out a bicycle.

More than 1,500 exhibitors and 50 brands from 24 countries attended the show, which understandably has the potential to be one of the largest motor shows in the world. It is believed almost two million visitors attended the event, not far behind the attendance figures for the world-leading Shanghai Auto Show.

However, the sheer weight of visitor and exhibitor numbers brought traffic outside the event to a complete standstill. The ITPO, which manages the Pragati Maidan venue, pointed the finger of blame at event organisers, who they claim invited problems by providing huge numbers of free passes for exhibitors to give to visitors.

Whatever the cause of the chaos, according to police traffic to the biennial event combined with movements around nearby India Gate and spilled into roads in central Delhi causing gridlock for commuters.

“Maybe Pragati Maidan is not the place to hold an event like the Auto Expo,” commissioner of police (traffic) Satyendra Garg posted with notable understatement on the force’s Facebook page. “Maybe the traffic police should refuse NOC for future events like this,” he added, conceding traffic management was to blame for much of the congestion.

Delhi, for anybody who has not yet had the pleasure of visiting the city, is a vibrant, buzzing place full of culture, opportunity, tourists and cars. Absolutely millions of them. Already crawling three abreast on a two-lane road, the addition of hundreds of thousands of visitors to a major event in the city had the impact of introducing gelatine to a cup of water. Before long the road network feeding the venue was reduced to a static, quivering mass.

The organisers knew this situation was untenable, the shell-shocked exhibitors knew it too, and with hundreds of new drivers clogging Delhi’s transit arteries every day and compounding the problem, the 2014 edition of the event was moved to the India Expo Centre and Mart in Greater Noida, a new-town development just outside the city.

News that the traditional Geneva Motor Show in Switzerland has been permanently cancelled (to be replaced by new car show called AUTOXPERIENCE Geneva) marks the end of an era. It’s also the close to an interesting example of geography mattering just as much as industry where certain exhibitions are concerned.

Successful exhibitions traditionally take place in cities or countries with a strong reputation for the sector the exhibition has been conceived to serve. The automotive industry provides a clear example of this. Four of the five largest international motor shows take place in the auto manufacturing hotbeds of Germany, Tokyo, the US and France. Despite the recession’s impact on the car manufacturing industry, these shows continue to pull in the visitors, buoyed perhaps by the collapse of lesser global car exhibitions.

It is the fifth member of this top-tier group, the Geneva International Motor Show (held in a country with no domestic car manufacturing industry) that provides an unusual argument for an international exhibition organiser. The conventional wisdom is that shows should be held in places with strong related local markets. But the truth is that Geneva benefits from Switzerland’s neutrality. Much as it did during the world wars, and as it still does for today’s chastened hedge funds, Switzerland offers its clientele refuge – a place where they can do business on equal terms with their competitors.

Take Detroit as a comparative example. America’s motor city: some brands will be put off launching a new model in the backyard of huge US brands such as Ford, General Motors, Chrysler and Chevrolet. These US brands will hit Detroit looking to impress not only the overseas markets, but the domestic US market; they will throw everything they have at their stands, maximising their marketing spend to drown out competitors’ engines with elaborate and spectacular model launches. It’s an issue that affects all of the international motor shows apart from Geneva. Tokyo is home turf to Toyota, Nissan and Mazda, among others; Germany to Volkswagen, Audi, Mercedes and BMW; France to Citroen, Renault and Peugeot and so on.

Switzerland, on the other hand, is home to the mighty Rinspeed, a manufacturer best known for creating Splash – an amphibious car capable of 50mph on water.

“We are the only international show of these five that takes place on neutral ground,” says director of the Geneva International Motor Show, Rolf Studer. “We have no automotive production in Switzerland. So every brand has the same chance to show its products to the press and to the 700,000 visitors. Without preference.”

This neutrality holds particular appeal for designers. Geneva has a reputation for being the launching ground of many models, and with a level playing field manufacturers are more inclined to unveil their latest models. The exhibition has developed a reputation for being a major branding event, rather than a straight buyer’s market, evidenced by the high number of model launches. And model launches bring the media, which means the show doesn’t need to rely on performance arenas and similar showpieces. “We don’t need spectacle – we have serious things,” says Studer firmly.

Historically, the economic evaluation of exhibitions has tended to be limited to the so-called heads-and-beds rule which is often used to assess the impact of tourism. While these are important metrics and should be evaluated, the impact of an exhibition is a great deal wider and needs to be assessed in full.

Many destinations have created ways to measure this impact using Geoffrey Dixon’s notion of direct, indirect and induced spend from the event itself and its attendees, but destinations must also evaluate the residual impacts of exhibitions in the social, cultural and political areas.

It is widely accepted that cultural differences in doing business are impacted through human interaction during international exhibitions. The information shared during these shows can also have a political impact, sometimes affecting regulation, co-ordination or investment in a specific topic or area. An infrastructure show immediately following the creation of a new ruling government for example, can even facilitate specific policies. Think back to Libya Build in the wake of the Gaddafi regime’s disintegration.

But not all of the socio-economic consequences of an event can be so easy to observe. And while economic impact studies are commonplace today, their importance often goes unrecognised, something that is surely unacceptable for an industry capable of doing so much for so many places around the world.

The Saudi Exhibition and Convention Bureau (SECB), not long into its existence, showed a keen interest in evaluating its exhibition industry. Saudi Arabia has a unique business environment as well as a vibrant exhibition industry, not least as a result of being the largest economy in the Middle East. The country’s awareness of the industry’s significance is beyond doubt.

“The exhibition industry plays an important role in developing the key economic sectors throughout the country, especially in the emerging non-oil sectors,” explains the SECB’s executive director Tariq Al Essa. “Exhibitions help us grow private and public sector investment in a variety of economic categories including transportation, construction and education.”

Overcoming resistance

In sharp contrast to Saudi Arabia’s enthusiasm, in other places there is active resistance to the introduction of competition to a region. While for some a major exhibition turns a city into a platform for its industry and craft, others regard it as the opening of a portal through which unwanted competition can enter and threaten the livelihoods of its residents and even its very economic foundations.

Exhibition organisers in Galicia for example, home to one of the world’s most important fishing ports, spent much of the early 2000s attempting to overcome protective local trade groups and cast their lines in international waters.

In 2004 the autonomous north-western Spanish region made a bold move to attract international business by building a colossal new venue offering 428,000sqm not far from the region’s capital. Feira International de Galicia [FIG], in Pontevedra near Santiago de Compostela, was created in a time of European prosperity; the project was led by Manuel Fraga Iribarne, then president of the Autonomous Government of Galicia, and conceived to offer opportunities for the staging of international events.

The sprawling concrete structure may have made its mark on the Galician landscape with its acres of space, onsite stadium, grand pillars, grand entrance and even grander aspirations, but the old adage ‘build it and they will come’ appears to have gone unfulfilled. Business isn’t attracted to grandeur alone. A decade later and many of its rooms have still not housed the type of attendee they were constructed to accommodate. Municipal development throughout the region and the subsequent creation of smaller exhibition venues in Galicia’s four provinces, tied to regional complications, rendered it more or less empty; an exceptionally large white elephant.

So where and why did Iribarne’s bid to court the international trade show community falter? Well, there was certainly no shortage of globally exploitable industry; Galicia is home to almost 2.7 million people, including leading industrialists such as the world’s third-wealthiest man Amancio Ortega, owner of the world’s largest textile group, Inditex, parent of brands including Zara, Massimo Dutti and Stradivarius.

The world’s largest fishing company Pescanova is based in Vigo, the world’s largest fishing port. Ourense, the inland city that made its name, literally, as a mecca for gold miners, stands as the second largest thermal city in Europe after Budapest, and has been busy for some time now exporting its thermalism spa and wellbeing show Termatalia to Latin America.

The region is also an attractive prospect for pre- and post-event tourism. The ‘land of a thousand rivers’ is lined by 1,030 miles of rugged coastline, broken by tranquil coves and inlets famed for providing some of the best seafood in the world courtesy of the Atlantic. This in itself is a significant point of differentiation for Galicia, given Spain’s more popular association with the Mediterranean. And while relatively isolated compared with Spain’s primary venues in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and other major cities, four high-speed trains a day run between Madrid and Santiago de Compostela.

On paper, Galicia’s failure to launch as a destination for international exhibition business is difficult to explain. But neither geography nor communications are the main factors here. Instead the greatest obstacle Galicia needed to overcome was convincing the region’s highly protective trade federations of the need to forge partnerships with global event organisers and exhibitors. As an autonomous region, Galicia is naturally protective of its independence, but there is a sense that while the region has been provided with windows to local industry, local protectionism was pulling the curtains shut.

To combat this, a new association was created to spearhead Galicia’s campaign for international exhibition business. AGAFE was established at the beginning of 2013 to internationalise trade in the region and overcome localism in order to introduce wealth and global business.

And of course, given Spain’s bleak financial outlook at the time, there was an urgently pressing need for international trade. “The economic situation nowadays dictates that this local protectionism cannot remain, and therefore it can be easier to reach that unity,” said AGAFE MD Alejandro Rubin.

One way AGAFE came closer to achieving its goal was by getting the backing of the many small Galician businesses that as a united group carry significant industrial weight. However, winning over the federation of small businesses, one by one, is a time-intensive task.

Once you have achieved this, however, the impact it can bring to a city, or region, is huge.

Convincing mayors and local governments of the need for exhibitions is the first step on the long road to establishing an exhibition as a fixture on the city’s local calendar. The world’s most celebrated shows are very often those which are truly embraced by the city in which they are based, and in many cases the event comes to define the city, commonly beyond the period in which the show holds tenancy. 

Because of popular demand, tourism hotspots tend to have a combination of strong local amenities, direct flight routes, efficient public transport, a culture of hospitality and ultimately the capacity to leave a lasting impression on visitors; important factors in the success of an international exhibition.

This was why the 130,000-strong crowd of Comic-Con International attendees, and the pop culture show’s management, were so keen to see San Diego retain the event. “When Comic-Con comes to town, visitors feel like they own downtown, and that’s an experience you wouldn’t get elsewhere,” notes Steve Johnson, VP of public affairs at the San Diego Convention Center (SDCC).

San Diego Tourism Authority (SDTA) officials say Comic-Con is the city’s largest annual event, attracting 130,000 visitors to the city with a direct spend of US$80.4m (£51.4m) in the metropolitan area itself and $135.9m in the surrounding region. This figure includes $25m in retail income and $40m in restaurant revenue and transportation.

However, in 2010 a dark cloud loomed over the event as the world knew it, at home on the bayside in San Diego. Limitation on space, and therefore visitor numbers at the SDCC, had kept the show from growing beyond 125,000 people a year since 2007, prompting the organiser to consider moving the show to Anaheim, Las Vegas or Los Angeles after the original SDCC lease expired. 

Strenuous efforts were made to enable the event to remain in San Diego until 2015. Local expansion plans valued at $520m were put in place and approved, the culmination of a multi-year planning process to increase public access to the waterfront, activate an underused part of downtown San Diego’s waterfront and meet the demand for an expanded facility. The plan was to add 20,900sqm of exhibition space, a 7,432sqm ballroom, five-acre rooftop park and 500 additional rooms for the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel.

In its struggle to secure the coveted Comic-Con, a non-profit body called the Tourism Marketing District (TMD) even offered the event’s organiser $500K in perks to stay in San Diego. They were adamant the show had to remain on the bay, its spiritual home since the pop-culture exhibition started almost 45 years ago.

The combined efforts of the TMD, SDTA and SDCC, and a legion of fans, did not go unheard. Eventually San Diego’s tourism lobby emerged successful after the city won its bid to continue hosting Comic-Con, which at the time of writing it will host until 2018.

Comic-Con’s director of marketing and public relations, David Glanzer, said at the time: “We are grateful for the tireless efforts all three cities put into their proposals. In the end, we feel this decision is the best for all those who attend Comic-Con and for the organisation itself. We are happy that the community has worked with us to ensure that we remain here.”

“If you still don’t understand how much Comic-Con means to San Diego let me phrase it this way; more Superman means more super streets, more lightsabers means more library hours,” San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer told the press in 2015, the year the show’s contract was due to expire. 

Carol Wallace, president and chief executive of the SDCC Corporation, was understandably relieved: “We have had a successful partnership since 1991 and we look forward to continuing our shared success.”

“Comic-Con is a long-standing civic treasure and a cultural icon for San Diego,” confirmed SDTA president and chief executive Joe Terzi, as if any doubt remained.

The same can be said for Reed Midem’s events at the Palais de Festivals in Cannes. In a former life I worked as a reporter in the television industry, and I can vouch for the fact that while business meetings are facilitated through exhibitions in the Palais, most of the deals are finalised and signed in cafes along the Croisette, the iconic promenade that runs from the Palais to the Marina. Because while it’s nice to meet face to face, after a while we need to relax and take a look around.

Prague is a place where many of the industry’s observers would expect to see greater success for the exhibition industry. Hotels are affordable, groups are easily accommodated, amenities are good and the city is remarkably beautiful. But as Jan Novotny, then president of the Czech exhibition association SOVA, pointed out to me, investors are put off holding exhibitions in Prague because “there is neither support from city hall or the state.”

And this is where the need to persuade the local authorities becomes so apparent. They are outside our industry, and yet they play such an integral role in the genesis of any successful international event. Perhaps they forget that a tourist in a suit typically spends four times a much as one wearing sandals and a sunhat. Business tourism is hugely lucrative, as the free-spending 130,000 people who attend San Diego’s jewel in the crown would attest.

Economic impact generates influence. If an industry wants to exert influence and attract investment from local, regional or national government, or from private investors, it has to compete with other industries for attention. An economic impact study provides a basis for comparing one industry to another in generating employment and contributing to GDP. In challenging economic conditions a clear view of the economic impact of any industry becomes all the more important when there is competition for dwindling financial resources.

Vivid Interface’s Geoffrey Dixon points out that to develop an understanding of the economic impact of the exhibitions industry it is important to first define what the industry actually is. Does it consist of consumer exhibitions and trade shows of a certain size or visitor numbers? In the UK for example, there are thousands of small one-day antique fairs. Do we count them in the economic impact or are we looking at events of say 2,000sqm?

“Once we have defined the scope of the industry we are then examining two distinct elements in the analysis process,” he says. “The first is primary data collection. This is market research that enables us to develop an understanding of the revenue earned and costs incurred in making exhibitions happen.”

In the UK, Dixon does this by conducting research surveys with exhibitors, organisers, venues and visitors to develop averages for revenues and costs.

His second component is econometric modelling, a process by which he takes input and output models based on government statistics covering business and consumer tourism, salaries and the multiplier effects of economic activity, a process he conducts in partnership with a company called Oxford Economics.

In essence, Dixon maintains that there are three levels of economic impact that exhibitions have in the economy: direct impact, indirect impact and induced impact.

It is, however, possible to examine impact on a more local level. For example, Madrid venue and organiser IFEMA was able to report that CPhI, the peripatetic pharmaceuticals trade show organised by global organiser UBM, generated revenues for Madrid’s service sector totalling more than €150m (US$203m).

In the UK, a study conducted by Vivid Interface including both visitors and exhibitors, established that the five-day consumer peripatetic outdoor sports show CLA Game Fair was able to generate €31m in revenue for local shops, hotels, restaurants and other services.

And if the significance of an event’s ability to draw money into an economy is clear and measurable, then it stands to reason that the absence of the necessary infrastructure required by a show is equally measurable. 

The lack of a world-class convention centre in Sydney, according to the premier of New South Wales Barry O’Farrell, had cost the city AUS$150m (US$144m) in lost business and economic impact over the four years leading to 2013. This loss of revenue was a key factor in the decision then made to develop the Sydney International Convention Exhibition and Entertainment Precinct.

“Nationally, the exhibition industry in many countries will generate an economic impact of billions of euros,” says Geoffrey Dixon. “This can and should influence investment in supporting this important industry that provides an essential lubricant to the wheels of commerce and, importantly, jobs.”

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?

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.

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.

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.

Comprehensive understanding of stakeholders will present an ecosystem within which we are able to model and test our innovation. Understanding which stakeholders are primary, secondary or tertiary will help us to involve and account for them judiciously, and to seek relevant information on each that is appropriate to our innovation.

Comprehensive understanding of stakeholders will present an ecosystem within which we are able to model and test our innovation. Understanding which stakeholders are primary, secondary or tertiary will help us to involve and account for them judiciously, and to seek relevant information on each that is appropriate to our innovation.

But stakeholders also play an ongoing role, with relationships to the organisation that must not be compromised by the act of innovation itself. Because while failure to innovate comes at a future cost, the real cost of innovation can be immediate. There is a risk of failure, a burden on employees time and effort, potential for disruption and ire arising from resistance.

In many instances, such as social innovation and, increasingly, digital innovation, there is also the risk that innovation precipitates unwanted change – a symptom of unforeseen consequences. The stakeholders in innovation are not limited to the organisation that introduces it, and the true cost can be borne by those who initially benefit from it. 

Social media provides us with a good example of this.

“The risks to individuals and society can be harder to see at first, particularly if they arise from business models and market power that develop over time. Instagram is now known to harm teenage girls’ mental health, Facebook is alleged to have enabled genocide and vaccine denial while Twitter has permitted threats to the physical security of citizens. Despite the growing evidence of harms from social media, regulators in the US have taken zero steps to make these services safer.” (Scott, Morton & Steger, 2023)

Stakeholders as an obstacle to progress

The year 2024 saw UK homes powered by the cleanest electricity in its history. But while most consumers would agree an increase in renewable energy is a good thing, one powerful stakeholder remained unconvinced: the energy company shareholder. Just five years after BP committed to achieving its target of 50GW of electricity generated by renewables over the coming two decades, the company walked away from its commitment to clean energy innovation and pivoted back to the crude oil that made its initial investors so rich in the first place.

“The collapse in global oil prices in the wake of the US president’s ­tariff blitz may have wiped billions from its ­market value – but Trump isn’t BP’s only problem. The oil company will face shareholders this week for the first time since it bowed to investor pressure to abandon its green energy ambitions in favour of a return to fossil fuels, and its chair, Helge Lund, agreed to step down from the board.” (Ambrose, 2025)

The shareholder is one example of a stakeholder with the ability to render innovation null and void, despite the vision of the organisation itself. However, early assessment and consideration of the stakeholders in the organisational ecosystem can help to identify such cases ahead of time, or to enable the innovators to develop a story that wins their support for the cause.

A strong understanding of the stakeholders involved, and the methods used to measure the impact of innovation on your organisation is crucial to converting your effort into results.

Innovation is not necessarily dedicated by the manager (indeed innovation can be stymied by a manager who is unwilling to allow innovation to flourish from other members of their organisation), but the manager’s role in directing innovation at a company will have a significant impact on the way in which innovation is achieved and documented. To be effective, they must introduce tools and frameworks that structure the innovation process and harness meaningful creativity.  

By surrendering to – rather than controlling – the process, a good manager will remove the barriers to innovation and avoid repressing creativity by prejudging outputs against their own perceptions.

A good manager will be able to plot an effective target journey, considering key customer events and the touchpoints and enablers through which an organisation is able to influence them. 

“Siloed focus on individual touchpoints misses the bigger – and more important – picture: the customer’s end-to-end experience. Only by looking at the customer’s experience through his or her own eyes – along the entire journey taken – can you really begin to understand how to meaningfully improve performance.” (Maechler, Neher & Park, 2016)

The manager’s direction may expand the scope of innovation beyond conventional, internal considerations. A successful manager might, for example, suggest analysis of other industries when seeking solutions in their own. In Not Invented Here: Cross-industry Innovation (Vullings, Ramon, Heleven, Marc) the authors make the point that Henry Ford revolutionised the automotive industry by creating the vehicle assembly line, something he observed and borrowed from the meat-packing industry. A service innovation example of this includes the medical industry making patients more comfortable by using practices from the hospitality industry, while technological innovation can be seen in the automotive industry adapting lighter construction methods by exploring aircraft construction. 

A manager is also responsible for creating an environment that is inclusive, enabling representation from all who can contribute (for example, via open employee forums such as ‘fireside’ or ‘playground’ meetings). They must also be forgiving; only by allowing for failure can an organisation seek to innovate in an unfettered and genuinely groundbreaking way. 

“Innovation is about trying new things and taking risks, which inevitably involves mistakes. However, many organisations want to embrace their innovative spirit but fear the consequences of failure … Edison, and many others like the Wright Brothers, didn’t start with all the right answers; they learned from their mistakes until they had something great on their hands (and sometimes even after.” (Coldwell, 2022)

There is of course more than one manager in an organisation, and each must contribute to innovation. While the CEO or founder may be responsible for creating a corporate culture that enables innovation to flourish, the chief operations officer (COO) may take responsibility for the assignment of resource and the gathering of relevant data.

In any case, the manager is responsible for overseeing the process of innovation in an organisation and ensuring a mix of methods and tools, as well as the inclusion of input from multiple sources, both inside and outside of the organisation.