Anagram Events

Expomedia's announcement on the 10th November came as a timely reminder - if anyone needed it - that things are getting tough out there. However it contrasted sharply with Reed Elsevier's announcement a few days later saying they expected their exhibitions division to be on track.

From these two, short announcements it's impossible - of course - to draw clear conclusions about the fundamentals of either business, and I wouldn't want to. What it does highlight however is that the economy as it relates to events (or as it relates to confidence in events) has got sharply worse in the last 6 weeks (since Expomedia's last trading statement on the 22nd September) and this decline has hit some parts of our industry very hard indeed.

If you look for clear and obvious differences between the two businesses Expomedia of course has its UK-based Homebuyer consumer events - but whilst that sector has of course taken a big hit, that happened months ago, and also the 2008 events all took place before the end of September anyway, so this is probably not where to look for reasons or conclusions.

Two other areas of difference are that Expomedia has a proportionally greater exposure to emerging markets and also a proportionally greater exposure to conferences than Reed. Would it make sense to look to these to try to explain the differences in the two statements ?

Well, if a marked decline in confidence has been seen very recently you could expect it to hit hardest in events where revenues and bookings are secured late in the event cycle, or where there is a short event cycle.

The first may well apply to Expomedia's emerging market events, and the latter would apply to their conference business.

Established B2B events with a long cycles operated in more established markets tend to have more advance bookings than those in emerging markets - and find it easier to get the cash in well in advance. Such events may well have had the momentum to make it over the (budgetary) finish line even though confidence has dipped - and this model sounds more like a typical Reed show.

So, some pointers, but too little data for any clear indicators for the sector as a whole.

The next milestones will be when some of the big conference companies start to report, and we start to get updates, forecasts and statements from some of the expo-led companies with year ends sometime in 2009.

With "Green" and "Credit Crunch" beating us all up on a daily basis, it's only a matter of time before the old chesnut of "Virtual Tradeshows" rears its head again.

So to get in first, here's my view:

"Virtual Tradeshows" that rely on exhibitors/booths to draw in traffic are IMO often little more than online directories with an appalling site navigation system bolted on the front - they miss the entire point of a trade show, which is to meet people face-to-face and eyeball/touch/taste/smell their products.

But, they also miss the entire point of the internet as well.

When I want to use the internet to find companies or products I want to do so on a site with a quick, easy indexing system with flexible search options. Forcing a tradeshow metaphor and 3-D virtual-booth based navigation onto an online directory is totally insane - it's like Amazon.com replacing its "search" function with a linear graphical display featuring just the spines of all the books in the world - yes, it would make it look more like a "real world" bookshop, but would also throw away all the advantages of the online medium at the same time!

Those online "events" that do work (for me) major on interactivity, using online-specific tools like discussion forums and blogs, have rich content available on-demand in multiple formats - from downloads to video webinars. They are however something quite different - and complementary - to a physical tradeshow, with different benefits and features.

If you are doing an "event" online you should be exploiting the advantages of the online medium, rather than trying to hamstring that medium in order to give a look and feel of something quite different.

This isn't to say that there is no competition between the two formats - and I'd actually include a third, "online sourcing" through properly designed and managed directories as another alternative - but each will be best suited to specific industries and products.

Commoditized items favour online directories. Things that need to be seen - or where the buyer needs to meet the seller - will work at traditional trade shows. Industries where online-savvy people want to exchange ideas globally will suit online (interactive) tradeshows. Fairly simple really...

But I don't see many sectors where someone not web-savvy enough to type into the search box on Google will be happy to spend hours clicking through a 3-D representation of an exhibition hall, just so they can eventually see pictures of products and maybe send an email to the manufacturer or supplier.

Labels: virtual trade show

Ever heard this one before ?

"Exhibition organisers need to do more to provide exhibitors with more ways to easily measure their ROI - otherwise we will lose out to Google and other online media - which do offer more measurable results".

But what's always puzzled me about this is that I can see nothing inherent in the exhibition model that means exhibitors can't track ROI for themselves. They can work out the cost of participation (much of which the organiser never sees anyway) - just like online. They can count the leads they generate - just like online. They can track those leads and see which turn into sales - again, just like online. So what's the big deal?

I've been playing with Google Adwords for a few weeks now (and how many tradeshow executives have actually done that themsevles I wonder?) and as a result I now have a slightly different opinion on what the diffrences between online and exhibitions actually are.

Google Adwords (for those of you who don't know) lets you create the adverts that appear on the right hand side of any Google search results - Google for "flights" and any number of airlines adverts will magically pop up next to your results.

Because Google want the ads to be clicked on - so they get paid - they give advertisers access to a huge range of tracking data. You can set up dozens of slightly differently worded adverts, you can make them appear at different times of day, in response to different search terms. There are lots of clever features, but the beauty of the system for an advertiser is that you don't pay each time your ad appears, but only when someone actually clicks on it.

In exhibitions terms this is like exhibiting at a highly focused event (your ads only appear when relevant search terms are keyed in) AND paying a variable space rental rate based for the leads you generate on your stand.

So again - what's the big deal? Focused events? We already do that. Payment on results - well, it does sound scary - but frankly, it wouldn't be impossible for an organiser to deliver something close to this sort of model if they really wanted to, would it? There are plenty of automated lead capture systems out there. Offer exhibitors the option to either pay rack rate, or opt for a lower base price per m2 with a variable supplement depending on leads taken? Hard, but not impossible.

So what stopping us delivering ROI just like Google? Is there something else?

I think so.

With Adwords the real USP isn't that you pay per click. It's that you can create and run loads of different variations on your advert all at the same time. You can try different sets of wording, you can change when and where it appears, you can even specify sites where it won't appear. But by trying them at the same time you can see how each variant alters the response rate instantly, so you can then make modifications "on the fly" improving your campaign as you go.

This sort of iterative, incremental and "market-tested as you go" design philosophy is pretty much mainstream business practice in many sectors of the economy. Have you noticed how often each model of car gets a "facelift" these days? Read any management books where big retailers talk about empowering local management to run local initiatives in-store? Ever accessed Wikipedia, or added an application to your own homepage on Facebook? It's the norm in all sectors - not just media and marketing.

But it does however sit rather uncomfortably with the annual tradeshow. Have a poor tradeshow and even if you know what went wrong, it's probably at least a year until you can try and fix it. As an exhibitor, all your investment is committed up front to just one booth location/stand design/staffing plan - which you can't change once the hall doors open ("sorry sir, health and safety, you can't bring a trolly in nw the show is open...").

But this again is not really an online-offline thing. If one of our exhibitors runs their own series of experiential roadshows - or hosts their own expo-sized event - they can make changes to the model whenever they want - even overnight if they need to. They choose when next to run it again, what themes and formats to keep, what things to ditch.

The difference with booking a tradeshow is huge. It starts to look like the buying process we require customers to go through is sitting increasingly uneasily alongside the iterative, incremental just-in-time philosophy that many other forms of marketing are gravitating towards right now.

So, are we in danger of missing the point of what makes e-marketing such a compelling proposition to some of our lapsed customers? Will offering better data, and helping them measure ROI make much difference anyway?

Providing our customers with more data is only part of the solution. But it's nothing unless we also understand how our customers want to apply that data.

The harsh truth is that redesigning the tradeshow business model to accommodate this new, iterative approach to marketing that Google and the other online media have made possible will require a far more fundamental rethink of the expo business model than just providing audited visitor numbers and some barcode scanners as part of the booth space price.

Labels: online media, ROI, trade show

The event industry (or certainly the UK one) often laments about the dearth of keen, eager and bright-eyed new blood coming into the industry - and staying there.

All too often the new "marketing exec" arrives one year, and the next they disappear either on a gap year or drift off into another industry entirely.

Even worse is the recurrent shortage of motivated sales people. Once there was a steady queue of graduates lining up for media sales and expo sales jobs, hungry for the chance to earn commission levels that gave them decent salaries straight out of college, and eager to use sales as a step into a career.

The PlayStation generation now seem to regard anything that involves "ringing people up" as being tantamount to a call center job - which is of course beneath them - and with the print media industry in decline as well finding young sales talent is harder than ever.

But now we are diving head first into a recession.

Graduate jobs with career paths and training courses will suddenly become scarcer than "use-only-once" grey carpet tiles in a trade-show aisle.

Tarquin and his 2.2, returning from his gap year surfing in Antigua may well find that his ability to pick and choose jobs is now restricted to being rejected after filling in a McDonald's application form or a Burger King one.

Will this means exhibition organisers suddenly find themselves a far more attractive proposition for the next set of graduates to hit the market?

Will hard times lead to more and more hungry potential sales people answering that "A Career in Media (ahem, shsssshhh, it's that dirty word, Sales)" ad in the Guardian instead of flicking over it?

It will be an interesting test indeed.

In theory, supply and demand will work in the industry's favour.

But even with less alternatives, there must still be a significant chance that the "me first", "OK-magazine" generation may still prefer to wait for jobs in organisations and industries they will actually have heard of, where they can see they could gain some transferrable skills, and still get home comforts like training - and not be exposed to the performance-scrutiny of working for a small privately owned entrepeneurial firms where the owner/CEO watches their impact on revenues and costs on a daily basis.

Time will tell, but it's by no means certain that supply and demand will in itself be enough to make our "invisible" industry of SMB employers built on the backs of results-driven sales jobs attractive to "kids today".

Labels: expo, graduate, industry, jobs