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Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Print Media....?
This month's edition of Exhibition News falls plumply onto my doormat, and whilst browsing past all the photos of drunken industry faces at an awards dinner I noticed that this edition didn't contain a single advert from any of the recruitment companies.
That's not to say the book was any thinner - there seemed to be loads of pages taken up by people trying to sell and promote their venues, contracting services and other ancilliary bits and pieces. But no job adverts at all - in a magazine that a few months ago carried little else.
Now, of course there are fairly clear reasons, with an oversupply of candidates and a rather drastic undersupply of permanent jobs being the main two!
But given all the talk about the "structural" factors behind the decline of print media and the "social" changes in the way we consume content that can work against magazines and newspapers, there are still some even more basic facts of economic life hitting publishing owners as well.
If there are no jobs, there's no recruitment advertising. And that's - at a guess - 20%+ of your revenue stream turned off at the tap, instantly, overnight, irrespective of the hit taken by reductions in volumes from your other categories of advertisers. That's got to hurt - and I can't see many show organisers coping with slicing another 20% off their revenues right now, on top of the hits they are already taking.
Exhibition organisers are already counting themselves lucky that they are only suffering the effects of recession, and that our business model is far more immune to substitution from other media than our unfortunatel colleagues in print.
But maybe we should be counting ourselves doubly lucky that the exhibition business model has never been any good at delivering for the recruitment market - or we'd be in real trouble right now!
That's not to say the book was any thinner - there seemed to be loads of pages taken up by people trying to sell and promote their venues, contracting services and other ancilliary bits and pieces. But no job adverts at all - in a magazine that a few months ago carried little else.
Now, of course there are fairly clear reasons, with an oversupply of candidates and a rather drastic undersupply of permanent jobs being the main two!
But given all the talk about the "structural" factors behind the decline of print media and the "social" changes in the way we consume content that can work against magazines and newspapers, there are still some even more basic facts of economic life hitting publishing owners as well.
If there are no jobs, there's no recruitment advertising. And that's - at a guess - 20%+ of your revenue stream turned off at the tap, instantly, overnight, irrespective of the hit taken by reductions in volumes from your other categories of advertisers. That's got to hurt - and I can't see many show organisers coping with slicing another 20% off their revenues right now, on top of the hits they are already taking.
Exhibition organisers are already counting themselves lucky that they are only suffering the effects of recession, and that our business model is far more immune to substitution from other media than our unfortunatel colleagues in print.
But maybe we should be counting ourselves doubly lucky that the exhibition business model has never been any good at delivering for the recruitment market - or we'd be in real trouble right now!
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Moving the goalposts (well, walls...)
Last week I went to 3 IT shows at London's Earls Court - Internet World, Infosecurity and the Helpdesk & IT Support show.
All of them were buzzing - at least 2 of them have already announced that attendance was in fact up year-on-year, which is great news all round, and seems to confirm that market-leading events (which these three are) will do well in a climate like the current one.
However, visitor numbers alone can't always keep the confidence of exhibitors on the up each year - the size of the show itself is a much more important indicator for confidence, if only because you can actually see it quite easily - if a hall gets cut out, or a wall is moved in, this is a lot more visible than a 5% +/- change in attendance.
Given all three are IT events and thus operate in markets where a high rate of exhibitor consolidation and churn is a fact of life, and where the "new business" to keep the shows growing comes largely from VC-funded IT startups or early-stage companies who use the show to invest their marketing funds in a bid to build market share and profile... and there are clearly a few less of these companies around right now! Given this, I would strongly suspect that all three of them must have seen a decline in sold m2 this year.
So - would this "shrinking" counterbalance the increased attendance, and serve to undermine exhibitor confidence, even though the show would be in fact better (more visitors to go round, and less other exhibitors to share them with?).
Well, absolutely not. Because - for one reason or another - all three shows had changed the halls they were held in since the last edition. Totally different shaped halls, a different exhibitor layout, and therefore making a like-for-like comparison of net sold space was practically impossible even for a seasoned old expo hack like me. Any average exhibitor stood no chance of comparing this years show with the last edition.
In the current economic climate, changing venue may well be attractive for commercial reasons - as almost all venues will be offering keener deals to steal business from each other. But the shows I saw last seek also illustrate really well that organisers shouldn't underestimate the power of a new venue, or a new floorplan layout, to improve - or even just shake up - your exhibitors perception of the show as well.
All of them were buzzing - at least 2 of them have already announced that attendance was in fact up year-on-year, which is great news all round, and seems to confirm that market-leading events (which these three are) will do well in a climate like the current one.
However, visitor numbers alone can't always keep the confidence of exhibitors on the up each year - the size of the show itself is a much more important indicator for confidence, if only because you can actually see it quite easily - if a hall gets cut out, or a wall is moved in, this is a lot more visible than a 5% +/- change in attendance.
Given all three are IT events and thus operate in markets where a high rate of exhibitor consolidation and churn is a fact of life, and where the "new business" to keep the shows growing comes largely from VC-funded IT startups or early-stage companies who use the show to invest their marketing funds in a bid to build market share and profile... and there are clearly a few less of these companies around right now! Given this, I would strongly suspect that all three of them must have seen a decline in sold m2 this year.
So - would this "shrinking" counterbalance the increased attendance, and serve to undermine exhibitor confidence, even though the show would be in fact better (more visitors to go round, and less other exhibitors to share them with?).
Well, absolutely not. Because - for one reason or another - all three shows had changed the halls they were held in since the last edition. Totally different shaped halls, a different exhibitor layout, and therefore making a like-for-like comparison of net sold space was practically impossible even for a seasoned old expo hack like me. Any average exhibitor stood no chance of comparing this years show with the last edition.
In the current economic climate, changing venue may well be attractive for commercial reasons - as almost all venues will be offering keener deals to steal business from each other. But the shows I saw last seek also illustrate really well that organisers shouldn't underestimate the power of a new venue, or a new floorplan layout, to improve - or even just shake up - your exhibitors perception of the show as well.
Labels: venue change
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