Trade shows are the standing punch line of any industry — can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. Or can you? LDI, the putative main show of the professional lighting and staging industry for the last two decades, is experiencing some significant turbulence this year. As reported a few months ago, Martin Professional and High End Systems have both opted out of the Orlando expo this year, the first time both have not exhibited, and Vari-Lite has announced that it will cut back its presence at the show. Syncrolite is expected to do the same.
Hit the Road, Jack
The general reasoning on the part of newly apostate exhibitors is that marketing dollars might be better applied in more direct contact with customers — on the audio side, Harman’s “Road Shows” are cited as an example of taking the product and the message into the field, rather than hoping the customer base has enough time to stop by your booth.
If it’s any consolation, North American trade shows have slowed in growth overall to as little as one to three percent per year, according to the Trade Show Exhibitors Association in Chicago. The organization’s president, Stephen Schuldenfrei, told me that growth is down for exactly the reasons cited by some exhibitors from LDI: “There’s more media slicing up the marketing pie, and the pie’s not getting any bigger,” he said, adding that, historically, some industry sectors will inevitably see a decline in trade show attendance as their sectors mature and become diffuse through convergence and other dynamics.
Sharon Morabito, group show director for Penton Media, the show’s organizer, countered that LDI experienced exhibitor growth of 30 percent from 2005 to 2006. “I’m sure that certain technology markets are contracting, but we’re just not seeing that trend with LDI,” she said. Morabito said that the show is sensitive to exhibitor and attendee needs; square footage booth costs have remained stable at between $20 and $23, depending upon booth size, and attendees are offered personal assistance in navigating the show floor if they ask for it.
“It’s not a mega-show, and we want to keep the intimate feel LDI has,” she said. “It’s important not to go the way of Comdex” — a high-flying, high-tech expo that expired precipitously in 2004. “You can’t let a show come to think of itself as more important than the market it serves.”
Bill Morris, executive vice president of High End Systems, brings up two crucial points that would resonate with any high-tech exec, though. “Lighting is a fast-follower industry, meaning if someone is an innovator, they can expect that competitors will emulate their new designs quickly and often cheaply,” he explained. The solution, he said, is for innovators to get closer to their vertical markets more quickly, presenting innovations in person, so to speak, deepening the link between the customer of the company’s development process as well as its products, and also grazing at shows targeting other industries, such as cruise lines and houses of worship.
Second, said Morris, new products introductions need adequate spacing. “As it is, PLASA and LDI are within weeks of each other,” he said. “The idea of two venues a year to launch products is a good thing, but not when they’re this close together. We and other companies have been asking for four years to get these shows rescheduled.”
An inescapable fact of life for large trade shows is that the spacious venues they need tend to be booked as long as four years in advance, says Schuldenfrei. “Changing timing or a venue can take years.”
It may be of little solace to anyone, but a trade show is perhaps the single best context in which to see Adam’s Smith “unseen hand of the market” do its stuff. A show will evolve based on how a market is perceived by its organizers, many of whom have their own profit motive. A show’s constituency has its own particular view of how its market is changing. To the extent that both parties can converge their perceptions, they can evolve together. NAMM has been a good example to see how it has integrated professional audio and lighting into a putatively MI environment. To the extent they can’t, I’d call that Comdex.
Over There
While the national trade show sector in general may be meeting resistance from some marketing departments, international trade show business is getting more aggressive. The Frankfurt Messe, in particular, has been partnering with trade show organizers to help them energize their exhibitor base. In 2003, Frankfurt Messe joined with Media-Tech, a Europe-based upstart rival to RepliTech, the world’s largest series of trade shows covering the CD and DVD business, literally killing off the older show in a year’s time.
Frankfurt Messe is the force behind Prolight + Sound Shanghai, which takes place in China’s premier industrial city in October. The Messe announced that the show will double in size this year from the 12,000 attendees and exhibitors recorded at the 2006 show.
Trade shows will experience a different dynamic in developing areas of the world than in North America or Europe because the Third World’s infrastructure is being built out at a furious pace. China is Las Vegas on a tectonic scale at the moment. (Except the condos are selling better in Shanghai.) To lesser degrees, the rest of Asia, the Middle East and Africa are also experiencing infrastructure expansion. In these areas, the trade show performs its traditional role as central souk.
But there’s one other function the trade show executes that’s particular to the times: it’s a place to police intellectual property (IP) theft. Last April, the U.S. government filed two IP complaints against China with the World Trade Organization — China’s membership in that group was specifically contingent largely on China cleaning up its piracy act. Expecting that to happen in any meaningful manner in just a few years remains wishful thinking — the very concept of IP is still being slowly and often reluctantly integrated into Asian business culture. Last year, several Chinese ministries jointly released a paper entitled “Measures for the Protection of Intellectual Property Rights During Exhibitions,” which emphasizes the responsibility of exhibition organizers to increase efforts to ensure copied products will not be exhibited. However, the government itself doesn’t get involved until Article 19 (http://english. mofcom.gov.cn/aar ticle/policyrelease/ domesticpolicy/200604/20060401844272. html); the paper is as much posturing as it is policy. (And you can monitor China’s posture at www.ipr.gov.cn.)
In the meantime, though, the trade show offers a means to track, measure and, to some extent, change the realities of doing business in a non-IP-oriented culture. It’s a chance to, as both President Lyndon Johnson and Godfather Michael Corleone put it, “Hold your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
Contact Dan at ddaley@plsn.com.
