Again I welcome back Michael Hart, the industry renown journalist and thought leader for his views on the ‘good times’ for our industry and why you shouldn’t ‘follow the leader’…..
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According to the Center for Exhibition Industry Research’s 2015 wrap-up report, the tradeshow industry grew a substantial 3.7 percent last year. That’s nearly double the rate of the year before and certainly one of the best years in some time.
CEIR forecasts growth will slow down a bit in the next few years, hovering somewhere between 2.2 and 2.8 percent for 2016 through 2018, which isn’t too bad given the even slower anticipated growth rate predicted for the gross domestic product. Growth in the larger economy, as we all know, has been very, very slow and is likely to continue that way, particularly given all the things there are in the world to worry about at the moment.
Meanwhile, TSNN’s latest list of the 250 largest shows has very few surprises at the top. The same 10 or 11 events remain about where they are from year to year, with an occasional change of rank or a fresh show popping up from the next tier of big shows only to be stuffed down and put back where it belongs the following year. I haven’t done the math on individual shows – which is hard to do in a consistent way since CEIR keeps confidential the statistics on individual shows that make up its index – but my guess is those biggest shows saw marginal growth, probably enough to keep their owners happy, but not nearly 3.7 percent.
Most of them, naturally, wrapped up with post-event press releases indicating record-breaking everything and wild success. As they should.
How much longer can all this last? The end-of-year story of the tradeshow industry seems to be the same every year, because it focuses on the Mt. Rushmores: the International CESs, the NAB Shows. NPE and the SEMA Show.
Is theirs the path to follow for the 10,000 or so events that aren’t as big? Will these biggest shows continue to dominate the industries they represent and just get bigger and better year after year ad infinitum? Which of those in the top 10 last year will be there in 10 years? 20 years? 30 years?
It could be that such a list of the largest shows will eventually become irrelevant. Those shows that remain successful will do so because they turn themselves into multidimensional marketing brands for which their flagship annual events are important, but no longer the only chance they have to interact with their audiences.
I have no idea how Gary Shapiro measures the success of International CES, but I’d guess it has less to do with show revenue or attendance than it does with the attention it draws to the consumer technology industry. It probably has more to do with the number of social media impressions mentioning smart cars, smart houses and virtual reality than it does with net square feet.
Likewise with the NAB Show, held last month and reporting more than 1 million net square feet and 103,000 attendees. I’ll bet just as important to Chris Brown is the impact the association is having with what it now calls the NAB Show New York, an event acquired a couple years ago as Content & Communication World and renamed, thereby creating an outpost for the NAB brand on the East Coast. Its tagline this year is “The Essence of NAB/The Power of NYC.”
Those are two currently large shows that will continue to grow as event brands, regardless of how their flagship events do from year to year (which will probably be pretty good anyway).
And which shows will fail the litmus test of the future? Could it be those shows I mentioned that make an occasional appearance in the top 10 and get stuffed back down?
When times are good for the tradeshow industry – and this applies to all of us – we are tempted to say, “Why tinker with success? If I made money this year, why wouldn’t I make money next year?’
The natural tendency is to start back at zero the day after one successful show ends and count down to the same thing happening 365 days later, with the possibility of a few tweaks here and there, but nothing significant because things went so well before.
However, the competitive environment today is not only made up of 365 days a year, it’s 360 degrees. Your fiercest competitors are not just other shows in your industry, it’s every other marketing medium that is discovering the profit buried in events and adding them to the portfolio of products they can offer your customers.
2015 was a good year for the tradeshow industry, but it’s not time for anybody to rest on their laurels.
Michael Hart is a business consultant and writer who focuses on the events industry. He can be reached at michaelhrt3@gmail.com.