Marshall Yard:

All too often folks in the trade show business- and our customers alike - lose sight of what really goes into an exceptional trade show booth. Let’s take a look at the requisite constituents for a great show:

• Exhibitor who knows what they want, and what their limitations are
• Exhibit company salesperson/consultant who can thoroughly bring forth those details from the exhibitor, and effectively involve the exhibitor and designer
• Trade Show Exhibit designer/design team who is a creative artist and problem solver, and who has experience with how his/her renderings will be enacted into a real-life display
• Exhibit Company Account Manager who ensures that what was designed and sold is effectively built, peripheral services are accurately ordered (lead retrieval, catering, clean-up, etc.), all with minimal stress on the exhibitor’s company behalf
• Tradespeople who have the skills and experience to take designs and a set of physical components, and translate them into reality
• Exhibitor that coordinates a comprehensive trade show strategy with advertizing, sponsorship, and sales efforts

Do you know what the glue is amidst these different factors? An exhibitor who knows what they want, knows their limitations, and brings one marketing component (the exhibit) into the fold of a company-wide marketing blitz. Ultimately, exhibit houses need to be better at one thing: bringing out the best from exhibitors, within the simple framework of an effective/perceptive salesperson, creative design team, and highly-professional account management staff.

Due to unexplainable reader demands, nay threats, we will be embarking on a journey of exploration and enlightenment in pertinence to carpet padding. No trade show blog would be complete without it.

Carpet padding has been called by some “the 3rd rail of trade shows.” If you search the blogosphere, you’ll find nary a tradeshow blog post or website dedicated solely to the subject of carpet padding. Why? Or, perhaps more conclusively, one should ask, WHY NOT?

Carpet padding is BY FAR the most integral factor in the design, fabrication, and implementation of an effective trade show exhibit. Some exhibitors have a marred track record of charging clients for unnecessary trade show items like: graphics, lighting, reception counters, demo-stations, the list goes on. We all know that this business has been characterized by this kind of behavior since its INCEPTION. What some don’t recognize, is that this is still commonplace in this industry. A client asked me JUST THIS MORNING whether he could add a table and four chairs to his exhibit booth. Disgusting.

If you are a client looking to custom design your booth, here are a few key questions to ask your trade show exhibit company:

1. What will visitors to my booth be standing on?

2. If a visitor refuses to wear appropriate footwear, how likely are they to stand in MY BOOTH, and not someone else’s?

3. Will the carpeting be obstructed by any unneccessary objects?

That should ensure that your trade show exhibit program gets off to a good start for 2009’s event.

Trade show exhibit trends are, like all trends, always changing. The idea of being on the leading edge of a trend is SCARY to most exhibitors. TREND=EXPENSIVE in their minds. Why?

To many trade show attendees, especially those who rarely visit the conventions and expos that we see month in and month out, most of the exhibit booths that they see are impressive - not just the latest and greatest. A friend of mine attended a show this past October and marveled at the cheap rented trusses on the show floor. Yuck! Those are so 1992. But with a jury of amateurs, why should one have such high standards?

I would argue that trendy exhibits need not be expensive. You can have IMPACT at a reasonable budget [and trusses rarely have an IMPACT on those of us who go to more than 1 tradeshow per decade...]. It has everything to do with the business model of the exhibit company, since the physical components are not the largest cost centers involved. Here’s what I mean:

The components involved in a trade show exhibit are only one of the many costs involved in the process. The beams, the fabric, wall panels, the plexiglass- or whatever your exhibit may be made out of -are not as expensive as the designers, graphic artists, engineers/detailers, account managers, and fabricators required to deliver a high quality exhibit to the tradeshow floor. Consider, then, why you would sacrifice on materials, when the cutting edge in styles is only a minor increase in costs. But trends are more than just materials - it’s the designers, stupid.

A busy design team, paired with an engineering, graphics, and overall operation that is geared towards large scale, cutting edge exhibit booths, actually costs less than a low quality, slow design team, error-prone engineers, wasteful graphics, and a sloppily managed overall operation. If paid based on productivity, the trend-following, top-notch-team earns more. But they produce more. It can even be argued that if the sales team sells/leases enough booths, and if operations are run with an efficiency of scale, employees will produce a higher quality product regardless. Quality improves with the busier the team becomes. Trends are easier to introduce when you do so many exhibits. Trends need not be followed because you heard about them, but because you are experimenting amidst a large scale, custom rental exhibit program - i.e. constantly innovating with existing clients.

Trends aren’t expensive. In prosperous, overheated economic times, an exhibit house will raise its prices if demand merits this. In leaner times, when every nickel and dime is squeezed out of any exhibit budget, the busy company is likely the best. Trends included, they may be working at the same price as the less efficient, wastefully under-utilized company. Which sounds like a better value?

This post has been deemed “salesey” (classic overt, self-serving sales pitch that lacks humor and/or self-defecating), but is approved by the Blog Master.

This morning’s blog is not about push-up bras. I’ve had a few people email me asking me to blog about female supportive garments, but this is not the correct forum (the “Bro” or “Manzeer,” on the other hand, can be covered in future posts).

I’m actually going to talk about carpet padding.

Wait!! Don’t leave yet!!! I know that sounds like a ridiculously boring topic, but at the RSNA yesterday I experienced a first in trade show errors - WAY TOO MUCH CARPET PADDING.

I’ve never been in a home that had so much padding, much less an exhibit booth. It was to the extent that it was laborious to walk normally. I never really thought about too much pad being an issue, and I can’t pin down who would have made the error. Was it a client who insisted they wanted the super-upgrade, or was it the exhibit company that suggested they “set their booth apart” and really outdo themselves.

It was one of the biggest exhibits at RSNA, and you felt like you had 5 pound bricks tied to your shoes as you walked through their village of highly unimpressive mini-booths. Has anyone else seen this in practice elsewhere? Or am I the only one who found this so cumbersome and annoying?

Over the next two weekends, my wife and I are invited to 6 Christmas parties. 3 of the 6 have been hilariously, and uniquely, entitled ”Ugly Sweater” Christmas Parties. Somehow we’re trying to go to 4/6ths of them. I am not in charge of the scheduling or logistics, but I am required to make pleasant conversation.

Pleasant conversation is challenging when people want to talk about work. These rare souls, who find that a full time job is not actually full enough, would like you to take everything that you left at the office, and dump it out onto their living room floor. Once my old college roommate gets finished unleashing a liter of bile onto his wife’s brand new wood laminate floor (it looks like real hardwood! ), it will be my turn.

It’s kind of a macho thing - talking about what we do on our telephones and laptops. He travels all over the world, to extravagent places like Minnesota, Iowa, even Ohio, once. And the girls just swoon over his ability to hock insurance policies that noone understands. And what do I get to boast about?

Trade Shows. That’s right, everybody in the general public, especially your school teachers, your nurses, your accountants  - they LOVE to hear about trade shows. In fact, most people know EXACTLY what I do.

Trade shows are, according to most conversational participants, a combination of car shows, baseball card expos, and homegoods bazaars. And the complexity and nuance of my work is, as one would expect, slightly shy of my insurance God friend.

He may get the glory, but I still get the girls. Car shows are AWSOME.

Regardless, I need to find myself a new sweater.

One last note: None of the people at these sweater parties were over the age of 12 during the era of ugly sweaters, circa 1978-1992. What gives? Why is this such a popular theme? I have to buy a sweater, and then tack it up?

This past Wednesday, I had the pleasure of driving down to McCormick Place with some of my favorite co-workers. The cast for the drive included Midnight Michigan, senior designer; Sasha Grove, manager extrordinaire; and Linda Railroad, working the oldest profession, sales. Update: I’ve finally received permission to clarify the origin of my coworkers’ names. These are porn names: Derived by the combination of our first pet’s name with the first street name that we remember living on (I will continue utilizing my McCormick Place psuedonym, since “Lucy Barton” makes for gender-confused blogging). With this crew, it’s always guaranteed to be quite a trip. The RSNA trade show was in day 3 of exhibit set-up, so let’s recap the day’s events:

When we realized that walking would have taken us over 17 hours that we decided to drive. Linda’s directions were denounced as “the long way.” Commute time: 1 hour, 15 minutes. We covered a lot of conversational ground on the way downtown: Trade show exhibit booths, obviously; how-to-drown skunks and other suburban pests; approved alternatives to watching football over the Thanksgiving holiday; and, finally, the potential drayage costs of parking on the convention center floor, versus the parking garage ($8,000 versus $15).

After arriving, we had a very stimulating time previewing the RSNA show. The Siemens rental exhibit booth is, as expected, surreal and impressive. Midnight seemed very pleased at seeing his 3-d renderings put into corporeal existance.

Other highlights from the trade show floor: One of our competitors, expected to fold within months, builds out one of their last exhibits; and our biggest “competitor” freaks out when we walk around their largest client’s booth. Name badges and company insignia can be quite intimidating, it seems. As innovators in the rental exhibit booth business, we were pleased to see them doing a mediocre job of imitating our custom rental system (ours utilizes custom built components that… well, just go to the website). They can try to imitate, but you can’t beat the real thing.

We took my way home (2 hour drive). It was a far more scenic route, and the subject matter was far less appropriate. Drowning dogs, Linda Railroad taking the “Midnight train,” and things got worse from there. H.R. will be busy sorting out who said what!

This week, the buzz around the office is all about the RSNA show (the Radialogical Society of North America’s annual meeting & expo). We have a multitude of outstanding clients at the RSNA’s. They range from Imaging on Call, who has a 20 ft. x 20 ft. custom rental booth, to the other extreme, Siemens, with a whopping 110 ft. x 220 ft. exhibit. Building a miniature “village” of different structures in a matter of a few days is fun to watch.

Word on the street (perception) is that trade shows will have fewer exhibitors in 2009, taking up less convention hall space, and with smaller exhibits, as the broader economy heads into recession. I think that’s true, by and large, but there are individual companies that are exceptions to this rule. Which side of the coin is your company on?

Tails:

Revenue is declining, profits are tighter (or in the red), and the marketing budget has a large “blip” that is “Trade Shows/Events.” In order to survive, your company decides to cut back everything, and the exposure and opportunity that a well executed trade show can offer gets thrown out with the “bathwater.” Hopefully these companies do not own their trade show exhibits - else they are wasting big marketing dollars that were invested when the economy was more favorable. In addition, there is a continuing expense of storing their exhibit property. This is a reality many companies are facing. Either scale down, or kill the program entirely.

Heads:

Your company has continued gobbling up market share, or may even be consuming competitors’ businesses via acquisition or attrition. I have a number of clients who are in this position: They are GROWING their tradeshow presence in order to undertake some major corporate agendie- Rebranding, launching new products (perhaps integrating their new acquisitions’ product line), or merely establishing their role as industry leaders. Sometimes they’re doing preventive work on potential misconceptions of who is struggling, and who is surviving, in the new economy. An effective trade show exhibit can allow a company to accomplish all of these goals in one space. A custom rental booth can be designed for each individual trade show, to ensure that the message that is conveyed is timely and precise for todays trade show audience, not last year’s.

Heads or tails, it seems like the company that rents their exhibit is better off. If you can’t afford to exhibit, you can cross off that expense for FY09. If you can afford to exhibit, you can do exactly what you want for 2009’s exhibition (e.g. - Siemens and Imaging On Call can build totally different designs for every show). It depends on what the reality is for your company, but at least you get to decide on how you’ll be perceived.