Trade · Show · Diaries

Everyone expected Print '09 in Chicago to be a quiet show. Hotel room rates were reduced and there were plenty of last minute deals available: a far cry from the previous Print show in 2005.

But I don't think anyone expected the show to be as dead as it was.

At times, you could look down any of the main aisles and not see anyone walking the show. In keeping with the downturn in the economy, my company decided to scale back the booth to nothing more than a few chairs and a table where dealers could meet and talk. At the last minute (and I do mean the last minute) the boss changed his mind and decided to hang banners from the back curtain rods. I wouldn't have minded this decision, had it been made more than three weeks before the show, but lugging eight foot banners to the airport as over-sized luggage is not my idea of a fun time. Add to this the decision by the bean-counters (see previous post) to cut back my time in the office, which led to lots of last-minute (as, thus, expensive) orders.

When I purchased our booth space, we were right in the center of the show. I was feeling pretty good about this location at the time. But by the time the show arrived, half the exhibitors had cut and run. Suddenly I found myself in one of the last rows in the hall. I was at the back of the show! The very thing I always make a point of avoiding. It would have been nice if the show officials had called or emailed letting us know that spaces up in front had opened up, but they did not. I probably would have checked on this myself had my hours not been cut back to the point where I only had time to do the absolutely essential things on the days that I worked.
     

    
Our staff was cut back considerably, but this wasn't as much of a problem as everyone expected. There just weren't that many people at the show. Our new National Sales Manager was supposed to work the last day of the show, but he decided to take an early flight back to New England, leaving me to man the booth by myself. Normally, this would grounds for a severe tongue-lashing, but the fact was, there was just no reason for anyone else to be there.
    
      
I sure hope the economy turns around before the Photokina show next September!

                
I have to admit that I have a special fascination with scam artists. I get dozens of scam emails and snail mail letters every day. These can range from the fairly innocuous ones like all those "Yellow Pages" out there that try to get you to advertise, to downright evil ones like the Nigerian letter fraud attempts to clean out people's bank accounts. For some reason, trade shows seems to be particularly susceptible to these scam artists. Probably because most trade shows involve so much paperwork that it is easy for these bad babies to slip under the fence unnoticed. One that is making the rounds right now falls on the diabolically side of the scale. If you go to any international trade shows at all, you will probably encounter this evil mutha.

It is called the Expo Guide. It starts with a letter asking you to correct any information on your expo guide information for your free listing. Of course, the implication in this wording is that you already had a free listing. Note the use of the word implication. In fact, what they are saying, if you read the form carefully, is that by sending in the form, you are agreeing to pay $1,571.00 to them for your ad. A few weeks later, you'll get a reminder letter asking for payment. It is usually around now that people realize that they have been had.
If you've fallen for this scam, whatever you do, DON'T PAY! In a recent Swiss case against one of these companies (Construct Data Verlag), the court found that the company was guilty of fraud, and could only seek money from the people who had already sent in payments!

There is a website out there devoted to tracking and stopping the expo guide scams called Stop the European City Guide. Here you will find all kinds of information on this and other guidebook-based scams.

There is an battle between accountants and marketers that has been going on since at least the middle of the twentieth century; probably longer. It goes something like this:
            
Accountant: "Why are we paying to go to this trade show?"
Marketer: "Because it is a great source of exposure and allows us to promote our products."
Accountant: "But nobody bought anything at the show."
Marketer: "We don't sell at the trade shows. That's not what they are about."
Accountant: "But we didn't get a big surge of sales during the show either. Clearly it accomplished nothing."
Marketer: "It doesn't work that way. People need to see and learn and become familiar with the products."
Accountant: "Well, we don't have the money for frivolities like this. We are cutting way back on the trade shows."
             
Cut to three years later, the accountant responsible for these decisions has moved on, the company has moved from the forefront of its industry to next to last place and the president of the company blames marketing for not doing its job.
        
There is no area that better illustrates the differences between accountants and marketers than the subject of trade shows. To accountants, they seem like a big waste of time with ROI figures that are spurious at best and down-right non-existent at worst. Unless you are taking orders at a show, it can be very difficult to prove that a trade show is worth the money. When it comes to trade show marketing, accountants just don't get it. I was handed a perfect example of this earlier today when I mentioned to our (new) accountant that our largest competitor was increasing their trade show presence this year while we are scaling back.
      
"That doesn' t make sense. In this economy, shouldn't they be scaling back?" He said.
       
I went on to explain to him that, in fact, the opposite is true. When many companies are scaling back, there is no better time to increase your advertising and trade show budgets because the prices for both are lower. This means you can often get twice the exposure for half the price. If a company has any chance at all of pulling out ahead of the crowd, it is when the crowd busy huddling together on the sidelines, waiting for the race to begin again. This seems so obvious to me, but then, I am a marketer, not an accountant.

Everyone was filled with trepidation going into the PMA show in Vegas this month. After the collapse of the stock market, trade show attendance all over the world started to dry up. Reports were coming in about other Vegas trade shows that had closed early due to lack of attendees. Many exhibitors decided to scale back their booths or drop out entirely, while others decided to take advantage of the cancellations and book larger spaces at reduced rates. The latter companies, it turns out, were the smart ones.

While there may have been fewer people this year than last, the show was nonetheless quite busy. All of our booth staffers were kept busy throughout most of the show. A quick poll on the last day revealed that nearly every exhibitor was surprised at how busy they were. Does this indicate that things are turning around, or was it just a fluke? I cannot say. I can say that it was nice to be kept busy.
 

        

In a previous post, I talked about the advantages of the Asus Eee PC. My bottom line was that I liked it, but I thought the keyboard was problematic. Not so much because of its size, but because someone at Asus decided it would be a good idea to rearrange things one the keyboard to make it all fit better. For me, there were two big problems with this: First, the top row was shifted over one key, which meant every time I tried to type a '4,' I got a '5.' Second, the Shift key on the right was reduced to the size of an ordinary key, which led to me missing it a lot.

But the Asus Eee did one great thing: it opened the market for the so-called 'netbook,' or mini notebook. If, like me, you travel a lot, need to check your email from hotel rooms around the world, and want a laptop that you can carry around all day without breaking your back or your wallet, the minis are a godsend. There are some good ones on the market right now. I would include Apple's MacBook Air in this category for its low weight, but it loses tons of points on price and the ridiculous decision to include only one USB port and no Ethernet. (And yes, I know you can buy a dongle that lets you plug in the Ethernet through the only USB port, but then where do the mouse, printer and flash drive go?) I guess Jobs only checks into hotels that have decent Wi Fi connections. I am rarely so lucky.

Possibly the best of the mini notebooks, by nearly any measure is the excellent Samsung NC-10. This is a solid little computer, with an excellent keyboard, a good assortment of ports, and a 10.2" screen. Its biggest drawback is its price, which, at $440-$499, is up to $200 more than most of the other mini notebooks. Another mini that is becoming very popular is the MSI Wind, which has the distinct advantage of being nearly completely compatible with OSX.

My own personal choice was the Acer Aspire One. I like the keyboard, which doesn't vary much from the standard keyboard layout and is still large enough for me to type with comfortably. It comes in two screen sizes—10" and 8.9". I chose the smaller one for the weight (2.17 pounds!) and the fact that you can find them online for less than $300. It comes with three USB ports, an Ethernet port, a standard video jack (nice if you find yourself needing to plug it into a projector), a media card reader, and an SD card reader. It is available with Windows XP or Linpus Linux. Since my main, almost exclusive, use of the computer is typing, the Acer Aspire One is working out nicely.