Behind The Story

July 1, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

If these are the dog days in Las Vegas, they’re the big-dog days for the city’s tradeshow and convention business. Sure, our editors in Las Vegas are still scurrying around to shows all the time, but this is not the season for the blockbuster. Organizers of shows like Intl. CES, MAGIC Marketplace and NAB are somewhere else, far away and far cooler.

So, if you look at the light crowds right now around the Strip, you might be tempted to say it’s the usual summer lull.

June 24, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Often at the annual meetings of industry associations with sizable numbers of exhibitors as members, the issues on people’s minds are much alike: Drayage, housing blocks, show hours and dates, and out-of-touch show managers.

Granted, all those came up at the Healthcare Convention & Exhibitors Assn. Annual Meeting & Exhibition wrapping up today in Salt Lake City … but there’s more. It’s what most in the health care meetings world perceive as the ever-tightening restrictions on how pharmaceutical and medical device makers can market their products to physicians and other health care professionals.

Wha...Read More

February 11, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

One thing this job I’ve got has over jobs I’ve had in the past, at daily and weekly newspapers, is that I don’t have to talk to politicians. That is not to say that the tradeshow industry is unaffected by politics, but the points where government policy and face-to-face marketing coincide are few and far between.

Most readers I talk to wish it was easier for their international exhibitors and attendees to get visas to come to their shows in the United States. They also wish the current administration didn’t keep doing things that make it so easy for people in other countries to decide they don’t like Americans. And most TSW readers probably wish the Federal Aviation Administration would ...Read More

January 30, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

In our annual survey of show managers late last year, somewhere around November, a majority of organizers famously told Tradeshow Week their No. 1 concern going into 2008 was industry consolidation. Even by the time we printed the results of that survey in mid-December, it was hard to believe that was the worst thing anybody had to be concerned about.

In the mere month and a half since then, a lot has happened in the global economy to make everybody nervous and, I’m guessing, to make those show managers who thought industry consolidation was all they had to worry about feel kind of naïve.

Judging from a couple of stories in our upcoming Feb. 4 issue, at least space rates at the world’s biggest convention center...Read More

January 14, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

If you’ve ever been to an industry meeting in Asia, you know that they tend toward the staid. While last month’s IAEE Expo! Expo! included scantily-clad girls dancing on tables at the opening night reception, the average CEFCO meeting has its share of solemn, long-winded speeches by dignitaries in flowery Mandarin that must lose something in translation into English.

However, the fourth annual China Expo Forum for Intl. Cooperation (CEFCO 2008) going on right now in Chengdu, China, has something that comes as a surprise: On the first day of the conference, Jan. 15, it was the Western speakers who gushed over the success of the Chinese exhibition industry.

Manfred Wu...Read More