Most of the conversations I’ve had recently around the trade show concept have focused on their being perceived as an old-school way to bring buyers and sellers together, one that is becoming increasingly ineffective and unappealing to attendees. Hence the move toward hosted-buyer programs, and adding education in hopes it will attract more people to the show floor.

Then I ran across this editorial in Forbes written by Consumer Electronics Association (which owns the CES show) president and CEO Gary Shapiro that is practically an ode to the trade show model. Called Want Innovation? Go to a Trade Show
, here’s the heart of his argument:

Perhaps most important, they come because relationships matter in business and, despite the worldwide reach of the Internet, a relationship cannot only be electronic. It must be personal.

This personal component to International CES – or any tradeshow, for that matter – is what makes it a living, breathing entity. It’s an experience that requires five senses. Some may scoff and wonder why in the age of technology and the Internet live face-to-face events even exist. Yet they not only persist, they also prosper because people, relationships and first-hand impressions matter. Five-sense interaction beats the Internet for creating a big picture view, allowing serendipitous discovery, developing trust, and evaluating people and products.

It’s an argument we’ve all heard before, and I of course want to get behind it. And yet I do hear, anecdotally anyway, an increasing reluctance on attendees’ parts to deal with the trade show model. Is the expo floor as we know it still a vibrant, living, growing model, or a dinosaur lumbering its way to an experiential tar pit? I’m sure the answer will in part depend on who the intended audience is, but generally speaking, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I spend a lot of time with continuing medical education providers, but not so much with the meeting planners who make those meetings at which the CME is conducted happen, so it was fascinating to have the chance to sit in on a frank discussion of what their biggest challenges are, and what they are doing to resolve them, as my last session of PCMA 2012.

One thing that seemed to be of huge concern was the idea that exhibitors were going to start asking them to provide physician attendees’ National Provider Identification numbers. Since this is public information, I’m having a hard time understanding why that is the meeting planner’s problem—why can’t the exhibitors just look them up? If someone can explain why this is potentially a big issue for exhibitors, please let me know. I tried to find out from a few folks after the session ended, but everyone was in a rush to leave so I didn’t really get much other than if an exhibitor demands it, it’s their problem. Which I get, but I don’t get why exhibitors would demand this from them. Light-shedding on this would be welcome!

Other big issues were the costs of complying with government regulations and Accreditation Council for CME rules, pressures to find new sources of revenue, building traffic to the exhibition floor, international initiatives (including visa-related challenges), CME credit interchange with other countries, and all the various codes and rules and regulations they are supposed to follow nowadays.

One participant was particularly concerned about the Council of Medical Specialty Societies’ newish ethical code that is designed to limit drug and device company influence over patient care. While similar in many ways to the ACCME’s Standards for Commercial Support, it also prohibits society presidents, CEOs, and editors-in-chief of society journals from having direct financial relationships with relevant for-profit companies in the healthcare sector. One participant said her organization actually had to ask one of its journal editors to resign after her society agreed to abide by the CMSS code.

Sponsorships and exhibit dollars on the decline had most of the crowd at least someone frazzled. As one person said, “With the PhRMA Code, they don’t want to sponsor anything anymore.” Several said their organizations were going the same route as PCMA, offering year-round sponsorships that extend far beyond the meeting rather than providing one-offs on tote bags and banners. (Note: This article offers some good tips on how to get more sponsorship dollars. And here’s another one.) One thing sponsors particularly seem to like, said some participants, is being able to meet with board members and other influential people in the industry at board and other high-level meetings. Some said they give preferential treatment on the show floor to exhibitors that are also in more extensive sponsorship relationships, others said they kept it completely separate.

From what people were saying, I’m not sure they’d buy into this snip of research finding that physicians aren’t eschewing the trade show floor now that the tchotches are out due to PhRMA Code restrictions. It sounds like, for medical meetings as for other types of association conferences, it’s becoming more and more of a push to get people on the show floor and interacting with exhibitors. While product theaters can help, they don’t appear to be a major solution to the exhibition drain problem. As one person said, “The surveys say they value exhibitions, but they don’t go. We give them food, product theaters, we’re even putting the reception on the show floor. Nothing seems to help.”

One said she was going to take the “continue the conversation” idea from PCMA, where a follow-on informal session is held after a keynote so those who want to can dive deeper into the material, only hold it on the show floor. Which is fine, as long as it isn’t for credit, warned another person. Another pointed to a different angle on the problem: Maybe it’s the booths that aren’t so attractive. So that organization offers a consultant who can evaluate exhibitor booths and suggest ways to improve them.

Some said they had added a virtual trade show component as a complement to repurposing educational content from the conference for online distribution, but it didn’t appear that the value was all that high (one said that only 42 percent of virtual attendees visited the virtual exhibit, which I thought actually sounded pretty good. Another said it was more like 25 percent for his group). Streaming the educational session, with or without CME credit attached, live and archived, seemed to be pretty popular among attendees of most of the planners who said they had done it. However, interest dropped off a cliff when members were asked if they would pay for it, one person said (shocking, I know!). Another said she had a good response to charging one fee to get access to all the content, and an additional fee on top of it if they wanted to get CME credit for it.

They didn’t talk a lot about CME educational grants, but one person did point out that, now that pharma budgets for CME grants are shrinking, their ad budgets actually are growing. Accordingly, medical organizations are beginning to put more of their focus on attracting those ad dollars to support their meetings.

There was more—a lot more—but I’ll leave this one with two of the wildest promotional ploys I’ve heard of:

One was a company that brought colored chalk and proceeded to draw its logo on the sidewalk in front of the medical conference’s headquarters hotel. Another person told of a company that put its logo on the mainsail of a big sailboat and had it sail up and down the harbor in view of the meeting (I’m not sure if this was in San Diego, but I could see it happening there.)

I also went to an interesting session on incorporating product theaters on the trade show floor. It was moderated by John Houghton with the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, who also showed lots of slides of different product theater setups. Interesting that almost all of the slides I saw were of open-sided theaters; of the few I’ve seen, they mainly have been at least somewhat shielded from the hustle and bustle. He was joined by panelists Carrie Abernathy, CMP, CEM, with the International Association of Fire Chiefs; Matthew Cunningham, CMP, with the American Petroleum Institute; and Colleen Donohoe, CMP, with the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons. Eclectic group, eh?

A few things I learned:
* Don’t do it unless you’re going to demo something. Sounds like that’s what they’re most effective for.

* Market product theaters with the rest of your program several months out.

* Where to place it on your show floor will really depend on the specifics of your attendee and exhibitor base. That said, while you don’t want to monopolize your premium space, but you do want to put it where it will get traffic. That may be in the back near the food and beverage stations, or in a more central location. One online session attendee said she put hers in the center of the show floor and used fabric to dampen the noise. Another mentioned that where you place it speaks to how important you think it is.

* For medical trade shows: Product theaters can not be offered for continuing medical education or CE credit.

* Panelists were mixed on whether to give product theaters dedicated time or run them opposite other programming. Matthew, whose organization runs its product theater concurrently with other sessions, basically tells companies to send their best speakers so they can compete. Colleen, on the other hand, keeps it unopposed both to make it worth the cost and to keep non-CME from competing with CME.

* You can use your mobile app and/or social media to push out messages about the product theater, both before the fact and during the show by broadcasting the news that a hot-topic session is coming up on the show floor. The panelists also promoted the sessions on the show floor with large, tall, eye-catching graphics over the sets, and had people holding signs saying “Follow me for a great hot-topic session.” I didn’t catch what her association was, but one attendee whose organization must be involved in lumber somehow said they place a live tree in the middle of the show floor, then sell space around the outside of it. They use the tree to demo whatever it is that organization’s people demo, then have the last session be about how to cut down a tree, demonstrated on the tree, which is then carried off the show floor as logs.

* To combat the idea that people will rush past the booths to get to the product theater, you can build in time around the on-floor sessions for booth browsing, or, as one person said, invite exhibitors to speak next time!

I’ve been a big fan of blogging for pretty much everything to do with a conference, but I’d never heard of an organization using a blog to perk up and streamline its booth space selection process before. Nice!

Someone asked one of the industry listservs recently if trade shows were on their way out. Some may well be, depending on what industry they serve, and how many shows are already working in that space, and how many alternatives their prospective exhibitors and attendees have to learn about new products and services. Some will lumber on due to legacy momentum; others will nimbly hop to new platforms to keep up with what their attendees and exhibitors need and want and do just fine. Others will find it just business as usual. Yet others will likely grow as they find new audiences and product areas related enough to make it make sense to expand in their directions. That’s what I think, anyway.

Here’s another view, from Dan O’Shea at the Big Fat Marketing Blog.

I thought it was just me, but it seems that others also get headaches (and stuffy noses, and all-around malaise) when wandering the tradeshow floor. And now I know why: The carpeting gives off toxic fumes. The good news is that we can do better. Read more on Hey Newman’s blog.

While outboarding — renting a hotel suite and wooing customers at a trade show without actually supporting the show itself — is nothing new, the recent Consumer Electronics Show’s problems with it have caught the attention of the New York Times In fact IAEE released a statement condemning the practice four years ago.

What does seem to be new, at least to me, is that hotels at CES seemed to be taking the initiative to give the boot to convention crashers. Is that putting too much of a burden on the hotel? I tend to agree with the hospitality lawyer the article quotes and say it is, especially in this economy, a bit much to ask hotels to be the exhibit police, though I applaud those that are willing and able to do it.

I can’t imagine this problem is going to ever go away entirely, but it is interesting to see a major newspaper covering it.

Update: If you ever have doubts about the importance of fact checking, there’s a doozy in the article that someone just pointed out to me: The article says CES drew 1.4 million attendees, down from 1.7 million. Needless to say, those numbers actually refer to the show’s square footage. Oops.

Just a friendly reminder to get your data in for the 2009 CEIR Index. It should be quick and easy to do, and you’ll get a free copy of the results for participating if you get your data input by this Friday.

The trade show business may have dipped almost 12 percent in early 2009, but here’s CEIR’s Doug Ducate putting those CEIR Index first quarter results in context by comparing them to the newpaper and other business advertising (you have to rub it in, eh?).

It’s nice to hear someone praising trade shows, especially since I haven’t heard much of it these days outside of our industry associations’ spokespeople. Check out this editorial from PC magazine, subtitled, CES and its ilk are critical to the way humans do business.