Trade Shows Cause Traffic Jams on the Info Highway : Technology: There are so many of them that both attendees and exhibitors are getting more picky.
Rick Doherty, editor of a Long Island newsletter about digital communications, will board a plane this morning for San Francisco, where he will spend eight hours tearing through Macworld Expo, a computer show dedicated to the Macintosh industry. This evening, he will hop another jet for Las Vegas to spend a few days traipsing through the miles of aisles at the winter Consumer Electronics Show.
Another day, another trade show--or two or three.
Sparked by the rapid pace of change in high-technology, the computer trade shows, conferences and investment seminars are proliferating like Al Gore speeches about the information superhighway.
As 1994 dawns, thousands of corporate computer system managers, high-tech executives and techno-junkies worldwide will ponder calendars jam-packed with dizzying options on how to spend their travel time.
Separating the helpful from the humdrum has become a monumental chore--and a weighty business decision, what with the tab for some conferences topping $2,000 per attendee.
Big trade meetings such as Comdex, the mother of U.S. shows, can cost exhibitors $2 million or more, with the return on the investment a wild card.
As a result, attendees and exhibitors are getting much more picky, with many exhibitors concluding that they get better results at more specialized shows.
“If you’re not careful, you could go to a conference or a trade show every week,” frets Richard Shaffer, principal of the New York-based consulting firm Technologic Partners, which puts on an annual PC Outlook forum and a combination trade show and conference that focuses on mobile computing.
Everybody, it seems, is getting into the conference business.
Seybold Publications, whose founder years ago instituted two annual desktop publishing shows, recently sent out a 17-page calendar of more than 350 shows in that category alone.
Ziff-Davis, publisher of PC Week, started a conference and exhibition division two years ago in Foster City, Calif. Its staff of 150 stages the Seybold Seminars. It also recently acquired and combined two shows--Networld and Interop--that demonstrate how products work together.
Down on its luck a few years ago, Compaq Computer Corp. pulled out of Comdex. Having waged a stunning turnaround, the company last year mounted its own Innovate trade show and conference, drawing more than 6,000 to a Houston convention center.
The boom in trade shows has spawned Mediamap, a company that tracks the gatherings for high-tech subscribers. Last year it made Inc. magazine’s list of the 500 fastest-growing privately held companies. The 4-year-old service based in Cambridge, Mass. charges as much as $800 a year for its comprehensive listing.
The Mediamap Trade Show Report’s 1994 table of contents is expected to triple from its current size of about 260 shows worldwide, said John Pearce, founder and chief executive.
“Trade shows are the new hot marketing craze,” said Kelsey Selander, vice president of marketing for Borland International, a publisher of business software in Scotts Valley, Calif. “Making sense of which ones to go with is challenging.”
Her boss, Philippe Kahn, is one of a bevy of high-tech honchos--including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Oracle Systems’ Larry Ellison and Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy--who are in demand on the keynote speaker circuit. Those speeches, intended to address industry issues, typically end up being little more than glitzy sales pitches.
The trade show business has prospered despite worldwide economic ennui. And, apart from a few failures each year, a surprising number of the gatherings manage to survive if not thrive. That reflects perhaps a high level of fear of being left in the silicon dust as the industry roars inexorably forward.
Yet companies hard-pressed by tough times find they must be more selective about what shows they attend.
At Mervyn’s, a department store chain based in Hayward, Calif., information systems employees attend 10 shows a year now, down from 25 in the past. Meta Group, a Westport, Conn., consulting firm, helps guide the chain in its choices.
“There’s no way we attend them all,” said Vivian Stephenson, vice president of management information systems. Many, she noted, are not worth the time and money.
Lloyd Westbrook, a senior technical consultant with Charles Schwab & Co., the big discount brokerage firm in San Francisco, picks half a dozen shows a year from scores of alternatives. “I restrict it tremendously just in order to handle it,” he said.
High-Tech Behemoths
The biggest computer industry trade shows and conferences of 1993:
Exhibition cost Show Location Attendance (per sq. ft.) CeBIT Hannover, Germany 600,000 $75.00 Comdex Las Vegas 173,000 $39.00 Systems Munich, Germany 170,000 $42.00 Internepcon/Japan Tokyo 110,000 $32.00 PC Expo New York 80,000 $34.00 Fose Washington 75,000 $32.50 Macworld Expo San Francisco 66,000 $36.00 Wescon San Francisco 45,000 $25.00 Graph Expo Chicago 45,000 $20.00 UniForum San Francisco 36,000 $28.00
Source: Mediamap
