Trade Show TalesBlog

Happy 4th of July: Word on the Street — June 27th thru July 1st

July 3rd, 2011 Mel White COMMENTS
July is Upon Us

Word on the Street by Kevin Carty

July is Upon Us

You can always tell when we hit July. Crickets can be heard at night, but their sounds are almost louder during the day. Yes, I am referring to how slow our industry gets in July. You can almost always set your calendars and clocks to it.

Not that I don’t like busy times, but it’s nice to have some down time. Not just for business but for personal stuff as well.

Personally, July means that I can take days off mid-week occasionally without feeling like I might get behind. So I was lucky enough to take my son to his first baseball game. And our favorite team was playing just up the road. The Braves were playing an inter-league series in Seattle, so we drove up for a day game on Wednesday. And true to what I had been told by others, there is nothing  like experiencing that “first game” with your son. Pretty cool stuff! Even made the jumbo screen during the 7th inning stretch. And for those who have met my son, you know that kid has quite the melon. And seeing it on the jumbotron did not help make it any smaller. 🙂

Business-wise this is when we tend to focus on cleaning up, organization, and general housekeeping. Which also means I spend a lot of time with my head in spreadsheets. Yippee! NOT! Seriously though, I consider myself one of those weirdos who likes working on spreadsheets and burrowing into the numbers. Even though I complain about it endlessly.

In doing so, I do need to share that because of some very recent increases from vendors, some more severe than others, we will be making some selective mid-year increases over the next few weeks. We’ll send out specifics as those come to fruition.

Anyway, I hope you get some downtime over this long weekend with your loved ones. And take some time to enjoy the freedoms we have in this great country.

Take care and be well.

Happy 4th of July!

“Liberty is the right to choose. Freedom is the result of the right choice.”

–Kevin Carty

http://twitter.com/kevin_carty
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kevin-carty/3/800/32a

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Fourth of July 2011 Schedule

July 1st, 2011 Mel White COMMENTS

Happy 4th from Classic Exhibits

Classic Exhibits, ClassicMODUL, and Exhibits NW will be closed on Monday, July 4th.

We’ll be back on Tuesday, assuming the rare sunny weather in the Northwest hasn’t adversely affected us. For some, just seeing the rare fireball in sky is enough to create a dangerous shopping frenzy for tomato plants at local nurseries. You haven’t seen crazy if you’ve never seen the face of an Oregonian fantasizing about fresh home-grown tomatoes by mid-September.

Plus, we get a little dizzy and confused from too much Vitamin D. And don’t get us started about middle-aged men with pasty white legs and ponytails wearing sandals with dark socks. They’re like a herd moving across the Serengeti at all the shopping malls. If only lions were allowed in malls . . . .

Wishing You a Safe and Happy Fourth of July Weekend!

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Excellent Interview in Event Design Magazine

June 28th, 2011 Mel White 2 COMMENTS

Event Design Magazine -- June/July 2011

I don’t know how many of you receive Event Design Magazine (www.eventdesignmag.com), but there is an excellent interview with Sue Huff, Director of Global Conventions for Medtronic, in the June/July 2011 issue, Best Practices column.

Normally, I’d simply link to the article, but it’s not on the Event Design website yet. Instead, I encourage you to read the interview if you have the print edition (pg. 16-17), and for those who do not have the issue, I’ve retyped several of her responses below. If I get in trouble with the folks from Event Design . . . well I’m sure they’ll let me know.

From the article:

Sue Huff manages more than 75 of Medtronic’s exhibition programs across all of the company’s U.S. businesses as well as its Pan-European programs . . . . Here, she talks to designers about the keys to creating global consistency, the evolution of social media and virtual events and overcoming cost containment challenges.

Event Design:  What are some of the biggest trends affecting the trade show industry today?
Sue Huff:  In general, I’m seeing social networking and virtual events used in combination with the convention environment. However, virtual has still not caught on in the healthcare industry like it has in other industries, perhaps because it’s important for physicians to be able to talk face-to-face about tough cases. We’re also seeing the show floor decreasing in size because companies are cutting back. At Event Marketing Summit last year, there was a lot of discussion about moving off the show floor with proprietary events, however, this is not common in the healthcare space.

Event Design:  What is the biggest hurdle at U.S. trade shows today?
Sue Huff:  Cost containment is the biggest challenge. With the recent economy, it’s more and more challenging and that’s why we’re seeing decreasing exhibit space. Exclusive service costs continue to rise, at a time when we’re looking at cutting costs. These costs are controlled by the show organizer and their selected vendors. For example, 63 percent of our convention budges are controlled and negotiated by the show organizer, and we have no control over these costs other than to decrease our size, or bring less (weight) to the show.

Event Design:  Is social media having any impact on how you execute at shows?
Sue Huff:  We use Twitter, Facebook and virtual technology. These channels can communicate what’s going on in the exhibit at a particular time, help us learn what the competition is doing and hear what people are saying, or what topics are of interest to show goers. I see this channel in combination with the face-to-face event increasing over time. Face-to-face is still a very important component for the healthcare industry. We’re also seeing more shows offering some type of virtual/web experience through the organizer.

Event Design:  How would you like to see the trade-show world evolve?
Sue Huff:  There’s still a value to face-to-face but the world is evolving with social media and I would like to continue to see how that’s integrated, but not as a replacement for live events. As the younger generation gets older, they’re just more comfortable with it, so it’s going to to continue to evolve. I would also like to see exhibitors more in control over their costs. I’m not in control of over 63 percent of my costs other than to increase or decrease exhibit size. Signing an exhibit space contract when true labor and the drayage rates are unknown is not OK. We need to know what we’re signing up for. I was recently discussing this model with an industry peer, and we agreed, it’s a flawed model. Normally, when you want to buy a service, you go out and get a bid from various vendors, review the responses, decide which vendor you’re going to work with, negotiate pricing, the vendor then provides the service and you pay the vendor. But today, the entire middle section of this model is missing and broken in our industry. To try and explain drayage to a marketing or finance partner is not possible, because it doesn’t make sense. I would like to see this industry healthy, which means the business model must change.

For the complete interview, please read the print edition, or be patient and it will appear online at Event Design sometime in July.

–Mel White
http://www.linkedin.com/in/melmwhite
mel@classicexhibits.com

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Based in Portland, Oregon, Classic Exhibits Inc. designs and manufacturers portable, modular, and custom-hybrid exhibit solutions. Classic Exhibits products are represented by an extensive distributor network in North America and in select International markets. For more information, contact us at 866-652-2100.

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Patient Recovery: Word on the Street — June 20th thru June 24th

June 26th, 2011 Mel White COMMENTS
Getting Healthy

Word on the Street by Kevin Carty

On Getting Healthy

As we climb out of the recession, the trade show industry as a whole has bounced back. Albeit slowly. From the manufacturing side, we have witnessed budgets increase and align with the design hopes of end users. All good things.

But as many of you would agree, not unlike the economy at large, the slow to moderate recovery (healthy growth as it has been called) is a key component to actual recovery. Let me draw a personal comparison if you don’t mind.

Some time ago, 11 years to be exact, I was diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer. Like many others who have experienced cancers of many kinds, I was given chemotherapy as my primary treatment. And chemo is designed to essentially kill you from a cellular level. Good and bad cells alike are destroyed in order to hopefully get all the cancer out of your system.

Afterwards, your body (regardless of age) is essentially back at the starting line. Not just from the chemo, but also from the fact that you have been without physical activity for a long period while recovering from surgery and from being out of commission during treatments.

Now, as much as I might have wanted to, I could not just go out and run a 10k, ride my bike 30 miles, or play a game of tennis. Actually walking around the block was like running a marathon. I constantly had to remind myself or be reminded that I needed to take my time and that it would take time to recovery from essentially 4-5 months of inactivity. Atrophy is an amazing phenomenon. It happens so fast, yet it takes so long to build your body back up to where it once was.

VK-5076 Island Exhibit

VK-5076 Island Exhibit

The reason I am sharing this is simple. Currently in our business and industry, like other industries in the US market, we are still recovering from the recession of the past 2-3 years. And in all reality, that recovery did not really start until about January of this year. At least that is when we really started seeing consistent, positive economic changes. And I, like others, have to keep reminding myself or be reminded by others that we are still early in this recovery process. Lest I forget that some even think we might slip back into another recession. I personally doubt that, but I have to admit that nothing would surprise me.

However, I/we need to continue to remain patient. Just like the muscles in your legs and arms that go unused for a long period of time and take awhile to gain their strength back, our economy and businesses will also take time to truly bounce back to peak health. So rather than focus on the length of time the recovery is taking, we should be focusing on the leaps and bounds we are making daily and weekly. Much of which is a direct result of the hard work we did to clean up our own houses during the lean times so we all come out of this stronger and healthier than before.

I know this may seem a bit off topic as you review the latest Island designs in Design Monday, like Ginsana (VK-5076) introduced this week, but it’s really not. It reflects some of the hard work we have been doing during the recovery process as we create high-end and multi-functional designs for you and your end users.

I guess what grandma always said is true, “Patience is a virtue.” Or as my grandad said, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Have a great weekend!

–Kevin Carty

http://twitter.com/kevin_carty
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kevin-carty/3/800/32a

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Urban Exhibitionary

June 22nd, 2011 Mel White 20 COMMENTS

Beginning in mid-July, Classic Exhibits and ClassicMODUL will run a series of banner ads in the ExhibitorOnline weekly e-broadcast. Most of you receive this email every Thursday or Friday from EXHIBITOR Magazine.

We’ll showcase a new banner ad each week (for 18 weeks). We decided to mimic the Urban Dictionary, but with exhibit industry terms and definitions. We call it the Urban Exhibitionary. To prime the pump, we reached out to some industry friends for ideas, and some of their clever definitions are listed below, but this is merely the first step to creating a comprehensive exhibit dictionary. We want your witty ideas and would love to use the best ones in the ads.

Here are some of the more interesting ones so far.

———

Blink: Special effects lighting that’s often used to compensate for a not-so-great display. Blink rules the dance floor, but isn’t quite as flashy as its rapper cousin, Bling.

That company’s got so much Blink on display, I couldn’t even read their sign.

———

Masterwaiting: Realizing you’re going to have to “go it alone” on the big presentation when your boss is delayed.

Please check on the flight status for Mr. K’s arrival, I’m in the hallway just Masterwaiting and the customer looks pretty anxious.

———

TTWN: Too Tired for Wednesday Night.

I know it’s the last night of EXHIBITOR, but I’m TTWN.

———

Port-not-able: Unwieldy, overweight exhibits that carry the claim “portable.”

At 300 lbs., that display goes in the Port-not-able Hall of Shame.

———

Face-to-Space: Used to describe “virtual” events and teleconferences.

Trade shows will always be the place to be seen. It’s impossible to close the deal when you’re working Face-to-Space.

———

Assertain: When someone wastes your time with small talk or jokes instead of providing factual information about pricing or warranty. Often used as a tactic to stall. (Alt.) Slang: What happens when an unlikable person attempts to entertain.

It took me two weeks to get the pricing info I requested, but the sales dude called everyday just to assertain me. (Alt.) Slang: He may think he’s an Elvis impersonator, but it’s really just assertainment.

———

Trinketeer: A show attendee whose primary focus is to gather as many trinkets and trash as possible. No giveaway item is too small or insignificant for this exhibit hall swashbuckler!

Did you see the two Trinketeers fighting over the last promotional Stress Ball at Booth 2234?

———

Arch-ritis: The pain from wearing new shoes at a trade show.

I told Sally not to wear those new pumps. Now, she’s got a serious case of arch-ritis.

———

CuervoSweat: Literally perspiring alcohol after a very late night entertaining clients.

You need to move away from me Jack, or I’ll be hammered by noon from your CuervoSweat fumes.

———

Booth Zombie: The comatose exhibitor who doesn’t like to talk to strangers, make eye contact, or stand for seven hours straight.

The Booth Zombie sat behind the table and stared blindly away from attendees, stopping only to check her emails, file her nails, and drink coffee.

———

Annie-halled:  The realization that you’ve been abandoned (orphaned) in the exhibit hall while dismantling your display.

I was tearing down the exhibit when I realized I’d been annie-halled by my co-workers. Leapin’ lizards!

———

Ban-boozled: The “too good to be true” $99 banner stand bargain . . . that wasn’t.

I knew I’d been ban-boozled when the directions were sturdier than the banner stand.

———

Guttastrophe: The SUDDEN realization at a trade show that eating and drinking too much while wearing last year’s belt size has consequences.

He was in the middle of a very large exhibit hall when the telltale signs of a major Guttastrophe were upon him.

———

We’d love to include your terms in the Urban Exhibitionary. You’re a creative bunch. Post your terms and definitions. We’ll use the very best ones and collect the rest into a dictionary.

. . . Frankly, I’m a little frightened of what you’ll share. 😉

–Mel White
http://www.linkedin.com/in/melmwhite
mel@classicexhibits.com

*********************************

Based in Portland, Oregon, Classic Exhibits Inc. designs and manufacturers portable, modular, and custom-hybrid exhibit solutions. Classic Exhibits products are represented by an extensive distributor network in North America and in select International markets. For more information, contact us at 866-652-2100.

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Posted in Classic Exhibit Systems, Fun, Mel White, Uncategorized | 20 Comments »

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