Show Animals

2022 and 2023 are going to be HUGE for in-person events.

— Joe Pulizzi

Content-marketing guru Joe Pulizzi is bullish on tradeshows, as are many who've attended one lately.

I'm not so sanguine, despite the Delta variant waning.

But a tradeshow-industry insider suggested to me this week that my bearish views aren't justified. 

He pointed to the recent shows held by Informa, the National Association of Convenience Stores, the National Confectioners Association, and the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute as examples of the industry's recovery.

I allowed I was perhaps underestimating tradeshow organizers' resiliency.

But whether you back bulls or bears, don't put your money on these two species: cows and pigs.

They're done for.

Three decades ago, I wrote an investigative article—the first of its kind—for the tradeshow-industry magazine EXPO.

It revealed two best-kept industry secrets: one, that most organizers' shows were cash cows; and two, that most organizers' net margins were piggish—well over 70%.

The article, entitled "Porcine Profits," made a few show organizers uncomfortable; but none disputed its accuracy.

Pent-up, post-pandemic demand notwithstanding, those heady yesterdays are over.

Show expenses are up; show participation, down; and no broad-scale economic rebound is going to change either of those facts.

Organizers are going to have to forget about bulls and bears and cows and pigs, and at last become rhinos.

That, or become dinosaurs.

HAT TIP: Thanks to Dan Cole for introducing me to the rhino.

Burn Rate

Desperate for cash, the organizers of Burning Man are auctioning art to stay afloat another two months, according to Billboard.

The event operator has partnered with Sotheby's to sell 100 works of art, so it doesn't go under before it can begin to sell tickets for its 2022 event. Prices for the art reach into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Burning Man, which normally attracts 70 thousand attendees and generates $43 million in registration fees, has cancelled its annual event two years in a row. CEO Marian Goodell told Billboard his company was in "dire straits."

Will other event organizers follow suit?

Talk about a fire sale!

Don't Let the Bastards Grind You Down

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

— Margaret Atwood

Although brought to its knees by Covid-19, the event industry remains vital—and can be a powerful political voice, when it chooses to be.

It's time for the industry to speak up for women's reproductive rights and boycott Texas.

Trade and pubic show organizers, convention planners, and corporate event marketers should join in solidarity. 

Exhibitors and sponsors should join in, as well. (They no doubt will.)

No events in Texas! None. Not a one.

Gamifying Masks

Event producers who want to encourage mask-wearing at conferences and trade shows should consider what won't work.

Behavioral scientists at the University of London analyzed 65 studies of "failed interventions"—failed attempts to influence behavior—conducted over the past decade.

The researchers found:

• 40% of failed interventions relied on attempted "social norming"—on encouragements to adopt a behavior simply because it's "expected"
  
  
• 24% of failed interventions relied on messaging that was delivered on printed flyers and texts
  
  
• 15% of failed interventions relied on simple "defaults"—opt-in or opt-out
  
  
• 12% of failed interventions relied on product labelling

The findings suggest incentives may be required to persuade attendees to wear masks.

Gamifying mask-wearing—randomly rewarding attendees for wearing their masks—might do the trick.

And sponsors would love to underwrite it.

Happy Days

There’s a trick to the "graceful exit." It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or past importance.

― Ellen Goodman

Job losses in the event industry are staggering, with some estimates exceeding 95%.

But to mention the industry's downturn, or suggest that the happy days are over, is to invite exile.

The holdouts won't have it.

Although the industry's collapse may deserve a speed-record, collapses have happened before. 

Whole swaths of the economy—industries that once employed tens of thousands—have been suddenly, and permanently, eradicated.

Some memorable examples of such now-extinct professions include:

• Badgers. Badgers were loud-mouthed middlemen who hawked farmers' goods at open-air markets. (The profession gave us our verb meaning "to harass.") Grocers made them obsolete overnight.
  
  
• Lamplighters. Lamplighters were driven out of business with the introduction of electrified street lights. 
  
  
• Pinsetters. Pinsetters set pins in bowling alleys before the job one day was abruptly mechanized.
  
  
• Knocker-uppers. Knocker-uppers woke people, using a bamboo stick to rap on their customers' windows. The invention of the alarm clock doomed them.
  
  
• Leech collectors. Leech collectors supplied surgeons with blood-suckers before "bleeding" patients fell out of favor.
  
  
• Resurrectionists. These wily entrepreneurs—also known as "body snatchers"—supplied med-schools with corpses until the use of paupers' bodies was legalized.
  
  
• Computers. Computers—often women—crunched numbers all day, until calculators made their jobs obsolete.
  
  
• Lectors. Lectors sat before factory workers and read aloud from books—sometimes books banned by management—to keep the workers entertained. A union strike in the 1930s put them out of business.
  
  
• Ice cutters. These rugged specialists, who cut big blocks of ice from lakes and delivered them to homes, were frozen out by the electric refrigerator.
  
  
• Milkmen. Every housewife's friend, the milkman suffered the same sad fate as the ice cutter.

The disruption triggered by the pandemic is horrendous. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. 

But it makes me wonder, can possible good come from the collapse of the event business?

I can think of two benefits:

A cleaner planet. Long before the lockdown, critics of the industry proclaimed the practice of assembling thousands of businesspeople, year after year, to mingle with suppliers and sit through seminars was unsustainable. But event organizers shunned sustainability, because it would slice into their profits. Perhaps tomorrow's organizers, facing a new breed of attendee, will think differently about their carbon footprint.

Better wages. I was among the lonely souls promoting virtual events over a decade ago. (In 2011, with an equally avid partner, I produced a day-long workshop that featured five case studies of successful virtual events. Getting more than a couple dozen organizers to attend the workshop was like pulling teeth, and we discontinued it a year later.) I have long believed that, like Hollywood and IT folks, event professionals can earn better wages as virtual event producers. It's an exciting, emergent field—a veritable "wild west"—and promising territory for those willing to acquire the right skill-set.

For those who can't, or won't, accept that the happy days are over, perhaps it's time for a graceful exit.