Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.“

Yesterday I met Paul Woodward. Paul’s Asia Business Media Blog is on my RSS subscription which I will read it everyday. He is a senior veteran of trade show industry. I have many things to learn from him.

Alright. Back to my conversation with Paul. We chatted about the “old school, new school” of trade show marketing. Some common measurement which trade show organizers will usually regard it as the unit of success. I remember when I was first introduced to trade show industry, all my colleagues were always checking on how many square meters had been sold. Back then, I seldom heard about cost per acquisition or buyer and exhibitor experiences.

I was the first batch Internet geeks who jumped into the Hong Kong dotcom bandwagon before I went to trade show business. So I already adopted to all the “new-world” parameters to measure usability and effectiveness before I became a trade show person. But in the world of trade show, square meter was the unit of measurement for performance.

Today the B2B media landscape has been changed a lot. Trade show becomes an important piece of B2B convergence. Trade show organizers are heavily relying on their online counterparts, offering 24×7 virtual exhibitions, doing business matching, recruiting International buyers over the web. Those online and print media, on the other hand, are expanding their territory into trade show business, adding a physical appearance for their virtual businesses.

All these have completely changed the traditional wisdom of trade show industry. We now regard the people who walk the show as “Buyers,” not just visitors. We also know buyers start their experience on the web. We want to drive traffic to our trade show websites so we can convert them as our physical visitors. And we start calculating cost per buyer acquisition, thanks to the web analytic tools, we also analyze the long tail and have better prediction on how good or bad the visitor flow will turn out, etc.

I think we still can choose to manage a trade show business in two ways: We either sell booth or sell a marketing solution. But the “Square Meter” doesn’t tell much about the performance. So, leave it to your booth contractor.

 Subscribe my feed