Respectful B2B blogger, Trapp Lewis, left this comment for his own blog post,

... What is ironic is that the web helps these businesses (trade shows) with all of these items but I can only name a few companies that are anywhere close to maximizing the power of the web to improve their trade shows and user experience for both attendee and exhibitor.

I completely agree with his view. I have been advocating online-offline integration in the trade show world for almost a decade. Today I am still in the field, meeting up friends in the trade show industry. The discussion on trade show innovation and online leverage have never ended.

Over the time, I’ve seen some perception changes. Since cannibalization has proven not to be the case, trade show organizers are now being more relieved working with their online counterparts. Most of the trade show organizers are adopting email marketing in all administration and promotional aspects. But when using online display advertising, the adoption is still very slow. It is partly contributed by the insufficient B2B media ad inventory. Every media planner in the field will tell you, it is relatively difficult to plan for an effective B2B media buy because the ad inventory level is so low that also limits the reach of the target audiences.

Let me give you an example, in a typical trade show media plan which might include some (sometimes all) ad placements on the relevant trade association websites. Most of the time, these ad placements are sold or bartered in cost per month basis. The reason behind the cost per month model is simple. The sites haven’t got enough inventory (impression) to support selling in CPM (low impression yields unmarketable high CPM). But the cost of advertising doesn’t illustrate my point. We have to further understand the reason behind the low impression, not the high CPM. Again it is very simple. It is the low traffic which contributes the low impression of a website, meaning that the size the audiences will also be small and that obviously affects the result of an online ad campaign.

We can still dig deeper and drill on the cause of low traffic. If you have visited some trade association websites, most of the contents are very static, meaning not updated very frequently. The user experiences are badly designed and the user activities are not particularly vibrant. You may argue that trade shows are all about niche and vertical. But still, the small websites simply can’t generate adequate target viewers’ traffic even for reaching the critical mass. This makes an effective B2B online media planning not easy.

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