Corporate Events Thrive

By Heidi Genoist -- Tradeshow Week, 4/19/2004

The rise of the corporate event has been the source of much hair-pulling the last few years for organizers of traditional trade-shows. With their budgets tightened by the economic downturn, many corporate marketing managers opted to pull out of tradeshows and invest instead in smaller, cheaper, more focused private events hosted by corporations for their vendors, users and customers.

The question on show managers' minds now is: With the economy picking up and, presumably, marketing budgets getting their groove back, will the companies that dropped out of shows return? Not likely – at least not in the numbers seen before – say those responsible for producing corporate events.

"What triggered it was money," said Mitch Ahiers, senior manager of global events for Check Point Software and vice president of CEMA, an association representing technology event marketers. Ahiers said Check Point was one of many companies that cut some tradeshows from its event calendar and added more private events.

Companies were finding they weren't getting the leads they wanted at tradeshows and were getting a better return on their own events, he said. So much better, in fact, that by Ahiers' estimate, Check Point went from doing 20 to 25 private events and 75 tradeshows worldwide when he came on board two years ago, to doing 40 to 50 private events and about 35 to 40 tradeshows today.

His experience mirrors that of suppliers. Nate Derby, national sales director for Champion Exposition Services, said that, although the general contracting firm has been doing corporate events since its inception, it really started focusing on that market three years ago. Today, he estimates, corporate event business represents 5 to 8 percent of Champion's revenues.

With the opening of Moscone West last spring, said Assistant General Manager Julie Burford, Moscone Center became ideally positioned to pick up corporate business. So, it was only natural that it went from having corporate events represent 10 percent of its pre-Moscone West mix, to having them represent 40 percent now.

Erin Presseau, director of marketing for Brickmill Marketing Services, said she too has seen a move away from tradeshow participation and toward corporate event participation among her clients, but she attributed the shift to tradeshows' increasing inability to draw senior-level decision makers, who are traveling less.

That's why, throughout the economic downturn, companies continued moving more of their precious few marketing dollars to private events. "From an exhibitor's perspective, you identify maybe 10 percent of a tradeshow attendee list that would make an ideal prospect for you," Presseau said.

Besides, it's easier to follow up on sales that come from a small event with a finite list of buyers and measure the return on one's investment. And, as Derby pointed out, corporations have been more aggressively holding managers accountable for their budgets.

In addition, corporate event managers like Ahiers developed a taste for the control factor of private events, where they could determine exactly who gets what message. "At large shows like COMDEX and Networld + Interop, you couldn't relay information to a specific audience," he said.

And now that they've seen the value in corporate events, companies are not likely to stop doing them. Burford said it is difficult to get a long-range view of Moscone's future corporate bookings, since those clients book relatively close to their target dates, but she doesn't anticipate a decline in the business.

However, stability, or even growth, in corporate event participation won't have to come at the continued expense of tradeshow participation if marketing budgets are increased. Presseau said, "Corporate events have a place for certain types of companies and we're doing more and more of them, but tradeshows do too."

This isn't simple waffling. With less money to spend, corporate exhibit and event managers learned to judge each show on its own merit. In other words, going forward, only the good will survive.

So what constitutes "good"?

Among the new tradeshows he's considering, Ahiers finds TechTarget's enterprise information technology conferences the most appealing. "They're by invitation only. People have to apply, so they make sure attendees have a purchasing authority and a budget over $1 million," he said. "And they have really focused content. That's how they build their audience. Then they only allow a certain number of vendors and a limited amount of space for each of them, so you don't get lost among the giant companies. They've got 2,000 applicants for 500 spots at one show."

Organizers of shows like these may have taken a cue from their private event counterparts. Under pressure to prove their events are something more than mere sales calls and to overcome the vendor bias not found at industry-wide tradeshows, corporate event organizers began inviting industry speakers, putting together conferences and otherwise offering useful content.

On the other hand, Sal Cavallaro, manager of marketing support programs for United Technologies and current chairman of the Trade Show Exhibitors Assn., pointed out that upstarts and other companies in need of reaching a broad audience will bolster tradeshow growth. "Private events have their role in a tight economy if you want to keep the customers you have," he said. "But if you're trying to grow a business and find new customers, tradeshows do more mass marketing and allow attendees to do more comparison shopping."

Presseau said she's seeing clients from product-oriented companies return to tradeshows in greater numbers than those from service-oriented companies. "Somebody who has a product that they want people to see, feel and touch will really want to go back to tradeshows," she said. "But it doesn't have to be an either/or. Even service-oriented companies, if they have the luxury of a large enough budget, will return to shows if they want to build awareness."