I've Got the Low-down CVB Blues

This may come as little surprise: Around the Tradeshow Week newsroom, we talk — a lot — about the stories we work on. But few have sparked the internal debates we've had recently about the troubles convention and visitors bureaus have been facing.

Certainly, there has been plenty of fodder for these discussions. In just the past year, we've seen:

• David Nolan resign his position as president of the CVB of Greater Cleveland following a spending scandal (last October);
• Denver Metro CVB President Eugene Dilbeck ousted after a local news crew caught some of his team meeting at a strip club (November);
• Bruce Crawley, Philadelphia CVB chairman, quit following a dispute with the city's mayor (April);
• and, most recently, the San Diego City Council strip its bureau of the responsibility for marketing and booking the city's convention center (last month).

In all these situations — particularly the spending scandals — there is no easy solution. CVBs occupy an awkward position, caught somewhere between the public and private realms.

On the one hand, they do business in a service-oriented industry that relies on personal meetings to persuade clients of the value of what it has to offer. General service contractors, private venue operators and other suppliers can spend as much money as they want, however they want, courting tradeshow managers — nobody cares. But if a CVB spends $16,000 to take clients on a golf trip to Boca Raton, as the San Diego bureau did, the local press is all over it.

Bureau supporters are quick to point out that those clients, on whom marketers lavish gifts and trips costing tens of thousands of dollars, also bring to the city meetings worth millions in economic impact.

To make matters worse for the San Diegos and Clevelands of the world, cities like Las Vegas, Chicago and Orlando are constantly raising the bar. The Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority is looking at a 2005 budget of around $140 million. In a city that's unanimously pro-tradeshow, would anyone care if the LVCVA spent $16,000 to take a prospective client on a golfing excursion? Especially if it meant landing a show that would fill every hotel within a mile of the convention center?

CVB advocates will also argue that the public shouldn't care what bureaus are spending their money on, because it comes from bed taxes, not out of the pockets of local citizens.

True, but does that make it OK for a CVB to do whatever it wants with the money? In most cases, voters authorize the measures that allow bed taxes, and elect the public officials who oversee the bureaus. There may be no direct connection between taxpayers and bureau budgets, but the quasi-public CVB does exist to serve its community.

And the bureaus themselves know this better than anyone. Faced with the task of explaining why, as in the case of San Diego, they spent $13,000 on liquor, CVB officials often respond with humble professionalism. Bureaus around the country have acknowledged the need for greater accountability and better public relations by uniting in an effort led by the Intl. Assn. of Convention & Visitors Bureaus to improve standards of conduct.

Accountability isn't a bad thing. An equally effective technique, used successfully in bureaus like Houston and New York, is a deft touch with local politicians. Because of the precarious space they inhabit between the public and the private, bureau officials have to learn to nurture both sides of the equation.

Having said all that, there's no excuse for taking prospects out for a night of drinking and leering at naked dancers, at least not in 2004. Just as there is no longer a place on the tradeshow floor for the "booth babes" of the '70s and '80s, there are also now many more tasteful options for impressing clients.

After all, don't cities want to show off the best they have to offer their most valuable customers?

In this, show managers share the blame. Running a tradeshow, particularly for an association employee, comes with few perks, so it's understandable that organizers would appreciate the attention paid to them by competing CVBs. But if there's little demand to begin with for the kinds of perks that get the bureaus in trouble — say, bar tabs and strip club cover charges — then the country's cities can focus on marketing themselves the way the vast majority of the public wants them to.