Dueling Truck Shows

California Trucking Assn. gears up to return tradeshow to Anaheim

By Heidi Genoist -- Tradeshow Week, 9/6/2004

With its show manager of 40-plus years in the rearview mirror, the California Trucking Assn. hasn't had an easy trip back to Anaheim after eight years away. Now, the return to its roots is just a few stops ahead, and the association has high hopes for this year's Intl. Trucking Show.

Kimberly Read, the show director, said she's expecting about 250 exhibitors to occupy 95,000 net square feet and attract about 7,000 professional attendees to the Anaheim Convention Center Sept. 23–25. That is a little short of the CTA's goals, but not surprising considering the circumstances, Read said.

For starters, she was only hired last March. In the intervening six months, she's had to assemble operations and sales teams, select suppliers and get the show up and running. "It's just crazy," Read said. "For instance, we planned a party for exhibitors and press at the ESPN Zone in Downtown Disney. It started off in one room, then we had to take another floor, now we have the whole place. Everything is just growing exponentially."

But getting to that point wasn't easy, she admitted. The CTA has had to learn everything about managing its own show from scratch. This is because, after the close of the June 2003 Intl. Trucking Show, the association and its longtime manager, Independent Trade Show Management, parted ways. The two disagreed on the reach of the show (Western or national), its timing (spring or summer) and its location (Las Vegas or Anaheim). In a familiar scenario, both sides touted research supporting their claims.

To make matters worse, when the CTA finalized its decision to move back to Anaheim — where it had been off and on since 1969, before moving to Las Vegas in 1996 — ITSM announced it would run its own show, still in Las Vegas, at the same time of the year Intl. Trucking Show had been taking place.

In 2000, ITSM President Roger Sherrard inherited management of the show from his father, who'd handled the event since 1963. Sherrard's grandfather was instrumental in founding the CTA 50 years ago. So, ITSM knows what it's doing. Its launch of The Truck Show Las Vegas reportedly was a success, drawing 361 exhibitors and 17,012 attendees to a 100,300 net sq. ft. exhibition at the Las Vegas Convention Center June 10–12.

"I guess our show is the one people wanted," said Tom Papageorge, the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority sales director who has worked with the trucking shows for several years, commenting on the difference between The Truck Show's closing numbers and Intl. Trucking's projections.

Papageorge said he told the CTA board, back when it first began considering a move back to Anaheim, that the area would attract more tire-kickers than Las Vegas does. "They have to book a trip here to do business. In Anaheim, they'll get all those drivers coming in to look at the new trucks, but they won't buy anything," he explained.

But Read is not intimidated by The Truck Show. Rattling off a list of the major original equipment manufacturers that have signed up to exhibit, Read said, "We've really raised the bar ... We don't have a lot of mini vacuums and all that. We turned away some companies that weren't directly related."

The CTA has signed on Freightliner, Volvo and Mack Utility — all exhibitors absent from the Las Vegas event. But many truck makers, such as Intl. Truck and Engine, Kenworth and SelecTrucks, are signed up for both the Las Vegas and Anaheim shows — at least for this year.

Read is putting her faith in the quality of the Anaheim show. The CTA has the knowledge base to put together a useful educational program, she said, and the money to invest in marketing the event heavily to its 2,500 member companies that employ more than 150,000 people. "We've given out 100,000 tickets to our big name exhibitors, and they're putting them in their August invoices," Read added.

As for the breach of contract lawsuit that the CTA filed against ITSM in Yolo County (Calif.) Superior Court, she said, "It's still out there, but everybody decided to play fair while we're both putting our shows on."