Captain of the Ship

For dmg's Mike Cooke, Putting on an Exhibition Is Like a 'Round-the-World Yacht Race

Staff -- Tradeshow Week, 9/6/2004

Twenty-four years after stumbling upon the exhibitions industry while helping a friend launch a publishing company, Mike Cooke holds the helm of dmg world media. From his San Francisco area office, Cooke oversees a company with 300 tradeshows, 65 magazines, more than 800 people, 38 offices around the world and €130.5 million in revenue in 2003. His latest assignment: increase awareness of dmg in the United States, one of its largest markets.

Cooke recently spoke with Tradeshow Week Associate Editor Margo McCall about dmg, a subsidiary of British media giant Daily Mail and General Trust, a company whose tradeshow roots go back to 1908.

Question: How did you get to dmg?

Answer: I helped a close rugby friend launch a company called Trinity Publishing. I didn't know the first thing about publishing or tradeshows. Eight or nine years later, we had three magazines and six or seven tradeshows, mostly in the materials handling and distribution markets. Because we were avid skiers, we organized some ski shows just for the fun of it.

We got bought out by the Daily Mail and General Trust. They asked if we could back our business into theirs and sort it out. That's what we went ahead and did.

Q: Since you ended up as the company's CEO, you must have done a pretty good job.

A: I hope so. It's a business you wouldn't recognize today. We had a handful of tradeshows and one big mothership of an exhibition, a home exhibition that lasts 30 days. Those are our roots.

Q: How important to you is the conventional integrated media strategy, where you create synergies between Web sites, tradeshows and magazines?

A: I go to many of these tradeshow industry meetings. I listen with interest to integrated media strategies and all this talk about the way you should do things. We do that when it's relevant, but I wouldn't say that's our strategy.

Q: How is dmg different from other tradeshow organizers?

A: When we try to explain it, we use a nautical analogy. When you look at a lot of these businesses, they're like a supertanker. They have a huge suite of products and everybody's up on the bridge sending out their orders and things.

We at dmg liken ourselves to organizers of a 'round-the-world yacht race. We're going to tell you which way around the world to go and supply you with the boats and the technology, then basically you sail your own ship.

You do need local knowledge. It's not a franchise operation, but there's a lot more freedom. If what turns you on is being allowed to understand your markets and run your products, come and work for us. If you want to climb the corporate ladder, go and work for someone else.

Q: Are there many sailors among you?

A: Probably. It's just a way of explaining things. We've got lots of small offices instead of one large central office. Our philosophy is, No. 1, you need to be part of the industries that you work in, and recognized as industry experts. No. 2, you've got to understand the regional markets in which you operate.

Q: What should your partnerships with George Little Management and the California Market Center tell us about the way dmg does business?

A: Four years ago, we didn't have any partnerships. We've got eight of them on the go now. With GLM and Western Exhibitors, they were working together in the gift and home markets anyway, and they had a partnership.

When we moved into the market with the California Gift Show in Los Angeles, we were bumping up on top of each other's dates. We started talking to GLM and Western about how to help the customers get from one show to the next. The more we talked, the more we realized that by sharing things and working together, we had a lot in common.

Q: What inspired dmg to take an equity stake in the California Market Center?

A: California Market Center's taken us quite a while to come to grips with. They've had a number of different owners and a number of different ways of doing things. To use another nautical analogy, it was a bit like a rudderless ship. It's taken us a few years to get it onto an even keel. Now we're starting to develop a vision for that business: where it's going to go, how much we have to invest in it. I think people are going to be excited about what we're going to do.

Q: Does this represent a move toward the model of tradeshow organizers owning venues?

A: I'm not a great fan of the German model. They have huge, huge shows; but I'm not sure they're particularly efficient. For many years, they relied on the fact that people were used to going to those shows.

I gave a speech at a UFI conference a few years ago, and somebody said to me, "We've got a declining audience and you've got a growing audience. What's the difference?" I said, "You're charging people $20 to get in; I'm paying $20 to get them to come for nothing."

Q: Some tradeshow companies' large corporate parents focus constantly on earnings growth. Is Daily Mail and General Trust like that?

A: We're trying very hard not to be a budget-driven company. We're trying to be a vision-driven company. Our primary goal is being our customers' first choice. We want to enthuse and inspire support to do business. That's what we ask our people to focus on. If you do that, growth comes automatically. We don't turn around to anybody and say, you've got to deliver 10 percent next year or whatever it is. It doesn't work like that. The world doesn't work like that.

Q: Then you must have people banging on your door to work for you.

A: We'd like to. We've got no shortage of ideas for things we'd like to do. Our biggest challenge at the moment is finding enough good people so we can do all those things, which is a great problem to have.

Q: Dmg produces its share of consumer shows, which much of the tradeshow industry looks down on. Why is that?

A: Consumer shows are much more difficult to produce. They're much higher risk and they've got low margins. I can see why people would shy away from them.

Also on the consumer show side, there's an element of showmanship. You do need to be something of an impresario. You do need to understand the local markets in which you're operating. Finding people who've got it in their blood, love doing it, are impresarios and understand their local markets isn't easy.

Q: Considering dmg's global reach, do you worry about competition?

A: Our philosophy is very simple. We get good people, people who understand the industries and the markets they're working in, and we let them get on with it.

Q: Are there any areas of the world that look particularly promising right now?

A: I think the standard answer is China, India, Russia and Brazil. That's just based on the size of the economies. How you choose to get into those markets and whether you choose to get into them are different issues.

From our point of view, we run a lot of retail business-to-business shows and a lot of business-to-consumer shows and they're not international brands, they're regional in terms of their reach. So I'm not sure you can export the brands and add any great value, because we don't understand the local market as well as the locals do.

Q: Yet you recently partnered with Expomedia to export the Big 5, Index and Intl. Pipeline Exposition brands to India and Russia.

A: We formed two joint venture partnerships — one to run two shows in India with Expomedia, which has a venue and a local sales and marketing presence. We're doing the same in Russia. But Pipeline is one of those global businesses, so we can export the brand. We can bring the international sales and the education and conference knowledge to that market, and they can bring the local market and deal with the local politics.

Q: With the Iraq War and SARS, last year was tough for international exhibitions. How did dmg cope?

A: Since 9/11, the exhibition industry has had a tough time, but dmg has grown fantastically during the whole of that period, in excess of 5 or 6 percent per annum. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier. We work really hard at being part of the industries, and we work really hard at being part of their markets.

With the SARS business in Toronto, our people went out to customers and asked them what they wanted to do. In one instance, a local trade association said, "We've got to have our show." So we put that show on, knowing we'd have half the number of exhibitors and only local visitors, because that's what the industry wanted.

Q: What's your take on the current climate for acquisitions?

A: I think at the moment there is a lot of equity capital and a lot of venture capital in the market, and there's actually a lack of quality products. Those two things aren't normally a good mix for operating companies like ourselves. It means the prices are going to get artificially high if any good products come along.

I think it's going to be a tough market for a while. But the great thing for our business is, for every two or three businesses getting bought, there's someone leaving one of the big companies and starting two or three new ones. It's a healthy life cycle in the tradeshow business.