Military Shows: Deployments Thin Attendance
By Margo McCall -- Tradeshow Week, 1/24/2005
For the Reserve Officers Assn., the writing was on the wall when beepers started going off as attendees at last year's Mid-Winter Meeting & Military Exposition streamed out of the military ball.
The beepers, notifying reservists that they had 24 hours to report to their units for deployment to Iraq, were a strong indication that attendance at this year's mid-winter meeting would be significantly down.
Normally by mid-January, the exposition is sold out and registration well under way for the meeting's 1,500 or so attendees. This year, just weeks before the Feb. 13–16 meeting at the Hilton Washington in Washington, D.C., Lani Burnett, the association's director of industry affairs, instead had to throw up some pipe and drape and erase an entire row from the show's floorplan.
Many of the officers that usually turn out for the meeting are among the more than 200,000 U.S. military personnel currently deployed in Iraq. And some of the defense contractors that normally fill the showfloor are too busy signing and filling orders to exhibit there.
"The war is affecting our entire meeting," said Burnett, who is retired from both the military and the reserves, "but we're moving forward."
At VNU Expositions, show organizers had to exert much more effort than usual to ensure turnout for the Marine West Exposition, held Jan. 12–13 at Southern California's Camp Pendleton Marine Base, which has incurred a high number of casualties in Iraq.
"We do billboards and use the base newspaper to get attendance. You always work hard," said Ron Bates, a VNU senior sales manager.
Luckily, the exhibitor side is still growing, Bates said. A dozen or so new exhibitors have joined the West Coast show this year. Bates said the showfloor is also growing at VNU's other military events, the Marine South Exposition, set for April 6–7 at Marston Pavilion in Jacksonville, N.C.; and Modern Day Marine, scheduled Sept. 13–15 for the Marine Corps Air Facility in Quantico, Va.
J. Spargo & Associates currently manages a dozen events for military associations each year. Most are growing, said J. Spargo President Susan Bracken, who expects that increased military spending, homeland security investments and the need to replenish equipment will continue their momentum.
By JS&A's estimates, 62.5 percent of those shows have experienced square-footage increases of 20 percent or more over the past three years. Some 12.5 percent have demonstrated growth rates between 6 percent and 19 percent in that timeframe, while one-quarter have grown or shrunk by 5 percent or less.
Among JS&A's military association customers are the Air Force Assn., the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Assn., the Navy League of the United States and the U.S. Naval Institute.
The biggest change in the sector, said Bracken, is the rise of regional events in reaction to the military-wide budget cutbacks limiting the ability of association members to travel to distant tradeshows.
"Concentrated niche conferences with associated tradeshows delivered at or near military bases are a win-win for the exhibitor and attendee," said Bracken. "To reach the buyer, the defense companies have to go to them. As a result, more military tradeshows are needed, thus increasing exhibitors' annual marketing budgets."
Holding shows near the Army's Fort Sill, Okla., or in San Diego, home to both U.S. Navy and Marine Corps installations, guarantees a sellout. The downside, said Bracken, is that exhibition facilities are sometimes smaller near military installations, many of which are located at some distance from large population centers.
And although exhibitors are still flocking to the shows, Bracken said visitor crowds can be thinner. "Attendance is always a concern and can be drastically impacted due to troop deployments," she said.
But with Iraq deployments still high — and now with other military members also helping out in tsunami-ravaged Southeast Asia — Bracken said exhibitors are generally understanding. And even if the audience is sometimes smaller, key buyers remain in attendance.
"The industry knows that. They understand there are situations. They know they have to be out there," she said.
