Professor Sanders, Let's Talk

By now, you have all read about the latest salvo from professor Heywood Sanders and the Brookings Institution commenting on the convention center tragedy that is occurring in America.

According to him, every convention center in the United States is a waste of public money that could be better spent funding programs for schools, the homeless, police, etc. I should note here that Sanders teaches at a public university.

I have two issues with Professor Sanders: First, he is wrong. And second, he uses Tradeshow Week research — attacking our methodology — to support his case.

Professor Sanders takes a bit of a Michael Moore approach to his work — look at a simple slice of time and run with it (although I should state that I have more respect for Mr. Moore and his body of work).

Yes, attendance is down. Yes, convention centers are a bit overbuilt right now. But hey, no one was counting on recession, war, SARS, and the shock and tragedy of 9/11, when they were busy funding and building the centers that are now newly open or expanded.

Attendance is the first and fastest metric to drop off when things like this happen. It is coming back — and even if it does not come back to pre-2000 levels, convention centers are a great investment.

To this point, Sanders argues that most, if not all, convention centers lose money, and that money could be spent on other things more urgently needed in the communities. While I agree that we need more police, better schools and smart help for the homeless, this dilemma boils down to one simple concept for me. What's better: for a center to lose $15 million a year and drive $100 million into the local economy, or for the city to keep the $15 million and not have the $100 million from the tradeshow business? The answer is simple.

Now to the second point, our research and methodology. Sanders states that we here at TSW are narrow in "focusing on only 200 very large events" in our reporting. He fails to adequately analyze the work we do in our quarterly reports, as well as in our medical, computer and consumer sector reporting — and, oh yeah, the Data Book. All of these reports and directories provide data on thousands of shows each year.

He also mischaracterizes our observations on the industry. In the TSW 200, we report the largest shows each year. He wants us to report on the same shows year after year. Newsflash: Our industry does not work that way. Shows have cycles, and the TSW 200 captures that.

Finally, he inaccurately states that organizers commonly report revised downward figures for the previous year's statistics — and that we do not include these "revised" numbers in our calculations. Not true. We require show managers to sign a statement confirming reported numbers. When someone tries to revise numbers, we find they are just as often larger than the previous year's numbers, not "usually smaller" as Sanders claims.

Professor, I have a lot of respect for academia — in fact, I used to work in academia — but I question your work and your methodology.

Here's my suggestion: Give me your publicly funded salary, fringe and expense budgets for a full year (let's say it's $100,000) and I will run a small event that will drive $800,000-plus into your community.

Now that's a great use of public money.