ASI Makes Its Move on Northeastern United States
Staff -- Tradeshow Week, 4/11/2005
The ASI Show! reached an agreement with Discovery Marketing Associates to acquire 85 one-day promotional product exhibitions called the Discovery Traveling Shows.
The transaction is expected to close June 24 and a 2006 ASI Discovery Showcase schedule will be available in July. Financial terms of the acquisitions are not available.
In a related move, ASI will also launch a preview edition of The ASI Show! Philadelphia May 24–25. A full-scale Philadelphia show is planned for May 23–25, 2006.
The Discovery Travel Shows, considerably smaller than the ASI Shows!, average 40 to 100 exhibitors, compared to about 900 at the recent ASI Show! in Las Vegas.
Mary Upton, vice president of tradeshow operations, noted that ASI will eliminate 20 Client-Distributor shows scheduled for this fall.
"Some of the cities were being visited too often," said Matthew Cohn, president of The ASI Show!
The shows will be rebranded as ASI Discovery Showcases. ASI considered launching similar shows, but instead decided to work with an established company to acquire existing ones, Cohn said.
There is a seven-week window between ASI's announcement that it will launch the Philadelphia show and its debut. ASI had been negotiating to acquire an existing industry show in Philadelphia for about a year, but when its owner backed away, ASI went ahead with its plan to launch its own, despite the short time frame.
About 1,200 attendees and 350 exhibiting companies are expected at the first ASI Show! Philadelphia.
One distributor, HALO/Lee-Wayne, announced that its 2005 national sales conference would be held at the ASI Show! in Philadelphia, according to Marc Simon, its president and CEO. He said the firm's top 200 salespeople would be invited there to network.
