Auditing Firms Pursue Collaboration

Two of the industry's three certified event auditors are getting together to offer co-branded attendee audits and research for trade and consumer shows.

BPA Worldwide, which provides audits for a variety of media, has teamed up with Exhibit Surveys, a specialist in event attendance research, to create a service called Event Insights.

The companies said it makes sense to combine Exhibit Surveys' attendee research capabilities with BPA's auditing experience in a tool that organizers can offer potential exhibitors to help analyze their shows.

While the companies will continue to serve their own customers during a two-year transition period, eventually BPA will perform the audits and Exhibit Surveys will do the research on attendee demographics, buying power, activity and satisfaction levels.

The partnership is intended to give BPA's members access to Exhibit Surveys' events perspective, and vice versa. The not-for-profit BPA operates in 25 countries. Its members include more than 2,600 advertisers, 2,000 business-to-business publications, 500 consumer magazines and newspapers, 300 Web sites and a number of event producers, e-mail newsletters and directories.

"Most B-to-B publishers aren't just publishers. They're in the business of content distributed across all platforms," said Glenn Hansen, BPA Worldwide president and CEO. "We'll be giving them integrated media, a measurement of the reach of their brand across platforms."

Skip Cox, president of Exhibit Surveys, said that although his firm might be well known among show producers, BPA's brand is better recognized by chief marketing officers, who frequently oversee exhibiting decisions.

"I'm looking at this as a way of bringing more exposure to the industry," said Cox. "Our intent here is to provide a package of information that is a lot more valuable to the organizer. I think there will be demand for it because organizations are looking for that tool."

BPA and Exhibit Surveys were both certified late last year (along with Veris Consulting) by the Exhibition and Event Industry Audit Commission, an independent group comprised of show organizers and exhibitors.

"This positions them as the big dog. In that respect, it's probably a wise move," said Bob Harar, president of Natl. Trade Productions and a member of the audit commission.

The new partners have different customers. Redhill, N.J.-based Exhibit Surveys has conducted audits for Hall-Erickson, the Intl. Assn. for Exhibition Management, IDG World Expo, Microsoft, Natl. Trade Productions, Reed Exhibitions and the Telecommunications Industry Assn. The Shelton, Conn.-based BPA's events division has audited shows for MediaLive Intl., PennWell, PostNewsweek Tech and Red 7 Media. Veris, meanwhile, audited the 2005 Intl. CES.

Proponents say audits create more confidence in show numbers, lend consistency and allow exhibitors to better gauge results.

Tradeshow organizers have been slow to embrace them, however. Large shows like Intl. CES and NAB have been audited for years. All IDG World Expo shows are now audited, and Reed Exhibitions has committed to auditing most of its shows by year's end.

However, a 2005 Tradeshow Week survey found that only 15 percent of U.S. organizers auditing their shows. And even with the collaboration, Cox doesn't expect a sudden surge of interest.