Ambitious Managers Plan Plastics Collocation

By Rachel Wimberly -- Tradeshow Week, 9/18/2006

Historically, the largest tradeshow for the plastics industry has been NPE — The Intl. Plastic Showcase, a triennial event that drew 65,000 attendees and 2,000 exhibiting companies to a 950,000 net square foot showfloor this past June at Chicago's McCormick Place.

But now, two smaller shows, the Society of Plastic Engineers' ANTEC and Plastics Encounter, owned by Crain Communications, have collocated. Tony Eagan, vice president and publisher of Plastics News, which hosts Plastics Encounter, said he'd like the collocated show to be the biggest, but with a small catch. He said there's an unwritten agreement that they won't stage a show the same year as NPE, or in its hometown of Chicago.

In a Plastics News press release dated Sept. 6, Eagan stated, "The event will be the plastics industry's largest in North America in 2007." Technically, of course, that seems like it would be accurate, since NPE doesn't have another show until 2009.

But north of the border in a little country called Canada, Sally Damstra, director of international trade and shows for the Canadian Plastics Industry Assn., read the same release and said, "I don't think there's any way it can be bigger than PLAST-EX."

PLAST-EX, also triennial, will take place May 1–3 at Toronto's Intl. Centre. Damstra said PLAST-EX typically draws 10,000 attendees and 649 exhibit companies to more than 100,000 net sq. ft.

In comparison, the last two years of the biannual Plastics Encounter shows covered more than 15,000 sq. ft. and drew approximately 100 exhibitors and 1,500 people and ANTEC 2006, held May 7–11 in Charlotte, N.C., had approximately 2,100 attendees and 75 exhibitors in nearly 13,000 net sq. ft.

So, when Damstra saw Eagan's press release, not only did she write him to challenge it, but she also declared, "It's marketing, but it ain't true," pointing out that Americans often forget about "the frozen wasteland in the north and the burning deserts to the south."

Later, when Eagan said he wanted to reposition his statement to mean the collocated show would be the biggest "purely plastics show in the U.S. in 2007," Canada and Mexico were back on the map.

Just in case you're not completely confused yet, there's another place to shop plastics. The group of collocated shows collectively referred to as Medical Design and Manufacturing, both East and West, include PLASTEC, but not in the years when NPE is held (apparently no one wants to go head-to-head with it). For the record, Eagan said, the ANTEC-Plastics Encounter collocation would be bigger than PLASTEC if it were a stand-alone.

All of that said, Eagan claimed it just made sense for ANTEC and Plastics Encounter to collocate because exhibitors and attendees who typically go to both could make just one trip a year. ANTEC was first launched in 1947. Crain purchased the show formerly known as Plastics Fairs from Advanstar in 2000 and renamed it Plastics Encounter.

Lesley Kyle, senior event manager for the Society of Plastics Engineers, which hosts ANTEC, said, "Technology in the plastics industry today reaches beyond engineers and researchers to include professionals in sales, marketing operations, etc. The purpose of collocating ANTEC with Plastics Encounter is to create an opportunity for SPE to deliver expanded information to this expanded audience."

Walt Bishop, vice president of tradeshows for the Society of the Plastics Industry (which stages NPE), didn't think there was much of a possibility that ANTEC and Plastics Encounter would catch up with his show any time soon.

"Heck no!" Bishop said.

Bishop said ANTEC probably saw an opportunity to increase awareness by collocating with Plastics Encounter.

"Their show is predominately educational with few trade components, and NPE has more trade and less educational components," he added. "They are not competition to us."