Salt Lake's Dilemma of a Success

Even a jaded editor has to feel for everybody in Salt Lake City. By everybody, I mean those who run the Salt Palace Convention Center and the Salt Lake Convention & Visitors Bureau.

First, they break their necks and all records (twisting a few arms in the Utah State Legislature along the way) to round up $58 million and add more than 200,000 square feet of space to Salt Palace in time to please the organizers of the Outdoor Retailer Summer Market last August. For some time, Nielsen, which owns the show that is sponsored by the Outdoor Industry Assn., had told Salt Lake it needed more space for its fast-growing show in a fast-growing industry or else it would head to Las Vegas.

"It was a miracle," said Peter Devin, then-VNU group show director for the outdoor industry, last year of the hoops everyone in Salt Lake jumped through to please his company.

The expansion, completed in an unheard of 22 months, was finished "with a slide into home base," said Allyson Jackson, SMG general manager of Salt Palace, shortly after the OR Summer Market opened Aug. 10.

But nothing lasts forever. Ten months later, Kenji Haroutunian, now OR show director, told Tradeshow Week the expanded Salt Palace was already maxed out for this year's show. Although Haroutunian did not bring it up in discussions with TSW Senior Editor Heidi Genoist in preparation for Genoist's July 9 story "Utah Throws Outdoor Retailer Some Rope," the specter of Las Vegas looms once again.

But, once more, the Salt Lake bunch got creative. Next summer, the show will grow beyond the Salt Place to the privately owned Energy Solutions Arena across the street. Typically, those involved are keeping how much who is paying for exhibit space a secret from us.

However ... along about the same time, the Salt Lake CVB got a $250,000 grant from a state economic development agency to help with OR. When Genoist asked CVB President Scott Beck if the grant would be used to pay for the extra space for OR Summer, his answer was that it was for "a joint marketing campaign to promote the new show."

Which is fine. The fact, of course, is that neither I nor most of our readers care what the money will be used for. To anybody who can get help growing the exhibition industry anywhere: more power to you.

It does point out the dilemma for everybody involved though. Outdoor Industry Assn. officials have said repeatedly they love having the shows in Salt Lake: It's the kind of city people in their industry take to (in a way they don't take to Las Vegas). Plus, there's the opportunity for all kinds of product demonstrations in the nearby mountains.

But Nielsen is the for-profit firm whose job it is to run a successful show in an industry that is hot. Its show managers know they have something good going, and they need to grow the show as far and as fast as they can before it loses its panache. Las Vegas is not all that far from Salt Lake, and it certainly has the room for a show like OR to grow.

Meanwhile, OR Winter and Summer are two of only three TSW 200 shows Salt Lake has and, if it loses them, it's hard to see where the next two will come from. All this after a $58 million convention center revamp undertaken specifically to keep OR around a few more years.

What's a show manager, CVB, convention center manager or sponsoring association to do?