Photo Show Looks to Make Memories

PMA and CKMedia, owners of the Photo Marketing Assn. Intl. Convention & Trade Show and MemoryTrends Trade Show, have struck an unspecified multi-year deal to collocate the two starting with the Jan. 31–Feb. 2 event at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

This year's MemoryTrends will go ahead as planned Sept. 18–20 at Sands Expo & Convention Center/Venetian Resort Hotel Casino. Thereafter, it will take place alongside the PMA show in Las Vegas.

The move might make some wonder what photography and scrapbooking have in common, but, in fact, organizers will have to worry less about synergy than about timing.

Bruce Aldrich, senior operations officer of PMA (which rebranded itself as The Worldwide Community of Imaging Assns.), said the group was for more than just photo shop owners. It also represents custom picture framers, mass merchandise chains, photographers, scrapbook retailers and anyone else with an interest in imaging.

"When you talk about scrapbooking, it's all about the print, and that's us," he said. "There's synergy between photo imaging and scrapbooking."

Mindy Cherry, vice president of ConvExx and consultant for direct-sell scrapbooking company Creative Memories, agreed.

"There's a big push for everything to go digital," Cherry said. "People are playing more with their digital pictures online, and creating photo books on their computers."

Increasingly, photo shops include sections for scrapbooking, while scrapbook stores, like Majestic Memories in Las Vegas, have digital equipment for printing photos and other graphics.

The problem with putting PMA and MemoryTrends together, said Majestic co-owner Bill Michael, isn't retailers' lack of interest in the imaging equipment and techniques that will be on display at the combined show. It's that "their timing is going to be wrong for us," he said.

The Craft & Hobby Assn. Annual Convention & Trade Show is Feb. 10–13 in Anaheim.

"CHA winter is the big release for the year," Michael said. "We can't miss that."

Small, independent scrapbook retailers often can't afford to attend more than one or two tradeshows per year, he added. If forced, Michael predicted, they'll choose CHA.

It was No. 69 on the most recent Tradeshow Week 200, attracting 10,130 professional attendees to 1,020 exhibits spanning 319,519 net square feet at the LVCC. MemoryTrends 2005 filled 106,659 net sq. ft. at the Sands with 388 exhibitors (attendance figures were unavailable). MemoryTrends organizers didn't report 2006 statistics to TSW, but at the show, participants said they thought traffic had slowed down.

Cherry, who canceled her planned 2006 launch of the ScrapbookBiz tradeshow, said that decision came from changes taking place in the market. "The manufacturers were going through mergers and acquisitions, and the buyers, the mom-and-pops, couldn't compete with the Michael's and Joann's of the world," she said.

PMA hopes to change that. Aldrich said the recent agreement with CKMedia was more than just a collocation deal: "We've made a commitment to be the association for the scrapbooking industry, for both retailers and suppliers," he said.

Like the scrapbook business, he added, the photo industry underwent a slump in recent years, as major manufacturers like Konika and Minolta disappeared.

"We've rebounded from that," Aldrich said, mainly by encompassing other industry sectors, such as framing.

The 2007 PMA show drew 20,922 attendees (including exhibitors) to see 683 exhibitors occupying 281,450 net sq. ft. March 8–11 at the LVCC.