Who's Got Your Back?

Rumping (more generously know as coat-tailing or piggy-backing) refers to the practice of launching a competing event in a market that already has a successful one — at or around the same time and place — in order to take advantage of a pre-existing attendee base.

The practice only really works if the coat-tailer is doing his own attendance marketing and filling a need unmet by the original show. It happens more in Las Vegas than anywhere else I know of because, in order to work, piggy-backing also requires enough convention space and hotel rooms to accommodate both the existing show and the up-and-comer.

Don't expect to see the "rumper room" go away. According to the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority's most recent estimate, developers plan to add some 3.5 million square feet of convention space and 46,000 hotel rooms by 2011. And that's not counting any construction going on at the World Market Center.

Once itself the indignant victim of piggy-backing (who performed a variety of booking maneuvers to shake its hangers-on), the producer of the semiannual Las Vegas Market will open the juvenile section of its permanent home furnishings showrooms during ABC Kids Expo this week at the Las Vegas Convention Center. ABC show director Larry Schur said WMC managers did not get permission to shuttle his attendees and their buyers back and forth between the two venues.

In the fashion world, Business Journals acquired West Coast Exclusive, the high-end men's wear show that was an offshoot of MAGIC Marketplace, subject of the most coat-tailers in the tradeshow business. Business Journals plans to take the Exclusive's assets and build its own men's wear show.

So, the disappearance of the Exclusive nearly completes the transformation of the fashion tradeshow scene in Las Vegas from a far-flung group of upstarts trying to launch a citywide fashion week, to a Sands (Business Journals et al.)-vs.-LVCC (MAGIC) scenario (if you don't count Specialty Trade Shows' staid Women's Wear in Nevada show at the Rio).

So much for a rising tide lifting all boats.

Still, there has been one example of a successful industry week: the so-called medical week last October that saw 16 health care industry groups in the city. Of course, none of those shows was here first, so to speak, and the health care industry doesn't have the same kind of competition as the retail sector.

It all makes me wonder: If the industry week won't work for fashion or furniture, and with giant new convention centers on the horizon, what's next in rumping? And how will a Las Vegas with millions of square feet of exhibit space survive without it?