New Prepaid Expo Chooses Caesars
Diane Taylor -- Tradeshow Week, 8/15/2008 10:22:00 AM
Robin Tobias wears two hats when she goes to work every day. Tobias is publisher of Prepaid Press, a business-to-business publication that she claims serves a $200 billion prepaid industry (prepaid wireless phone service, phone cards, debit cards, gift cards). She also is president of the Prepaid Press Expo, a tradeshow and conference that will be launched Aug. 19-21 at Caesars Palace.
“We only considered two places,” Tobias said, “New York and Las Vegas. New York is a great prepaid market, but the only space we could find that would accommodate us and be cost-effective was Madison Square Garden. In the end, we found we could get much more bang for our buck in Las Vegas.”
Launching a show in a slow economy may seem chancy, but Tobias used just that thinking in announcing hers. “The prepaid industry is a low-margin business,” she said, “and before our show, our distributors and retailers might have felt they had to spend the money to go to three or four different shows to get the full prepaid story. We are launching a one-stop show for prepaid. Attendees will know what products are available and what they can make money on. And so that we don’t price ourselves out of the market, we are doing all we can to keep the show and conferences affordable.”
With some 50 exhibitors and a projected attendance of 1,200, Tobias admitted that this first year she expected some potential exhibitors to just “walk the show” and decide whether to participate next year. “Our acceptance has been phenomenal, but we are confident year two will be double the size of year one,” she added.
The Pelorus Group is handling the show’s conference tracks. Instead of the popular practice of spreading tracks throughout the entire duration of the show, all the sessions for each track are scheduled in a single day. This was done, according to Tobias, to get conference attendees to maximize their time networking and visiting exhibits on the showfloor. On the fun side, the Prepaid Press Expo is featuring a toga party at the Caesars Palace pool.
