Michael Hart

From the Green Side of the SISO CEO Summit …

The meat-and-potatoes bottom line on the SISO CEO Summit is fairly easy to capsulate: Things are tough in the tradeshow world, as tough as many people can ever remember – but they’re going to get better.

There.

We will be filling in that particular story line on the Society of Independent Show Organizers’ meeting this week in San Diego in more detail in the next issue of Tradeshow Week, but that’s the gist.

It only took 75 words to write that, allowing me a few hundred more to talk about something else I thought was interesting, albeit perhaps not the No. 1 topic everybody went to San Diego to learn about.

As with most every other tradeshow-slash-convention-slash-events industry meeting I’ve been to the last couple of years, green was good. There were the now nearly-ubiquitous flash drives and CD-ROMs to replace the old paper programs. There were pens made out of corn, SISO staff and volunteers with green shirts, and even a name badge that you could take home and plant.

Peter Nathan, who led much of the initiative for the green tinge to the meeting, got up at the opening session to explain, not only some of the sustainable features of the meeting, but the pros and cons of the hotel’s efforts separate from those of the meeting.

The pros: recycling, energy efficient this and that, bids being taken on solar panels. The cons: Among other things, no polite requests in the hotel rooms to hang up your towel if you don’t want a clean one. (Even a cynic like me couldn’t understand that one.)

All good stuff.

The second conference session of the first day – a point in the course of any two-day meeting when people were still in the room paying attention – was titled “Going Green – The Symptoms of a Bad Lunch or a Strategic Business Trend?” Long-time SISO member and panel organizer and moderator Skip Farber admitted that, in surveys, very few SISO members had said they could care less about environment issues, but the leadership had decided to put the panel on anyway.

Still, all good stuff.

One of the speakers, Kerry Smith, president and CEO of Red 7 Media, gave the group the details on a Green Meetings Summit his company held last summer. He didn’t bother to mention during the session – and I didn’t learn until I’d left San Diego – that it might be a never-again phenomenon because there were no plans to stage it again this year.

Like many companies and many events, whether to hold a second Green Meetings Summit is being viewed through a prism shaded by cost cuts and marginal revenues.

You can’t blame Smith; at least he held ONE Green Meetings Summit. That’s one more than about anybody else in the room.

Despite our best attempts to convince ourselves otherwise, we are still in an early phase of the move toward greener shows and meetings. Nobody would dare say a discouraging word, but, in their heart of hearts, few show managers or suppliers are about to admit they’re not going to raise a finger to do anything themselves unless there’s a profit to be made (not that’s there’s anything wrong with that).

The challenge – which suppliers are working to meet – is to make it worth everybody’s while.

Posted by Michael Hart on April 2, 2009 | Comments (2)