Rachel Wimberly

Suppliers and Buyers Need Best Practices
July 26, 2007

I just got back from the Corporate Event Marketing Assn. Summit 2007 in La Jolla, Calif.  During the session “Intellectual Property Town: A Democratic Pursuit of the Answers to Industry Standards Governing IP Ownership,” I was absolutely stunned by the discussion.

Aimee Ahiers, global brand manager for Symantec, represented the buyer’s side and Ben Nazario, vice president of national accounts for MC2, represented the seller’s side. John Pavek, vice president of publishing for Exhibitor Magazine moderated the discussion.

First, Ahiers told a story that would make any event planner cringe. She hired a company to plan an event for her in a tropical location with a specific theme and aspects. One week later, her competitor, who had worked with the same company, held the exact same event with the exact same theme in the exact same tropical location. Ahiers said there was nothing she could do about it, except vow to never work with that particular event planner again.

Nazario, who works for an exhibit design firm, had his own horror story. He said MC2 has often been in the RFP process, in which thousands of dollars can be spent trying to win the job, only to find out nine or 10 others were also part of the process.

Not only that, but another person, from Pinnacle Exhibits, whom I spoke to over lunch, told me she’d had the exact same thing happen, and then, to add injury to insult, the buyer issuing the RFP took parts of the designs others had done and gave them to a vendor who wasn’t even part of the original process to fulfill.

Yet another story that surfaced involved an exhibit design firm building an elaborate structure for an exhibitor, and that exhibitor seeing the exact same structure in a competitor’s booth.

You get the picture.

In the architectural, engineering and vehicle manufacturing industries, to name a few, there is copyright protection in place for intellectual property. In event planning and exhibit design, there isn’t.

One suggestion for exhibit suppliers to fix this: Have the buyer simply purchase the design, and both sides would be protected. The exhibit firm would never use it again, and the buyer could use it all he or she wanted to. Same goes for event planners and companies they work with. Everyone just has to agree on a price.

For now, to address some of these problems, CEMA’s goal is to work toward some sort of best practices. When polled, 86 percent of the audience thought that if CEMA led the charge, other associations would follow.

Posted by Rachel Wimberly on July 26, 2007 | Comments (0)