The crème de la crème in trade fairs connects in Valencia

The congress was held in Valencia for the fourth time, confirming the strong trade show culture of the paella city. The venue: the iconic new convention centre of Feria Valencia. Two days of intense networking, high-level training, and city visits. Curious about an industry with a reputation of crisis, we sat down with CEO Paul Woodward.

People we have talked to praised especially the networking side of the event. It is an increasingly important component of this event?

Indeed. This is a CEO / board of directors level gathering. Our members consistently tell us international networking is the most important thing for them. So this is not an educational event in the traditional sense. Though we have a lot of meetings, the educational programme is quite limited, with a few high-level keynote presentations, and we keep a lot of times for gathering.

¿How is the exhibition industry doing worldwide?

Obviously it has been impacted by the crisis, The exhibition industry is always dependent on the economic activity. So in the last two years we have seen decreases in activity in all top 10 markets except China and Brazil. We also see a lot of activity in India, though with issues of lack of exhibition centres. This said, our members have probably been less affected than others because they are typically the top shows in the industry, and there is a common view that if you have the top position, people will still come to your show, even if maybe with a smaller booth. So we see, logically, a lot of focus in developing markets. Our members have developed significantly in Asia in the last few years, now there is a lot of interest in Latin America. We had an educational session about Latin America, and networking with delegates from developing markets. Then in more mature markets, people are very interested to see how the events market is evolving: how to include technology into events. We brought people from other areas of business events (conferences, seminars, workshops, meetings…), as interestingly, we see are types of events are converging and the definition of the types of business events is getting increasingly blurred.

There is lots of talk of crisis in the trade show industry? Do you see a need for evolution -or revolution- or are current formats OK?

I don´t think current formats are OK. All businesses need to evolve; companies are changing the way they do business, the way they are promoting and marketing themselves, so our industry has to evolve too. Does it mean trade fairs are dead? Not at all. When we had the first dot.com revolution in the late 1990, you heard that this would be the end of trade fairs; that nobody would need to go to trade fairs anymore. There is interesting research showing increased activity in social media leads to an increasing need for people to go to events and meet face to face. Trade fairs well managed, with a good strategy, with a good year-round marketing activity and which clearly serves en industry, have a bright future.

UFI pretends to be a quality label. How does that work?

We have a few criteria:

– The events need to have taken place several years; it must have a proven track record.

– It must be international; it needs to have a certain percentage of international visitors or exhibitors.

– Its statistics have to be audited.

– It must be approved by at least two existing UFI members.

– And we go check the quality of the trade fair on-site.

ROI: is it an issue you discuss?

Important, but complicated topic… It is of course essential, but it depends on a lot of variables outside the exhibition´s control, especially the way exhibitors manage their presence, prepare their show, do the follow-up. We have organised a few educational sessions about how exhibitors can maximise their ROI, but it is a huge task.

There is an exhibitors´ association in the USA, which is of great help for that, as it gets its members to be better exhibitors and get more value from trade shows, but no such association exists in the rest of the world.