Marketing an exhibition can be a tough task at the best of times. Marketing an exhibition to a target audience that are themselves marketing professionals is a potentially terrifying prospect. Launched in 2009 by Centaur, ‘Marketing Week Live’ has to do exactly that.
“I studied marketing at University, and when I talk to Marketing Directors I always ask them why they wanted to go in to the industry. The common answers are that they wanted to be creative, to design sexy campaigns, to do fun things. Our thinking is that to get those people to come to a show, you can’t give them a normal trade show. It’s very important that we’ve got content, conferences, excellent suppliers, but also important that we make it fun. If people are happy, they’ll talk to more people, which is vital for a trade show.”
Choosing the right speakers for the event is also a massive task, with the organisers being inundated with requests from professional seeking to pass on their expertise to the delegates. As Centaur Portfolio Director Paul MacDonald explains, they hold a strong position
“We’re in a very fortunate position in that a lot of people from some of the biggest brands in the world want to speak at Marketing Week Live because of the reputation of the Marketing Week magazine and brand. We have a professional conference author who isn’t part of our team that we use remotely. They are very well equipped to research the market, as are the in house journalists and editors at Marketing Week. We give them a guide of what we believe the leading edge subjects are and they go away and acquire the brands and the speakers.”
In terms of event production, due to its growth the physical manifestation of the show has changed every year since its inception. The biggest change in 2013 has been in the ‘wow’ factor that the organisers like to give visitors. In previous years it had been inside the hall, with visitors in 2012 being greeted with a sweet shop and 10ft jelly babies a they entered the hall before following a winding tunnel that took them in to the heart of the show. This year, they worked with GES to deliver that experience outside of the hall, with the intention being to greet visitors before they enter and give them an environment in which to prepare themselves for the work they are about to do.
Centaur also collaborated closely with Aztec Event Services to deploy digital signage for the first time at MWL. Aztec’s digital signage system is driven by the new EventIgnite platform. It allows central administration of all digital signage at an exhibition and creates new ways of engaging visitors with relevant information. It’s really easy to set up and update, it can be done from any web enabled device (desktop or mobile) in real time in response to the changes.
Further Aztec equipped 14 seminar rooms with full AV facilities, seminar rooms were then connected to the “Speaker Ready Room”, where speakers could upload and edit their presentations on a suite of networked PCs, before remotely uploading them directly to the seminar laptop.
“What Marketing Week Live has been very good at is facilitating a dialogue between supplier and buyer, which is what a good exhibition should do. I think we can go one stage further and drive the agenda. Centaur has recently launched its marketing manifesto and that says what they believe in and what they believe the future of marketing to be. If people disagree, that’s great, so let’s have that debate and find out why. In 2014 we hope to give the show a stronger voice and make it all about the reintegration in the third era. Our opinion is that there was marketing, and then ten years ago digital turned up and smashed things in to silos. All of a sudden people were talking about digital marketing and data marketing and customer loyalty. Marketers never used to think like that and what happened was it created this segregation amongst what used to be a single industry. Fundamentally, digital is just a means and tactic to engage market.”
With this in mind, next year the show will go from having eight zones to four – Engage, Understand, Personality and Convert. The change is being made to mirror the way in which marketers think, in turn creating a stronger voice for the show.
When asked about the exact visitor numbers to the 2013 show, Paul was candid in his assessment of how the visitor number affect a show.
“We started in 2009 with 8,000 visitors and last year had 13,000. However, the proof of the pudding lies with our investors. The exhibition industry is its own worst enemy sometimes in that we can focus too much on the big visitor numbers. Really it’s about the conversion post-show of our investors. I’ve worked in the exhibition industry for 17 years, so I like to think that I can tell a happy exhibitor from an unhappy one, and so far the response has been very positive.”
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