Let’s review the prerogatives of today’s marketing executive: Go to work for the post office, volunteer for active duty in Iraq, or stay put with the same company with the task of managing more trade shows with less money. There’s no doubt that trade shows are increasing in number, but not because they are multiplying — indeed some have been closed down — but simply because the market is becoming more fragmented and one needs to cover all grounds: Film and TV rights, Internet rights, licensing, etc. Plus, there are markets that focus on Latin America, Eastern and Central Europe, the new TV season… And, of course, there are the all-encompassing markets such as MIP-TV and MIPCOM. Another reason that trade shows are becoming important is that traveling is no longer fun. Instead of being constantly on the road as we used to do prior to 9/11, nowadays, it is cheaper, less burdensome and more effective to meet clients and content providers at regular intervals on the yearly calendar. Unfortunately, as sales staffs rejoice, marketing execs are proportionally dismayed: “How is it possible to add yet another market to my budget, without increasing it? Plus I have to be grateful if they don’t cut it!” And this is without taking into consideration that costs to attend the traditional trade shows increase every year, be it because of the exchange rate, inflation or one thing or another. Since the cheapest and fastest way of getting things done right in the marketing division is to do them oneself, these execs end up having no life. We’ve reached a point where someone putting in just 12 hours of work a day risks being accused of working only half a day! Try to explain that you have a family and would like to see your kids for a few minutes, and one will surely get the question: “What are ya goin’ to do with the rest of the day after that?” At trade shows, I’ve seen marketing execs get calls on their cellulars from associates who cannot figure out how to make overseas calls from their hotel rooms. And what about the crying calls from co-workers who cannot get a taxi? This is without taking into consideration all the missed deadlines because people above cannot make up their minds. We in the publishing world tend to value and appreciate the work of marketing execs. Personally I’d like to see more of them at trade shows because, more than anyone else, marketing people can save their companies lots of money. They know how to position a product, how to evaluate the effectiveness of individual trade journals and how to leverage a show’s strengths. As a service to promo execs, I’d like to suggest a way to better allocate marketing budget money on the basis of the Audience Interest Factor (AIF) obtained at each market. AIF is the percent of a trade show’s attendees who have shown an interest in the company’s product. By knowing AIF one can more accurately predict their exhibit-marketing results at a show. AIF was created by Dick Swandby, the now-retired founder of Red Bank, New Jersey-based Exhibit Surveys, Inc., a research firm specializing in trade show data. According to Ian Sequeira, executive vp at Exhibit Surveys, the average AIF rule of thumb for an exhibitor with one type of product is 16 percent, meaning that at a show such as MIP-TV with its 13,000 plus attendees, some 2,000 people have an interest in the exhibitor’s product. Which, in our case, represents about 52 percent of the people listed by MIP-TV organizers as buyers. This factor, however, increases for companies with multiple products, like a studio, which could have an AIF of 50 percent. Swandby also developed the “density” formula to determine the average number of attendees per 100 square feet (9.29 sq m) of exhibit space, which in effect determines floor traffic. A show with less than a 3.0 density factor has cause for concern. Exhibit Surveys’ Sequeira walked me through the complexity of calculating the density factor for MIP, which involves exhibition area (20,974 sq m), daily and cumulative hours of exhibition time (nine and 44 hours, respectively) and total number of participants (13,000). According to his calculations, MIP’s density factor is 1.2, which is not too great but on par with larger shows such as NAB in Las Vegas. In this case, because MIP has a high AIF level, a low-density factor could be due to the various seminars that take participants off the floor and to the conference rooms. The presence of marketing people at TV markets is important because some trade shows are ad-driven –– meaning they require heavy trade advertising and promotion –– with little market costs (such as the L.A. Screenings and DISCOP) and others are standdriven like MIP and MIPCOM. However, according to a study by Exhibit Surveys, only 27 percent of trade show attendees remember the booth, while 54.8 percent remember the company name, which indicates that it is not savvy to spend lots of money on the booth and neglect advertising in order to save two to three percent of that particular trade show’s total budget. Finally, the presence of marketing people is now more important because there are so many new people coming out of the woods. This is something difficult to explain to the old timers who are used to the usual faces that made up our industry when it was simple. But now it takes an IBM mainframe computer just to keep track of Internet-rights buyers. Plus, just when one has developed a good database of potential clients, these leave the companies, never to be found again. Implementing all new strategies and service tools to save money and to make trade shows more effective and efficient for their companies is the job of marketing execs, especially now that trade shows are becoming more important than ever. Let’s not lose sight of this. Dom Serafini M y T w o C e n t s MAIN OFFICES 216 EAST 75TH STREET NEW YORK, NY 10021 TEL: (212) 288-3933 FAX: (212) 734-9033 VIDEO AGE WEBSITES: www.videoage.org www.videoagelatino.com www.videoage.it P.O. 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