OR Blog

August 17, 2010

And the Show goes on

Well the whirlwind of the OR Summer show 2010 has subsided, except for those of you road-tripping on to points N/S/E/W. I didn't find any road trippers from the South, but certainly from every other direction and I bet there were a few willing to take highway and byway to SLC last week.
I know it's important to say, so I'll say it now that attendance at the show was up in all measured categories of buyers, stores, exhibitors, media, advocacy groups and overall attendance. This bucks the trend in the trade show industry for sure... But is that really important, or just a sound byte for the data-starved b2b media market? Is the show, after all, a quality play, or quantity play? Is it a numbers game at the end of it all?

I'll let you answer that... likely a different answer depending on what your goals were going into the show. Those numbers are important enough that I will be engaged in show stat analysis like never before in the next month (while planning Winter 11) to test Nielsen's new audience development technology called Alterian (who comes up with these names anyway?). Store demographics, geographic profiles, attendance history patterns, success/failure with prospecting, and detailed survey results will all be part of the wrap up effort on the show. As video, images, stories, reviews and commentary on the show stream onto YouTube/Facebook/Wordpress/Blogger/Twitter/LinkedIn over the coming weeks, can we really even say the show is over?

So instead of a post-mortem on SM10, I'll post up some of the highlights in pic form (pictures worth 1000 words each), and keep adding to it as the pieces of the overall puzzle flow into the public domain.