Below is the second installment of our trade show roundup with thoughts and recommendations for some of the key conferences for online marketers.
Internet Retailer – Internet Retailer currently hosts two key shows each year – the Web Design & Usability Conference which was just held last week in Orlando, and the larger Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in June. This year’s main conference will be in Chicago from June 8-11. If you are actively involved in web design, the February show would be valuable to attend. For more general retail info, I am a big fan of the June show. It draws a huge crowd (great for networking and exhibiting), and there is a ton of great content. Our clients also rate this show highly for value and time well invested.
Shop.org – Shop.org hosts several conferences throughout the year. The best known and largest of all the online retail shows is the Shop.org Annual Summit in the fall. This show has frequently been held in Las Vegas , but it’s moving to Dallas for 2010. The change is unfortunate as I predict they are going to take a hit on attendance. The Mandalay Bay venue in Las Vegas was much loved and Dallas pales by comparison. The Shop.org shows have the reputation of being extremely retailer-focused, as opposed to eTail which is more vendor-focused. Shop.org has retailer-only days and retailer-only events. But despite their somewhat heavy-handed non-vendor stance, there are many sponsorships available to vendors, although some (like the vendor-hosted tables on retailer-only day) come with a pretty hefty price tag.
One of Shop.org’s other (smaller) events has just been retooled. It is called the Retail & Innovation Marketing Conference and will be hosted in San Francisco from March 2-4. This show focuses on next-generation media. Social media had been a key topic at prior shows, and this year mobile will be a big area of focus. I have really enjoyed this show in the past, but the reality is that there are so many shows crammed into a tight six-week period between February and March that marketers are challenged to squeeze them all in. I personally could not make the Retail & Innovation show work with my schedule this year.
Retail Marketing Conference and DMA - These are two offline shows that attract many of the same retailers who also attend the online retail shows. After years of declining attendance, the ACCM catalog conference has been renamed and presumably retooled. It is now called the Retail Marketing Conference and will be held May 24-27 in Kissimmee, Florida. The thrust of the agenda for this year’s show is “integrated marketing” with mostly online content spanning social media, SEM, mobile, e-commerce and catalog/print. The new show doesn’t sound that much different than the Internet Retailer, E-Tail or Shop.org conferences. I’m sure the Retail Marketing Conference will continue to draw a large offline audience made up of prior attendees of the ACCM, so the Direct Marketing Association (who runs this show) would be foolish to kill that offline content. After all, there are still plenty of catalogs in my mailbox every day, so it’s not like this business is going away. I remain on the fence about this event. If the retooled content and rebranding works, it would be a great show. If they aren’t able to get attendance back up, however, I imagine it may be the last year for this conference.
With regard to the DMA itself, I have attended the big annual conference for the past 10 years and have come to the conclusion that from an online perspective, I get very little out of this show. One year the DMA filled up a pretty awesome online pavilion of exhibitors, but it wasn’t successful because they housed it across the street which drew very little foot traffic. The next year, the online and offline exhibitors bordered each other in the main exhibit hall, and in subsequent years, many of the online exhibitors dropped out. So thinking solely of online, I am ambivalent about the fate of this show. The DMA:2010 Conference & Exhibition is scheduled for October 9-14 in San Francisco.
ad:tech – This is such a fun, mobbed, upbeat show with great energy! There are two large U.S. ad:tech conferences along with a variety of smaller events throughout the year. The big U.S. shows are ad:tech San Francisco (April 19-21) and ad:tech New York (November 2-4). Audiences for these events consist largely of agency and technology people, job hunters and employers. There is very little content that is applicable to an actual marketer – it is largely technology-focused for agencies. It will be interesting to see if this year’s NYC show can maintain the same high-energy atmosphere in its new digs at the Javits Center vs. the Hilton which had been its home for many years.
Last year we saw attendance at all the shows plummet. We are optimistic that this year they will go back up. We have also noticed that marketers often attend the exact same conference year after year. My recommendation would be to mix it up and do one of the eTail, Internet Retailer, or Shop.org shows and then perhaps add an SES or SMX show. Next year you should consider switching it up. Note that in my opinion there is really no reason to go to more than one or two of the retail shows and only one of the search shows in a given year. You’ll quickly find that the content is not exclusive to each show.
Click here for Part 1 of our Online Marketing Conference Guide.
Suzy Sandberg is President of PM Digital.
