The exhibition wing of EMAP, EMAP Connect has been spun off as a separate company. EMAP is to become the Top Right Group, saying goodbye to the lovely old school name of East Midlands Allied Press. In 2008 EMAP itself was bought jointly by the Guardian Media Group and the spectacularly huge investment group Apax Partners. And I’d thought that EMAP was huge.
The change will allow EMAP’s exhibition wing, which accounts for 40% of the group’s turnover, to establish its ‘own culture, location and business plans’. Throwing away a brand and wiping the floor clean is something that some firms are able to do. They must surely know what they are doing.
However, it was in January this year that I wondered if EMAP knew what it was doing. The BETT technology show in London was being moved to ExCel in Docklands. The show had been at Olympia for numerous years, in which time companies had fought for cherished spaces in the floorplan. It’s funny how a trade show lives for a few days each year. For the rest of the year hundreds of companies to do months of talking on “our stand at BETT”.
The ExCel venue offers a massive tidy exhibition space that can expand. As a new venue, EMAP wipes the floorplan clean and starts fresh. It’s like planning your shopping mall to offer some sense of organisation – it’s surely something to do when you have so many hundreds of firms as at BETT. For example, sections of the hall can be dedicated to certain markets or informal ‘zones’ that guide the visitor.
EMAP didn’t think that was a thing to do. When the new 2013 floorplan appeared, the only evidence of such thinking was an area labelled ‘software’. However, pretty much every exhibitor sells software so the silliness of this title was soon noticed. The ‘software’ area was tippexed off the plan. Something easier like 'BETT marketplace' would have lasted.
Was that a one-off goof? No this is the goofing has been happening for a while. EMAP has a show that grows in size, never fails and thus it goofs as it wishes.
No longer does the BETT Show nod to teachers’ subject associations and academic bodies, who represent the teaching profession. It is now irrelevant that the curriculum drives the resources that people buy. To be fair, EMAP is unable to have a dialogue with academic bodies beyond a couple. And the academic bodies don’t get the point of the dialogue either. Can anyone work out why one of this year’s show themes was ‘3D learning’? So random. Double-U tea ef.
Show visitors and exhibitor numbers rise each year with no help from outside. So I guess they know what they’re doing. Commercially, nothing needs doing. Greedy wins.
2 comments:
They do seem to be trying to push the small guys out, with their larger booth sizes and prices. A pity, since I think it will reduce the richness that was the old BETT.
The BETT 2013 show was disappointing really. There are going to be bugs in a new layout but I really feel for those exhibitors who were set in corridors that gained no traffic. Long-timers 'Sunflower' were in one of these and it was due in part to a huge stand building its back wall in front of them. Newcomers from Holland had splurged on a medium-size stand in a void. Surely the thing to do was to put similar sized stands together where they would have equal status. Instead the organisers 'used' people to fill in gaps. There were no little stands for startup companies - the minimum was 4m, twice the size at BETT.
I heard though that moving BETT to ExCel came at a price so a huge amount of floor space needed filling and selling. The car parking however was easy and brilliant.
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