So what are you seeing as the burning issues this year in the health care convention industry? Broadly speaking, I would say there are two primary issues. The first is documenting the value specifically of convention marketing, meaning documenting the value within the exhibiting companies themselves. When you take a major pharmaceutical firm or medical device company and look at their sales and what they have available to them, you need to speak to where convention marketing fits into that array. That's the challenge convention marketers face.

This is partly due to the nature of health care marketing in general - sales do not take place on the exhibit floor, so it's more difficult to draw a direct cause and effect line between activity and market share. Even that oversimplifies that equation because obviously in medical marketing, there's far more to it than generating sales. There's a definite education component involved and that takes place as well. So all this feeds into a difficult equation when you're talking about trying to define in the simplest terms "what we get out this."

Is the struggling economy contributing to the focus on budgets?
I think it's more due to financial pressures on health care companies themselves. Their financial performance is obviously critical to their shareholders. When it's more difficult to define relative benefits … that makes it a more problematic equation internally. You'd love to be able to say for every dollar we spend at a health care convention, we get this much out of it, but it can't be done. And even if it could, there's the education aspect, which has been lost somewhat over the last few years in product discussions.

 So if the value isn't really quantifiable, how are companies managing to quantify it?
A lot of companies are looking at various systems. It's about finding a model for your inputs and outcomes that satisfies a company's stated objectives. It's not so much about software, but developing systems to try to capture the information.

Where does that leave associations?
What can they do to have a voice in the process? Event organizers need to be as helpful as possible by providing better demographic information on their attendees. Get feedback from exhibitors or some representative body: We advocate the Exhibitors Advisory Council (EAC). We recommend they bring in the EAC, and ask them, "Tell us what we need to do to help you. What kind of demographic information do you need?"

For example, take the number of professional attendees who are from within the United States versus outside the United States. That remains controversial between associations and exhibitors because for associations, regardless of where they come from, those attendees represent revenue. From the exhibitors' perspective, it makes it a little more problematic because many health care companies have issues interacting with clients outside the United States, maybe regulatory issues, or perhaps their internal sales and marketing structures are not set up to take advantage of contacts outside of the United States.

Can associations frame the issue in terms of the value of education on the trade show floor?
I certainly don't think it can hurt to reiterate the value in the exhibit hall of education, not in terms of CMEs, but in terms of how valuable it is to have that one-on-one interchange with the company in an environment where that's what you've come to do and where you're not distracted by the day-to-day of your business.

It really comes down to an attitude of partnership - you see industry as another one of your constituencies. If you see it as constituency, as one of a group of partners, not just a vendor … that changes the relationship. It implies a dialogue needs to take place and there needs to be a focus on both partners' goals.

So that's the first hot topic. What's the second?
The first was a strategic consideration. No. 2 is practical - material handling costs. It's very exhibition specific, so maybe some in upper management haven't focused on it. Not only have the costs been going up, but there's been an increase in what I'll call their unpredictability. For example, there'll be a published rate, but there's often the provision that if there's a special circumstance - special handling or part of the teardown has to be done in overtime - that rate changes. The degree to which the final invoice an exhibitor is getting for a show reflects a published rate is going down. The special charges just seem to be growing.

Is there a solution?
There's often a lot of confusion surrounding overtime - who gets loaded in at overtime and who gets loaded in at straight time. There's a lot of discussion now of blended rates, which means the contractor sits down and estimates what the total material handling costs will be and then calculates an hourly rate which incorporates that so overtime goes away.

These companies are facing more and more financial pressures. Say you've put together a budget for 2008 that says we expect to spend a certain amount for a certain show, and when you come out of that show the amount is 35 percent higher than what you've budgeted. That's a very difficult thing to justify internally. The exhibitor has no control over this at all. The idea is to have control and be able to take measures to ensure predictability, but then the exhibit managers comes in and says it's 35 percent higher and there's nothing you can do about it. That volatility is an even greater stress point than the cost itself, although the cost is considerable.

So what can the planner do?
The convention manager for the association would establish practices with its contractor. Here again I would recommend they sit down with the EAC, or bring in representatives from their exhibitors and their contractor and just talk about it. It [a solution] can be very individualized, but if they come to an agreement in that manner, their chances of having happier exhibitors increase.

Is part of the problem that exhibitors feel like no one's doing anything about it?
There's a perception maybe that some of the associations are turning a deaf ear to it. And it's surprising how many convention managers just don't know that they can negotiate rates and that they should do so. They should negotiate those rates with their exhibitor constituency in mind, not just their own association's bottom line in mind. And they need to be aware that this is the environment these exhibitors are operating in.

Contributing Editor Ginny Phillips is a freelance writer in Birmingham, Ala.