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bubba
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« on: January 10, 2007, 08:41:28 am » |
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I just saw this article regarding the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which is going on right now... I would love to see this show.....
Companies Pay Dearly for Technology Trade Show
By Brad Stone and Damon Darlin The New York Times January 6, 2007
For a small technology company called Digeo, the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is one of the biggest opportunities of the year. For the next few days, the city will be jampacked with potential customers, partners and press — but the price of participation is daunting.
It starts with $24,500 for reserving 700 square feet of booth space on the sprawling convention center floor, tens of thousands more to furnish and operate the booth, plus $300 a night for hotel rooms for the 29 Digeo employees who are attending the convention.
Then there is the cost of rental vans, thousands of dollars to advertise at the show and meals for employees. The eight-year-old company, which makes gear and software for home entertainment, estimates that it will spend $500,000 to $1 million on the show this year.
Is it worth it? “Ask me afterward,” said Allison Cornia, vice president for marketing at Digeo.
Financial anxieties aside, Digeo, like almost every other technology company, hardly thinks twice about attending the event, North America’s largest trade show and the industry’s flashiest stage, which turns 40 years old this year.
Luminaries like Bill Gates, Michael S. Dell and Robert A. Iger, the Disney chief executive, will deliver keynote speeches. Starting Monday, powerhouses like Sony, Samsung and Panasonic will light up the showroom floor for four days with their largest high-definition TVs, smallest digital music players and latest high-tech gadgets, many of them months away from going on sale.
The event, known in the industry as C.E.S., provides more than $80 million in revenue for the Consumer Electronics Association, an industry trade group and lobbyist. It has thrived even as Comdex, the computer industry show that once held sway here, went bust. And it is a windfall for a booming city.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority estimates that 140,000 attendees and 2,700 exhibiting companies will pump about $230 million into the city economy this year, 40 percent more than the show generated in 2001.
But for many of the exhibiting companies, C.E.S. is something else entirely: a huge and ever-growing bill and a challenge to be heard by the industry elite over a deafening cacophony.
“I don’t think you can buy the value you are getting from exposure to that many people,” said Sterling Pratz, chief executive of Autonet Mobile, a month-old company trying to bring Internet access into cars.
Mr. Pratz is bringing all six of his employees to the show and asking them to share hotel rooms to save money. “We are putting the people who snore together,” he said.
Headaches for companies at C.E.S. go far beyond simply opening the corporate pocketbook. Hotels triple their rates for the event, and most of the city’s 133,000 rooms are sold out for months in advance.
A regular suite at Caesars Palace that runs $99 a night any other weekday will go for $350 during C.E.S. On the other end of the spectrum, Verizon Wireless is renting the Hardwood suite at the Palms Casino Resort — which features a half basketball court and 10,000-square-foot room. The room goes for $25,000 a night.
Hewlett-Packard, a major exhibitor that has paid $40,000 to brand big plastic tote bags with its Connecting Your World slogan, has to find accommodations for 500 employees for the week. It does get a discount because it buys in bulk, a marketing executive said, but he said total show expenses easily run to several million dollars.
On the convention floor, booth space costs $35 a square foot for association members and $40 for anyone else. That means the electronics giant Samsung, this year’s largest exhibitor, with a 25,000-square-foot booth, will pay the Consumer Electronics Association $875,000 for real estate alone.
C.E.S. is so vast that GES Exhibition Services, the show’s main contractor, lays 350,000 feet of extension cord, enough to run up and down the Empire State Building 140 times, and 1.2 million square feet of aisle carpet, enough to cover 600 average homes.
Other charges include union labor to bring the booth materials into the hall ($70 an hour), separate union workers to actually build the booth (up to $1 million for the larger setups), Internet access ($1,195), booth “spokesmodels” ($300 a day plus agency fees) and water ($49 for a case of 24 bottles) to keep everyone properly hydrated.
The toll on the expense accounts, and sanity, of technology executives does not stop there.
Limousines are used to chauffeur many executives from the convention center to the hotels on the Strip, where companies set up hospitality suites or showrooms. But the streets are so clogged with traffic that it can take 30 minutes to travel from the convention center to a nearby hotel.
The city’s entire fleet of limousines has been booked, often for 30 percent over the regular rate, and one of the few available minibuses would cost a company’s marketing department $4,656 over four days, according to one firm, Las Vegas Transportation.
Restaurants are sold out months in advance. Craftsteak, the star chef Tom Colicchio’s steakhouse at the MGM Grand, is booked solid for the first three days and says it will do 40 percent more business than usual. The “surf and turf” tasting menu (Kobe beef, lobster and salmon) costs $135 a plate, but the restaurant asks for a minimum bill of $3,000 to $4,000 from large groups.
Putting on parties is not cheap either. On Tuesday night, Dell is renting out Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. Such a party, including music, food, premium liquor and photos of guests with Lucille Ball and George Washington, can cost $60,000.
On many nights during C.E.S. there are miniconventions in hotel ballrooms, like tomorrow’s Digital Experience at Caesars Palace. Exhibition tables at the event go for up to $12,000 to companies like Sony and Microsoft, which seek to court the attending journalists.
Chris O’Malley, a partner at Pepcom, the company that runs Digital Experience, says the cost of operating his event at C.E.S. goes up 20 percent each year. As attendance grows, he said, prices for food, drinks, labor and ballroom rentals rise, too.
“Las Vegas is the ultimate supply-and-demand city,” he said. “The cost to host 1,500 hungry, thirsty people during the most expensive week in the city is now a little staggering.”
Yet pretty much every company in the intermingling fields of consumer electronics, entertainment, automotive gadgets and video games arrives for C.E.S. and takes part in some way, even if it is not directly on the showroom floor. I.B.M., which says its computer business is growing indistinguishable from consumer electronics, is returning to the convention center after a 10-year hiatus and renting 3,600 square feet.
On the other hand, DirecTV, after renting a booth for the last decade, is leaving the show floor amid concerns about rising costs and what its co-president, John Suranyi, calls “the hype and clutter of the experience.” Instead, it is renting a ballroom at Caesars Palace and holding its own events during the show.
Some companies clearly do not mind the chaos. Monster Cable, a company in Brisbane, Calif., that makes home entertainment products that in any other context would appear numbingly dull — like cables connecting audio and video equipment — leaps at the annual opportunity to catch a bit of Las Vegas glamour.
This year it will put 140 employees up at the Venetian Hotel, operate two separate booths and six private demo rooms at the convention center, and put on a Monday night concert at the Venetian Palace that will unite the jazz greats George Benson and Al Jarreau.
The company would not specify its overall C.E.S. expenditure but said that it devoted 10 to 15 percent of its annual marketing budget to the show.
Monster’s chief executive, Noel Lee, said the investment was worthwhile because the show gave his employees a singular goal and deadline. “If it weren’t for C.E.S., we could not have grown the company the way we have,” he said.
Many companies say the show actually saves them money by allowing sales representatives to meet all their prospective customers in one place, instead of taking multiple business trips later in the year.
“There is an amazing ability for a small company like us to go in and be able to meet with senior executives all at once,” said Singu Srinivas, co-founder of HiWired, a three-year-old company from Needham, Mass., offering technical support to consumers and small companies.
Last year at C.E.S., HiWired scored a promising partnership with the retailer OfficeMax after Mr. Srinivas met its executives at a cocktail party and went out with them the next night for an informal dinner. “The nature of meetings is very different in Las Vegas,” Mr. Srinivas said.
This year, HiWired will bring six of its employees and will pay $20,000 to attend C.E.S. and rent a table at a press event, ShowStoppers, on Monday night.
For some attendees, C.E.S. is not just expensive and essential — it is also a tad bittersweet. Jason Chudnofsky, who will attend this year on behalf of the trade show and publishing firm Pulvermedia, ran the Comdex conference for 16 years before it imploded in 2003 after the technology bust. Many of the companies, speakers and attendees have since migrated to C.E.S.
Mr. Chudnofsky thinks that even though the same growing pains that afflicted his show also plague C.E.S. — overcrowding, draconian room rates and grueling convention floor walks — the annual Consumer Electronics Show is not going away anytime soon.
“The reason is simple,” he said. “There is no other event that can take its place and bring the entire industry together like C.E.S.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/06/t...agewanted=print
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