Cover Feature
to enter the industry from school or
college-age.
“As a marketer I think exhibitions
is one of the best kept secrets,” says
Foster. “Everybody in the world is
trying to bring buyers and sellers
together and we see it happening live.
“What the industry wants is
specialists in data, specialists in IT, and
specialists not just in marketing but in
forms of marketing. It’s about bringing
more of those skills into the industry.”
Foster’s marketing background
arguably sets him apart from many
C-Suite leaders in the industry, who
often hail from the world of sales.
“I always describe myself as a
marketing person who could sell,” he
continues. “Salespeople always think
they’re better than marketers – or
certainly when I was a young marketer
I thought that was the case – but as a
business leader now I want salespeople
to be competitive.
“It’s an interesting point and I don’t
want to overemphasize it because I
think salespeople and sales leaders
are really important to our business,
but I think marketers often get
underestimated.”
RECRUITING FROM WITHIN
Recruitment has long been a hot-
button topic in the exhibition industry,
with companies across the organiser/
venue/supplier spectrum struggling to
find the talent to fill key roles.
“At UBM we had a big debate about
whether it was better to recruit from
within or without, and at Comexposium
we still have that discussion internally,”
says Foster. “What’s changed over the
last few years is that we’re trying to
recruit specialists. Probably one of the
single most significant changes we’ve
made at Comexposium is that we’ve
recruited a head of digital, digital
director etc. and we weren’t interested
in someone from the exhibition
industry, we were interested in someone
“The key to any event is understanding the
dynamic between the buyers and the sellers”
who could take a different approach.
“For me, it’s about making sure you
can drive innovation and change. One
of the ways of doing that is bringing in
someone who can disrupt, and disrupt is
often a scary word. It’s always valuable
to bring in people who can give a
different perspective.”
CONSTANT EVOLUTION
“I don’t know how many years the
exhibition industry spent debating
whether digital was a threat,” Foster
tells EN. “It’s obviously an opportunity.
“We have the magic of creating those
experiences but digital gives us an
absolutely huge opportunity to do more.
I think this is a great time for us to even
innovate. We’ve always been about
bringing buyers and sellers together,
now we’ve got to keep doing more and
driving more.
“The biggest threat to our industry
is not digital. The biggest threat to our
industry is constantly producing the
same, again and again and again.”
The cyclical nature of the exhibition
industry, continues Foster, can be a
barrier to genuine change.
“One of the challenges of our
business is that it’s very deadline-driven
and it tends to make us repeat things,”
he explains. “You’re always chasing
a deadline and the thing that can kill
shows is doing the same as last year,
plus a little bit.”
We discuss the construction of a
floorplan, and how precarious visitor
experience can become in the face of
additional profit. When organisers are
faced with the choice of constructing
a rest area for visitors or selling an
additional stand it can be difficult not to
go with the commercial decision.
“Of course, you have to think about
it commercially,” adds Foster. “We’re
all about leveraging commerciality, but
we also have to make sure that we’re
providing the right experience. Yes,
it’s about commerciality. Yes, it’s about
driving bigger floor plans – or certainly
better floorplans – but it’s also about
driving up value and how we can use
innovation to do that.
“Square metres are how we
leverage the connection we make. At
Comexposium we’ve got a one-to-one
model, a hosted buyer model, and if you
look at the sqm rate it’s ridiculous. But
the point is measuring it per square
metre is not the right way to measure it.
“Customers don’t measure it that
way, they measure it by the value of
the connections they’re making in the
meetings.”
Hosted buyer programmes and
match-making services have
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