the June 2008 Issue in PDF Format - Trade Show Executive

Incubator
Webcast Increases Global Audience for
Investment Expo
By Hil Anderson, senior editor
Sarasota, FL – Allowing people to tap
into the content of a conference or a
trade show via webcast is a concept
that is working out well for InterShow,
the producers of investment education
seminars serving investors and
professional traders.
The Florida based company recently
made 25% of the sessions at The Traders
Expo held in New York in February
available for viewing on the Internet free
of charge. The result was about 6,000
people from 53 nations logging in to
watch some of the 41 individual sessions
offered at the event.
InterShow looks at the strategy as a
winner for its particular market. “It helps
increase the number of people exposed
to the conference,” said Aaron West,
senior vice president of marketing for
InterShow. “This is the way conferences
are going to be functioning from here on
out in order to provide more benefit for
both exhibitors and speakers.”
On the surface, allowing attendees
to tune in free of charge sounds like an
anathema to the bottom lines of trade
show organizers who like to see people
paying the registration fee and talking
business face-to-face with their exhibitors.
InterShow, however, caters to a different
type of audience than most industryspecific
events.
InterShow events are themselves
free of charge and target an audience
of financial traders who are less able to
step out of the financial markets for the
better part of a week in order to attend
seminars in person. By utilizing webcasts,
InterShow aims to drive more viewers
to its Moneyshow.com website as well
as to educational sessions and product
demonstrations.
“Our goal is to educate investors and
traders as much as we can,” said West. “It
is to get them to connect with the website
and learn how to trade from the industry
experts who come and present at the
Strength in Numbers. Webcasts, such as this one, made 25% of the sessions at The Traders Expo
available free of charge to remote viewers. The organizers sees webcasts as a way to increase the
exposure of their events to office-bound financial traders.
conferences. They realize there are some
great resources available on Moneyshow.
com.”
The logistics of the webcast operation
are fairly simple. InterShow developed its
own web interface that allows sessions
to be captured live with a video camera
and the hotel-provided sound mixer.
Both are plugged into a laptop computer
connected to the Internet. At The Traders
Expo, there were three conference rooms
being webcast simultaneously throughout
the conference.
The sessions were broken up into
two categories: editorial presentations
and product presentations. The product
presentations are “purchased” by the
exhibiting companies who are given the
opportunity to pay an additional fee
to have the session webcast to a larger
audience. “They can then use it for their
sales collateral or internal purposes as
well,” West said. “If they go to a show for
three days, they can leverage the time they
had at the show and use the content for a
much longer period.”
Editorial presentations feature speakers
who are often regulars on the financial
speaking circuit. Many of these speakers,
in fact, are able to assist in the marketing
by putting out the word to their regular
readers or attendees of past speaking
engagements. “Speakers tell the people
in their database they are going to do a
webcast and their constituents can log on
and watch for free,” West said. “We do the
same thing with our database.”
Many conferences and trade
shows have adopted a practice of
archiving webcasts on their show sites
as a means of extending the interest in
their events. InterShow also keeps its
content available to act as a draw for
exhibitors, speakers and the conference
itself. “For a lot of people who are tied to
an office, it can be difficult to come to a
conference,” West said. “But this allows
us to continue to build interest in what we
are doing and market to them for future
shows.”
Reach Aaron West at (941) 955-0323
or aaronwest@intershow.com
20 June 2008 Trade Show Executive www.TradeShowExecutive.com