ROOMOF ONE’S OWN: Attendees take a break and stay in touch at an attendee lounge at the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute’s PACK EXPO 2010 in Chicago. There is a growing trend toward supplying attendees with their own space at meet- ings — places where they can interact with one another and take care of business.

Earlier this year,when SamLippman announced the brand-new Attendee Acquisition Roundtable (AAR), an invitation-only event where producers and industry experts would share strategies and technologies for driving event attendance, demand was so strong thatAAR sold out in a few weeks. Lippman added a second event for July—and then yet another, set for October. That’s telling.Meeting professionals, it seems, understand

that the formula for identifying and capturing attendees is changing. Ten or 15 years ago, Lippman said, if meeting organizers who held dominant events in a given industry just followed the classic formula —three direct-mail pieces and some adver- tising — they would have an audience. But today, they face challenges fromall sides. “There is somuch noise out there, number

one. You have to somehow get through the clutter,” said Lippman, the founder and pres- ident of Integrated ShowManagement andMarketing,whose high-level events include AAR as well as the Exhibition& Convention Executives Forum (ECEF) and the Large Show Roundtable. “Secondly, there are somany events—and now virtual events. There is an amazing amount of competition.” And even as conferences and events have grown more

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numerous, their inherent value is no longer an automatically accepted conclusion. For the Boomer generation, “getting on a plane on a business trip and being chosen to go to a con- ventionwas part of the ticket you punched on the way up,” said Lippman, who formerly produced such large international events as the Consumer Electronics Show and GRAPH EXPO. “Nowyoung people have been around the world with their parents already. The thought of getting on a plane and going to Chicago is no big deal.”

Likewise, the newgeneration thinks nothing of using dig-

ital tools and platforms—some of themfree—that deliver information, education, training, and other programs that can compete with live events. Little wonder that when Lippman polled a group of industry executives at ECEF inMay about

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