#gs12 Why You Need To Be In Chicago In 2013
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Globalshop moves back to Chicago in 2013 (its proper home to many that we spoke to on the show floor of #gs12 held last week in Las Vegas).
Exhibitors who have paid for space do, as they tend to, always try and see the rosy side of having spent all that money on exhibiting, “the quality of leads was excellent” sort of thing but there was no doubt traffic was light in Las Vegas this year.
Exhibitors we believe were expecting more, especially as we all see evidence that retailers now need to spend to compete with the online word.
You can spot the really smart vendors in our industry who target retail as they were all exhibiting (and have done for several years now)…
STRATACACHE not only had their own stand but were also demonstrating their technology with RockTenn (with whom they announced a strategic partnership during the show). STRATACACHE had shipped in a row of five commercial refrigerators equipped with their PrimaSee technologyand these seemed to attract a lot of attention – playing with them up close is really cool (forgive the pun).
Mind you, STRATACACHE really should populate them with real product next time they are on display (i.e. put the ‘fridges’ in context). Also on their booth was a Microsoft Kinect interactive solution and a really nice transparent LCD type light box that revealed (via the content on the screen) a real bottle of Gin inside (obviously put there especially for us).
In the guise of Activate The Space, ~Sedna were there with a really good stand.
It was nice to catch up with Lighting up the Aisle author, Adrian Weidmann who was on great form on the Activate The Space stand (a nice touch was signed copies of the book for visitors).
And of course, as we have previously mentioned, there were five music providers selling their wares.
No doubt all of the above would like us to shut up at this point and keep the GlobalShop audience to themselves – especially as when the show moves back to Chicago in April next year, even more brands and even more agency people, as well as retailers will descend on the event. The event will be in our travelogue and if you are like a ComQi, Real Digital Media, Scala or signagelive and target the retail sector then you ought to be there as well in 2013.
Shows like GlobalShop offer a way to get in front of retail folks (not necessarily ‘techies’ – that’s more NRF than GlobalShop) – shop window fitters, merchandisers, product marketing folks etc, etc.
Anyone thinking of exhibiting needs to up their game in terms of what their stand looks like. The best stand by far from our perspective was that of UK company Tensator Ltd. who are doing a great job at the moment with queue management solutions (regular readers will know them because of their ‘virtual mannequin’ work highlighted here with MediaZest at various regional UK airports.
Tensator in themselves are an interesting company and a bit of a UK success story (note to self – we must do a feature story on them going forward) and the stand they had laid out, clearly demonstrated all of their queue management, digital signage and virtual mannequin solutions in a retail context. For retailers their stand was educational, informative and fun.
We often say this about shows such as Viscom, and GlobalShop is much the same – it is worth going along just to see how creative and innovative these cardboard merchandising people actually are.
We never walk away from an event like this without being amazed and inspired and we always learn something. Speaking of which one small business we really liked was Clifton, New Jersey based Mediagraphics. Ostensibly a full service Large Format Printer they have developed a unique product line of ‘Smart Posters’ and ‘Smart Banners’ (shown above right here).
What’s unique about them is the nice mix of print and digital – a system enabling the end user to incorporate slide show and video presentations into their poster and banner displays. Mediagraphics sell them by the bucketload to the retail, medical, manufacturing and education sectors and have a nice revenue stream in the way of updated print and digital as follow-ons. Actually a very clever system.
Hopefully in April 2013 we will see a lot more of you at GlobalShop – both exhibiting and visiting. Let’s make that a date in our diary!
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