The major events I've been involved with over the last several years are SuperComputing and SIGGRAPH.
SuperComputing is the primary conference for the high end of the technical computing market. With roughly 5,000 attendees, it is small but exceptionally qualified.
SIGGRAPH is aimed at the graphics market and workstation users. In the past it had a major focus on scientific visualization, but today it is mostly DCC (Digital Content Creation) -- movies and special effects.
SuperComputing
In general, I dislike trade shows. They are expensive, time consuming, and have very little payback.
Due to a unique approach, SuperComputing is different.
Instead of focusing on a booth on the show floor, we elected to put considerable efforts into customer meetings. We had a booth, of course, but put a lot of effort into the meetings.
Customer Meetings
Like many vertically focused trade shows, we had engineers, marketeers, sales people and executives attending -- a major cross section of everyone involved with HPTC was attending. We also had the majority of the people who purchased and used HPTC systems gathered in the same place.
We decided to take advantage of this! We arranged meetings -- typically 1-2 hours -- between customers and prospects and the people they wanted to meet with; engineers, Vice Presidents, technical experts, even sales and marketing people.
Since the prospects were already there, it was easy for them to take an hour out of their schedule for the meeting -- especially to meet with corporate and technical people that were ordinarily difficult to reach.
We developed invitations to be hand delivered by sales people, put the invitations on the Web, included them in newsletters, and used telemarketing.
As a result, at the last SuperComputing conference, we had 150 customer meetings! These ranged from meetings with existing customers, to receive product updates or perhaps just complain to the proper people, to sales presentations to new prospects we had not met before.
The result? SuperComputing has the highest payback of any trade show I've ever been involved with.
Challenges
Scheduling 150 meetings over a four day period, with between two and six of our people in each meeting (plus customer attendees), and a small pool of frequently requested presenters, became a major challenge.
After doing this by hand one year, I developed a Meeting Scheduler to automate the assignment of key resources. This software package proved to be a life saver!