Content area
Full Text
Companies Have Evolved from Builders to Marketing Consultants
Walk in to any trade show and you'll see acres of creative and perfectly decorated booths hoping to catch your eye and a share of your company's budget. But if you were to walk in a few days earlier, you would find chaos. What happens in the interval is the result of months of planning and behind-the-scenes work by exhibit designers, builders and installers, some of whom call Orange County home.
"It's just like Lego," said Michael Taylor, president and CEO of Anaheim-based Taylor Exhibit & Exposition Service. "Build it, transport it and install it, tear it down, store it."
Once seen as little more than craftsman carpenters, exhibit builders have evolved along with an increased sophistication in trade shows to become part ad agency, part consultant, part show coordinator and part builder. And exhibit houses large and small agree that they end up being marketing partners with their clients.
"The process (of designing a show booth) is like designing an ad campaign," said Herb Hite, president and general manager of Roselle, Ill.-based Exhibitgroup/Giltspur, whose Orange County offices are in Cypress. (Exhibitgroup specializes in design, fabrication, warehousing, installation, transportation and marketing; Giltspur handles show promotion.) The company, a $2.5 billion subsidiary of Viad Corp., Phoenix, and the largest exhibit house in OC, handles everything from a simple design or instaa ation to full-service, multiyear contracts for clients that include Times Orange County, QLogic, Bergen Brunswig and Aim Surgical Equipment. But they've also done permanent exhibits for the Getty Center and Staples Center in Los Angeles as part of specific marketing programs.
Hite said the 90employee OC office handles "thousands" of projects each year that range in cost from "a couple of thousand dollars to several million."