I can tell you how much they pay as I have been involved in designing stands for various companies and I have also had to exhibit twice.
Companies I have done work for did not have much change from £300,000...and that was a good 10 years ago! We are talking major companies with large stands, but still!
I did a 3 minute animation for Weatherford and that was circa £25,000! I saw none of that of course
It does not happen so much now, but back then, the exhibits were bespoke, used for the week and then skipped, including all the visual displays and so on. I got my first Mac from there, it was being thrown out!
2 years ago a certain Audio/Visual company in Aberdeen were hirering out large Plasma display screens for £1000 a day! You could buy one for £2000.
There is business done, but not as much as you would think in volume. However, just because the deal is done (well initiated) in Aberdeen does not mean Aberdeen will see any of the money. Much of the manufacturing work is done abroad and a vast number of the exhibitors are not Aberdeen based.
The real winners are the hotels (one of our clients had to get a hotel in Banff, and is being charged, wait for this, £400 a night!) and the folk renting out their houses for the week. A 2 bedroom house in the Bridge of Doom for the week is around £6k.
Trouble with the whole show is that it is open to anyone. Pre register and you get in. What this means is that there are thousands of freeloaders who go and see how much free "stuff" they can get. Some of our designers went yesterday, got back to the office and laid all the freebies out on the desk to see who had "won". Walk around the place and I would say a good 75% have no say what so ever in a company buying something. Of the rest, half of them may be in a position to influence a purchase, leaving a very small amount of people who can actually do business.
I hate the place!!
One of the lads here took 2hrs and 20mins to get to the main road last night. We can see the road from the office!!
