What you get out of an event is roughly equal to what you put into it.
great ideas are easy
How am I doing coach ??
How are you doing?
Having great ideas
can be easy... where most people struggle is distinguishing them from the bad ideas.
Assume for the moment that it just occurred to them last week to promote this idea? Should they have refrained from publicizing the job fair at all in deference to potential attendees who now don't have enough time to plan to travel to the show in Las Vegas from the Philippines ($2000 r/t airfare, $650 hotel, $155 DEMA regstration, ~$300 in meals and other expenses) in order to apply for a job that pays $18,000 a year?
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Or were you thinking of the guy from Honduras - who's airfare would be marginally less expensive than the guy the Phillipines - who is now scrambling to arrange ~$2,000 in travel in order to apply in-person for the Dive Shop Assistant job back home that pays $6,000 a year?
DiveNewswire WORKS: Dive shop assistant
Or - call me crazy - but do you think that POSSIBLY they are smart enough to realize that NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON would specifically travel to DEMA for this particular event? Irrespective of how much time, effort, and money they put into promoting it.
Perhaps - and I'm just thinking out loud here - they are smart enough to realize that the target audience for both the event and the press release is actually limited to those people who were already planning to attend DEMA?
If they were that smart - let's just blue-sky this for a bit - they may also be smart enough to know that the best timing to hit attendees for any conference with information like this is within two-three weeks or so of the date people leave to attend the conference -- which is when most conference attendees really start to plan their own agenda for what they want to look into while attending the conference. Any earlier and people don't really pay attention or forget. So, with attendees leaving for DEMA on the 18th it would seem that the best time to issue such a press release would be... let's see... oh, somewhere between the last week of October and the first week of November.
Now, I've only worked for companies that have handled planning for a few dozen trade shows... a year... every year... for the past 20+ years... so I might be off base here, but given that the purpose of the idea is more than likely limited to generating some interest among those potential employers and employees
who were already planning to attend DEMA to stop by booth 1613 while there (that would have been my recommendation to a client) the potential your ideas to produce a positive ROI is exceedingly low, relative to the cost and effort necessary execute them.
If, as you assert, you "get out of an event roughly what you put into" that would mean that attending an event is a break-even proposition at best. If that's the case, why would any company go to the time, effort, and expense to exhibit at a trade show? I would never advise a client to do
anything for a trade show - including attending - that doesn't have highly leveraged return. Anything that increases the already significant cost and effort associated with attending that doesn't greatly leverage that spend... is a waste of time and money. Anything that's easy to do, inexpensive to implement, and has potential to drive targeted traffic among people already planning to attend... makes all the sense in the world.
So, which ideas do you think provide that kind of leverage?
- your suggestions, which could cost thousands of dollars and take multiple people several months to execute
or
- issuing a simple, well-timed press release that took one person an hour to write