Marketing Budgets Slashed Trade Shows Suffering

As the number of unmployed continues to rise the amount of people attending trade shows is plummeting.  Back in February the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority said almost 30,000 room nights had been cancelled as the result of trade show cancellation which was a record high.  The outlook does not look much brigher as we head into late Spring.

The biggest industries to cut back have been big pharma and of course the financials.  Both of these segments make up a huge percentage of the ad specialties business and consequently the trade show business.  As a result the entire trade show and promotional industries are suffering with widespread reports of layoffs and major sales hits.  A recent online poll indicated somewhere near a 25% drop in sales on average for both promo suppliers and distributors.  Firms such as Brown & Bigelow that are top performers in the industry hold the numbers close to the vest but it is widely expected that 2009 will see the first contraction in the marketing specialties industry in decades.  Whether or not that gets accurately reported by the underlying organization bodies is unknown as like the National Association of Realtors with their overly optimistic projections the agencies that oversee the promotional industry are often more optimistic than reality.

There is all sorts of news today that the economy is on the mend and we can expect a brighter future later this year.  That seems unreasonable given that mortgage delinquencies just got dramatically worse as reported by Equifax today.  Despite efforts to rewrite and modify so many mortgages a stunning 50% increase in loans greater than thirty days late occured last month.  Even prime mortgages are now falling behind and as the jobs continue to vanish it will only get worse.   Some economists took the recent jobs picture as an indication of the bottom without realizing what we are probably seeing is people giving up.  The jobs that are available are barely above the break-even point for many people who instead will opt for unemployment benefits.  Worse there are increasing reports that it is actually cheaper for particularly two incomes homes to have someone not accept a job because the costs of doing so in terms of daycare are too high.   I would think that 2009 will continue to be a horror show in the jobs market, real estate and finance sector and with that in mind 2009 will be a rocky year for most of us.