Well timed to follow Fast-and-Wide's recent blog on trade shows, the ACETA industry association has turned its attention to the crowded calendar of trade shows in Australia.

Officially formed earlier in 2011, ACETA aims to collect data and comments to support its discussions with main show organisers. To achieve this, ACETA has launched a trade show survey, inviting members and non members to participate. The survey can be found at the ACETA website and is open until 31 October 2011.

One of the primary reasons for the establishment of ACETA was the increasing concern across the sector about the amount of money being asked to invest in an ever-increasing number of trade shows, with exhibitors complaining that the return isn’t there because delegates are being spread too thinly across too many shows.

‘Australia is a robust market, but with only 22m inhabitants, plus visitors from places such as New Zealand, it’s the law of diminishing returns,’ says Ian Harvey, Executive Officer of the Australian Commercial and Entertainment Technologies Association. ‘We can’t keep expanding the number of shows and expecting to do substantially more business from them. Not every show is annual, but many are.

Companies are having to make tough decisions about which to attend and which to pass on. Budgets are finite, visitor numbers aren’t growing sufficiently to justify the additional cost of attending yet more shows. ACETA believes that somewhere something is going to have to give and has taken on the responsibility of addressing this issue. ‘We need the sector to participate in the survey in order to provide the data and commentary to ensure we take those discussions down the right path…’

In order to encourage an obvective result, responses to surveys are confidential and can’t be tracked to any individual.

More: www.aceta.org.au