Where in the world am I today?: Cruising in Tracy Arm Fjord, Alaska aboard the Golden Princess

I’d totally forgotten about mentioning Trade Shows as a great market to work in until I had a woman approached me at the Pacific National Exhibition while I was doing The Hot Dog Show. She asked if I’d be interested in being an animated ‘Pitch Man’ at a trade show that her company had coming up in October. I gave her my email address and sure enough a few days later she followed up on our original conversation with an inquiry as to what would be involved in employing me.

Now, as it turned out, this particular opportunity is a show where one distributor is putting on demos and introductions of new products for their existing clients, and not quite the same scenario as a full blown trade show, but it got me to thinking that this would make an excellent topic for a post.

The picture that accompanies this post shows me at one of the Travel Trade Shows that I’ve done for the Canadian Tourism Commission in China. For what ever reason, my goofy performance really seems to connect with the Chinese public and I’ve been very lucky to have been asked to gather crowds to the Canadian Exhibit Space on the show room floors of several different show in China.

Now there are trade shows for just about every industry under the sun. The travel/tourism industry, the computer industry, the toy industry, the car industry etc. etc. Each of these industry shows are typically the same. Exhibitors pay for exhibit space, the larger the space, the more it costs the exhibitor.

The basic purpose that all exhibitors are aiming to achieve is to sell their product to the people who attend these industry shows. As a performer you can vastly increase the exposure of a specific exhibitor’s product if you are able to gather a crowd and create a dynamic interactive sales pitch for the product. This often involves creating a custom script that covers several key points that the exhibitor wants mentioned and incorporating them into a dynamic show that takes advantage of everything you already do as a performer. Basically you’re creating a hybrid of what you normally do the sales pitch for an industry related product.

My friend Anders Boulanger has been pro-actively trying to get more work in this market and took a course offered by a performer who had done trade show work for years. In a recent email to me he mentioned these very astute points –

1. What I have been taught is that you create a crowd, convey a message and collect the leads.
2. When I work for companies I am able to charge a message integration fee. That’s because I also “write the script” and create the metaphors I will use to get the benefits across.
3. I urge companies to let me do some of my regular schtick so that I can “leverage their ability to communicate their message.”  The more I can make my skills an asset the more value I have and the more I can charge. I’ve found that you must tell companies what they want because most companies have no idea what they are doing.

Keep in mind this isn’t a market to look into if you don’t like working hard. At a typical full blown trade show you can expect to do a show every hour and can often end up doing between 6 and 10 shows in a day depending on the length of the show and the needs of the exhibitor. The days are long, but the rewards are also size-able, so if you’re able to convince a company that your ‘their guy’ when it comes time to sell their product at a trade show you can make big bucks in this market!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under Job Opportunities, Performance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.