PPB March 2021

The Inside Story On PPAI ExpoDirect-2-You A conversation with Alan Peterson, PPAI vice president, business development, and Ellen Tucker, CAE, PPAI director of business development and expositions, on all the behind- the-scenes decisions and planning that went into creating the PPAI Expo Direct-2-You. When was the decision made to go virtual and when did your actual planning begin? Ellen Tucker: We started preparing for the possibility of having a hybrid or fully virtual show in April 2020 and started looking into and evaluating options then, but we didn’t make decisions or start planning specifics until we knew if the in-person show would be possible. The board was informed that we would be doing some level of a virtual component early in the year and approved the fully virtual event in September, and we announced it to the industry that month. Alan Peterson: We had a plan to do a live show, so we felt like we needed to have a virtual plan as well. As we were negotiating with Mandalay Bay and learned that we could not have an in-person show, that’s when the virtual show plans really ramped up and we began having meetings on a weekly basis. What needs were you trying to fill with a virtual show? Peterson: Our primary need was to bring distributors and suppliers together, but it was also about still wanting to own that Expo experience and those Expo dates in January. Nothing had been done yet in the industry in terms of a virtual event on steroids. There were good virtual events but nothing like what we had in mind. Tucker: The three pillars Expo is built on every year are to provide the industry knowledge, community and a forum to do business. The latter is at the heart of our trade show—it’s about bringing suppliers and distributors together—but also key to the event are knowledge and community. The community piece is a bit harder to accomplish on a virtual platform. But we kept those three pillars in mind throughout our planning to remind us why we were doing this show. Peterson: There’s an expectation for Expo in terms of all the things you can do at an in-person show—professional development, the show floor, pop-ups and prizes. Our goal was to try to recreate that live experience in a virtual format—that was our goal from the start. The Expo has a reputation and a brand that we wanted to make sure we maintained both as an important event kicking off the year and as an effective solution to get the industry through to January 2022. How did you evaluate virtual show platforms? What type of questions did you ask potential providers? Tucker: This process, from a broad perspective, began for us in late April. We put together an internal team consisting of 10 or so PPAI employees from various departments; almost all departments had at least one person involved. In addition, allowing us to take a full-picture approach to the evaluation also helped us to be efficient in evaluating platforms for our smaller professional development events such as Technology Summit and Product Responsibility Summit. We started with a list of 30-plus non-industry-specific platforms and narrowed that down to the ones from which we wanted a demo. From there, we asked questions about everything from how much bandwidth they could prove to be capable of handling and what type of networking opportunities they offered, to the customization and capabilities available on the platform. The reporting capabilities for our exhibitors was important, as was the ability to live-stream and provide education on-demand—all of these things came into play. Another big consideration was registration and how we’d be able to verify attendees because it was and is important to us that our show remains closed to those outside of industry suppliers, distributors and business services companies. Peterson: We whittled our list down to two providers. One had good bandwidth and customization opportunities but what SAGE brought us was depth of supplier information including videos and products. We knew we had to make it as easy as possible for suppliers to upload and create their booth experience. We didn’t have the resources for customer service to help suppliers create Ellen Tucker, CAE Alan Peterson PPAI Expo Direct-2-You | FEATURE | MARCH 2021 | 31