It happened right after the 2003 annual meeting — a revelation. In a debriefing after the event, Stacy Waymire and his staff at the Independent College Bookstore Association shifted their conversation to finding a new way to engage both exhibitors and attendees.

Stacy Waymire, executive director, Independent College Bookstore Association, Ashland, Ore.

"We thought: ‘Wouldn't it be great if instead of doing a traditional trade show, we set it up so buyers would have private appointments with vendors?’" recalls Waymire, executive director of the Ashland, Ore.?based association. "We thought we had an original idea," he says, laughing.

A few months later, they researched the idea on the Web and found an organization that was doing something similar. For Waymire, it was validation of the ICBA idea, so they began creating a new event — the Planned Retail Innovation and Marketing Exchange, or PRIMEtime — for the annual meeting.

Six years later, the model has been a huge success for ICBA, which has continued to refine its new marketplace, turning the traditional buyer-seller models upside down. The concept is catching on among more and more associations. In January, the Trade Show Exhibitors Association is launching its own hosted-buyer event, Face-to-Face Connections (see sidebar, page 14). In February, Meeting Professionals International will scrap its traditional trade show and replace it with a modified hosted-buyer event. And in 2011, both IMEX and Reed Travel Exhibitions are debuting hosted-buyer events in the U.S.

It wasn't an original idea, but ICBA's PRIMEtime was and is on the leading edge of a growing trend.

The Message was Clear: "you Need to Change"

The impetus for PRIMEtime came from exhibitors and attendees, who were not satisfied with ICBA's exhibition. Both sides told ICBA staff that they needed more value from the exhibition to justify the investment in time, money, and resources. "They were looking for that return on investment," Waymire says.

Once the idea was hatched, ICBA spent the next year figuring out how to make it happen. In the process, Waymire heard about a Cleveland-based company called Efficient Collaborative Retail Marketing, which had been doing private planning sessions since 1994. Waymire went to an ECRM event in his field as a buyer and saw firsthand how the model worked. "I thought, ‘We can do this,’" says Waymire, and ICBA proceeded to develop its own version for the 2005 annual meeting. Before going forward, they approached their most influential vendors and attendees and asked: "If we do this, will you come?" The key partners supported the idea.

The result was an exhibition hybrid: one day of the traditional exhibition and one day of the new PRIMEtime format. The hybrid model remained in place until 2008 when ICBA, citing the success of the hosted-buyer format, overhauled its show with PRIMEtime as the focus.

How it Works

PRIMEtime brings vendors out of the exhibit hall and into hotel rooms where they conduct 20-minute meetings with attendees, or buyers. PRIMEtime now has about 150 buyers and 75 to 80 vendors. Roughly 75 percent of the buyers are hosted. Over the course of the four-day conference, two days are carved out for PRIMEtime, with ICBA scheduling the private meetings. The other two days of the conference are dedicated to educational sessions.

PRIMEtime's product areas are academic resources (textbooks and course materials); apparel; backpacks and imprinted gifts; technology; and school and office supplies. "We let buyers qualify themselves on which products they are really interested in," Waymire says. "If you are not interested in widgets, then you don't need to see the people who sell widgets."

ICBA pays for buyers' airfare, ground transportation, food and beverage, and meeting registration. "It removes an enormous obstacle to getting buyers to the show," Waymire says. Paying the buyers' way seems like quite an investment, but it's not, when you consider the alternative. "There's tremendous overhead to the traditional trade show," he says, including the cost of renting the convention center, hiring a decorator, catering, and security, among other things. "We've reallocated those revenues to the buyer."

If a buyer skips any appointment with a vendor without a good excuse, the buyer is required to pay back the money that ICBA laid out for them to attend. ICBA officials are the judge and jury when it comes to determining what's an acceptable reason to miss an appointment. So far, nobody has missed an appointment without a good excuse.

The meeting rooms are provided as part of the vendors' registration. Vendors are charged a flat fee to participate, which is about five times more than what they would have paid for a traditional booth under the old trade show format. ICBA also offers a less-expensive option called PowerHall, where vendors set up 10-minute private meetings with buyers in pipe-and-drape booths in a hotel ballroom. The fee for PowerHall is roughly half that of PRIMEtime.

Additionally, ICBA offers a third venue called Marketplace, which is like a traditional trade show. It is open for 60- or 90-minute blocks, and there are no pre-scheduled meetings. However, all registered buyers participating in PRIMEtime and PowerHall have access to Marketplace. For vendors, Marketplace is half the cost of PowerHall and is much smaller. There are only about 20 companies that exhibit in Marketplace.

Overall, the number of vendors is about the same now as it was before 2005, but show profits have increased significantly because expenses have gone down and revenues have gone up, Waymire says.

The View from the Hired Help

In 2008, when ICBA decided to commit itself completely to PRIMEtime, it partnered with Efficient Collaborative Retail Marketing for help. Since 1994 ECRM has run more than 400 category-specific "planning session" events (as they call them) on everything from school and office supplies to health and beauty.

In 2008 ECRM did 70 private-planning session events on four continents, says Thom Randle, ECRM's vice president of strategic partnerships and industry affairs. ECRM runs its own conferences, which it calls Efficient Program Planning Sessions, but in recent years it has begun to outsource its model to other organizations. Associations can customize the ECRM model to fit their own meetings, which is what ICBA did when it partnered with ECRM in 2008.

In addition to experience, ECRM offered technology that would enable buyers and sellers to remain in contact after the meeting. ECRM's MarketGate software creates "a 365-days-a-year relationship around the event, connecting buyers and sellers before, during, and after," Waymire says.

Next Page: The View from Vendors and Buyers