Feature: Long Island Business News

Mar 17, 2009

Conventions are about more than setting up a booth

by Ambrose Clancy  |  Published: March 11, 2009

Everything changes, and if you’re not quick enough to realize that, change will run over you and keep right on going.

That’s the guiding principle behind Mike Benti’s Dynamic Display, a four-decades-old Ronkonkoma trade show consultant, exhibit designer and manager.

In the late 1960s  a couple of artist customers came to Benti’s father asking for help in preparing for exhibitions.

“That’s how we got into presentations,” Benti said, adding that the business really started to take off in the 1980s.

In October, Dynamic Display landed the sole distribution rights for Long Island, Queens and Brooklyn for Nimlok, a trade show exhibition manufacturer with 200 distributors in 56 countries.

Benti’s customers, who include, Globecomm, Newsday, Atlantis Marine World and other Long Island companies, will now have state-of-the-art materials for their exhibition booth because of the Nimlok deal, he said.

Despite the killer economic hurricane, Benti noted that promoting your product or service at a show is still one of the best ways to grow. According to TradeShow Week, an industry publication, attendance was down 1.3 percent last year over 2007, but the Trade Show Exhibit Association said attendance was up 3 percent over the same period.

Another industry monitor, The Center for Exhibition Industry Research, reported that “audience interest factor” was very strong last year, with 80 percent of attendees at trade shows saying they were seriously engaged with exhibitors.

Dynamic Display has changed with the times, saving exhibitors, especially large companies, money in showing their wares, Benti said.

Catching the trend in exhibit construction, Dynamic Display, through its deal with Nimlok, can now offer light, inexpensive, aluminum modular exhibits, replacing the old construction method of using wood and heavy metal parts.

“Globecomm, for example, would fill up 15 crates of material for an exhibit to be shipped to a trade show, with each crate weighing anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 pounds,” Benti said. It was enormously expensive to move these behemoths long distances or overseas.

“Now with aluminum, the support structures are lighter and not as large, and Globecomm can get their shipping down to three crates, which is a huge savings,” he added.

If a company does 12 shows a year, they break even on cost after the fourth show, Benti said.

Dynamic Display works with a client to design the exhibit and then the plans are sent to Nimlok’s facility outside Chicago where the exhibit is manufactured and assembled. They then send the disassembled exhibit back to the client or to Dynamic Display.

“We’ll set it up for them, stage it and if they want any changes like adding graphics, we’ll do it and then they ship it to the shows,” Benti said.

But creating an exhibit is the last step in a process, Benti said. “We emphasize to our clients that we want to help them determine qualitative goals,” Benti said. “So many people just go to an event, set something up and then say, ‘Wow, that trade show stunk. It didn’t work for us.’”

Potential exhibitors should realize that trades shows can save a company up to 40 percent compared to a person-to-person sales call if done effectively, Benti said.

The problem is exhibitors are afraid of change and continue to do things the way they’ve done for a decade or more, Benti said. “Everyone’s different. We sit down with them and establish important goals and then we design around what they want to do.”

Calling off exhibiting at trade shows doesn’t make sense, even in a recession, Benti believes. “It’s committing suicide.”