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MEETinLEEDS is the brand name of the conference, meeting, training, and events facilities of the University of Leeds.
The University offers a wide range of conference facilities: from a simple day meeting to a fully-managed residential conference, and all close to the heart of Leeds. Contact us on 0113 343 6100.
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Making an Exhibition of Myself
As 2014 dawns, I have been thinking of how the conference business has changed in the last 20 years….
Back in 1993 when I came into the academic conference sector, computers were few and far between (we had just one in our department), and very basic, with dark screens and green writing, and Windows were things to watch rain drip down. We wrote letters…real letters, with typewriters (typewriters were things with keyboards connected to sort of hammers with letters on…never mind, Google it!). Oh yes, and we had to go to the library to research anything because the World Wide Web was a year or two away!
Back in those days, when we’d only just heard of Bill Clinton, the final episode of Cheers was in the can, and Whitney Houston was topping the charts screeching “I Will Always Love You” (I know these things because I Googled them), I used to exhibit at seven or eight venue shows. These included Venuemasters, EIBTM, Confex, Chase, HRD, and the Chartered Institute of Professional Development (CIPD).
These days at MEETinLEEDS we routinely attend only one, very focused exhibition (Venuemasters, 14th May 2014, at the Earl’s Court Ibis) and the rest, like Bill and Whitney, are history.
I actually did tot up the number of exhibitions I’ve done over these twenty years and I reckon it’s an astounding 60 at a cost probably well in excess of £150k! Although this seems a high cost, we did see a lot of business coming from exhibitions when they were at their zenith, and in fact I can remember one single enquiry returning £150k of revenue.
What will the picture be in another 20 years? It’s anybody’s guess, but thinking very positively, One Direction will be no more…..