Attended SPE’s (Society of Petroleum Engineers) ATCE (Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition) last week in Houston, which had roughly 10,000 attendees and about 500 exhibitors. ATCE targets a more technical crowd consisting mainly of scientists, engineers, and students in related fields. It’s a sharp contrast to other shows I’ve attended – less flashy, no double-decker booths, booth babes, magicians, or wheel of fortunes. It’s just not that kind of show. It’s a show that gives exhibitors a platform to showcase their latest wares to an audience that is interested in reservoir description and dynamics, drilling and completions, and production & operations. The show had a diverse amount of exhibitors from gas guns, to structures, to computer software and modeling. I would take small sound bites of what was being said in booths around me and all seemed to give honest talks about their products and solutions – pointed questions were answered with straight-forward facts. “Tech Talks” were the premier choice for driving steady traffic into booths. Most booths conducting these talks seemed to have the seats filled. It was hard to determine if attendees were there for the actual talk rather than the schwag they were going to receive at the end of the talk. I’d like to say it’s probably the former. There were quite a bit of students who attended this show, especially on the first day. 100% of these students were on the hunt to land a job. According to a resource of mine, because of the recent state in the industry, many of the graduates who actually had job offers just before graduation, had their offers rescinded. So as you can imagine, many of these students were at a lost and scrambling to figure out what to do next. Overall my observation of show attendance seemed to be low but I got confirmation that it was indeed the case from quite a few of exhibitors. Since most of the attendees actually work in Houston, most came in to attend one day of the show or just an afternoon rather than all three days. Coupled with the state of the industry, numbers were down. An appealing extra that I enjoyed from ATCE were the ENGenious presentations. ATCE had a small pavilion-style setting with seating and everyone at the show was welcome to listen in on ten minute presentations that were being given related to new technology. Some of the presentations were quite interesting. Besides working with my client, I spent my time observing booths and talking to various exhibitors. Again, since this show was more technical, the booths were modest in display and size. I don’t think I saw one booth that was 50’ x 50’ – most were either 10’ x 20’ or 10’ x 10’. The most extravagant I saw was from Baker Hughes – they had a barista/coffee bar area, lounge area with swanky furniture, and a few state-of-the-art show floor-sized monitors. The booth was tastefully done. Main motivators for exhibiting at the show were related to branding and networking. All exhibitors I spoke with said they have never had any direct business from the show but they attend yearly because they can expect to see the same people from the same companies attend and soon enough, there is recognition. At some point that recognition transforms into a sale.
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