ACCM Show Daily: By the Numbers May 5, 2006 6:03 PM
, By Mark Del Franco
JobZone
Search and post jobs for the Multichannel Merchant. Including jobs for brand & agency marketers, e-commerce, catalog marketers, ops & fulfillment, direct marketing and more.
For all the numbers that show organizers like to throw at you, the biggest number this year is one. This is the first Annual Conference for Catalog & Multichannel Merchants (ACCM).
Granted, for the previous 22 years, this same conference—copresented by MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT magazine and the Direct Marketing Association—existed as the Annual Catalog Conference. The name change acknowledges that only a very few companies use a print catalog as their sole marketing channel. Companies that started with a print catalog or a brick-and-mortar store or as a manufacturer or an online-only merchant have become multichannel merchants to satisfy the shopping preferences of the customer.
But back to the numbers... This year’s conference offers nine content-rich session tracks, including one especially for retailers new to print and Web cataloging. There are six Executive Forums, and two keynote presentations. All told, 175 speakers will be discussing a broad range of multichannel topics, from search engine marketing to catalog production, from cross-channel merchandising to b-to-b creative.
What’s more, 12 consultants were scheduled to review dozens of catalogs during the Catalog Critiques earlier today, while another six were plugged in and ready to review attendees’ Websites.
In the Exhibit Hall, 262 companies will be on display at 420 booths. That’s up slightly from last year’s show, at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, FL, where 260 companies occupied 419 booths. During the three-day event, show organizers expect some 4,400 attendees to walk the Exhibit Hall floor.
As for the venue, Chicago’s McCormick Place attracts 3 million visitors annually. It consists of three buildings: the North Building, the South Building, and Lakeside Center. The buildings have a total of 2.2 million sq. ft. of exhibit space, including 1.6 million contiguous sq. ft., making it the nation’s largest convention center—or roughly the equivalent of 36 football fields. Among Lakeside Center’s features: a 45,000-sq.-ft. ballroom, a north-to-south divider wall in the 300,000-sq.-ft.exhibit hall, an outdoor waterfall cascading from Level 3 to ground level, and the recently renovated 4,249-seat Arie Crown Theater.
