CONVENTION CRASHING: EXHIBITOR 2007

Thursday, March 29, 2007 | 7:16 a.m.

Simon Perutz walks around the show floor at Mandalay Bay and eyes his competitors' wares with cool detachment. He has, after all, been in this business for more than 25 years.

"See that?" he says. "That's very European. All the European stuff looks like that."

He's pointing at a minimalist sort of booth, one that's all metal frames at right angles, orange-red plastic panels and empty space, something I.M. Pei would toss off using an Erector set.

The booth is advertising itself. Really. Exhibitor 2007 is a convention convention, meaning it's a convention about conventions. Almost everything on display is advertising its ability to advertise. The signs are for signs. The promotional tchotchkes are promoting promotional tchotchkes. Entire booths are advertising their booth-ness.

Put simply: The exhibitors are exhibiting exhibit exhibits. (It's OK if you need to lie down at this point.)

Back to Perutz. His company, Nimlok, builds booths (style-wise, he prefers the American look, a curvier "organic" look). But booths are not just booths anymore. No, now it's messaging, too, meaning logos, banners, projectors, flat-screen televisions and whatnot. And it's all got to be crystal clear, because it takes about five seconds to walk past a convention booth.

Companies can demand a lot, Perutz says, because they're paying a lot. A cheap 20-by-10-foot booth might cost $20,000, and that's just the booth. The ground it's sitting on could cost eight, nine, ten thousand dollars per square foot. Around $200,000, and you're not even counting shipping and labor. All for something the customer hates doing.

"Most clients don't really like going to shows," Perutz says. "They're expensive, they have to leave home to go and then get stuck in a show all day."

But for sales leads, they go.

Over the years, Perutz has formed some opinions about what works and what's a waste of money. Lounge-type booths, with their spaced-out, comfy chairs are "a lot of expensive space for just doing nothing." Fuzzy fabrics add texture to a booth. People avoid two-story booths because they know they'll get stuck on the second story, trapped by a salesperson. Moving displays - water fountains, spinning metal things - catch people's eyes. And giveaway items are usually money lost.

(He lies! Don't listen to him! Keep giving away pens!)

Clients, generally speaking, don't know any of this, Perutz says, and need a booth salesperson to guide them.

"If you're good," Perutz says, "you'll end up with something totally different than what the client thinks they need."

Attack of the screen people

From his secret lair in Montreal, the French-speaking fortress of the frigid north, it's Pixman!

Well, OK. That's just the company name, and it's more like pixmen, guys wandering around with a screen-on-a-stick up over their heads and a computer strapped to their backs. Also, there's a Las Vegas office these days (you may have seen pixmen wandering around the Strip advertising "Stomp Out Loud").

But it is edgy street marketing, guerrilla marketing, says Francois Comeau, Pixman's creative director. It's marketing that can follow you upstairs, marketing you can't escape.

"With Pixman, you are in the face with the person," Comeau says, "and they cannot change the channel with the remote."

The services of a pixman cost about $250 an hour in North America, Comeau says. For that, some enterprising lad will strap the wireless-Internet-capable box to his back and wander around, holding out a keyboard, fliers or whatever.

"A lot of people think it's uncomfortable, but it's not. It just rests on the hips," pixman Kyle Morris says. "If I were to go running, though, that'd be a different story."

From the people who make Chuck E. Cheese sing

Comes Wendell, an animatronic unicyclist in a candy-stripe jacket who rolls totteringly atop a sign, gives your sales pitch and has more than 30 other functions .

"What I won't tell you is how he works," says Jody Van Meter, vice president of marketing for Garner Holt Productions. "Everybody's guessing, 'Is it a gyro?' 'Is it a magnet?' One person even guessed he was a balloon. He's not."

Wendell costs $3,500 a day , though that doesn't include programming and extra costuming. Wendell, you see, doesn't have to look like Wendell.

"He could be a woman," Van Meter says, "he could be a bear, he could be a product spokesperson."