CHICAGO — When Trade Show Executive (TSE) first launched the Young Professionals Corner in 2024, one of the first Resource Rundowns it published was the Events Industry Vocabulary 101: An Informal Guide to Understanding Event Lingo.
In it, events industry leaders shared what they thought were the most important acronyms and phrases to know when you’re just starting your career, but it’s time for an update with some more advanced terminology.
Let’s get class started.
First: Let’s Review Some OG Favorites
- EAC: Exhibitor Appointed Contractor or Exhibitor Advisory Council
- CVB: Convention and Visitors Bureau
- NPS: Net Promoter Score
- VAS: Value Added Services
- ICW: In Conjunction With
- Day Zero: The day before a show opens
- Double Decker: two-story display
- I&D: Installation and Dismantle
- DMC: Destination Management Company
- BEO: Banquet Event Order
- CWT: Calculated per Hundredweight (used to measure material handling)
- Drayage: The transportation and handling of exhibit materials from the loading dock to the booth space
- Bone Yard: Storage area on or near the show floor or general session area
- BOL: Bill of Landing, the document of form listing good to be shipped
What’s New?
As time’s gone on, new phrases have been popping up in the events industry, and we’re here to help you break them down!
Ecosystem Event: This type of event goes beyond the traditional definition of a trade show, which convenes an industry or niche verticals. An ecosystem event aims to bring together all of the players that touch a specific vertical, from investors and startups to experts and leaders to innovative companies and long-trusted brands. We’ve been seeing it so much, TSE wrote a whole article just dedicated to exploring the model.
PE: If you’ve been keeping up with M&A (merger and acquisition) news in the trade show industry, you’ve likely seen or heard the term PE thrown around. It stands for private equity, which are investment management companies that invest in private companies or take controlling stakes in public companies. Private equity firms are profit-driven and usually hold ownership in companies for less than 10 years.
ROI: Return on investment; seems simple enough. But, the definition of investment is evolving, and can extend beyond just financial investment and cost for participating. Investment has now come to encompass time, energy, resources and other trade-offs that participants to a live event must make to be at the event.
Neighborhoods or Zones: At a large event, some organizers are opting to design their show floor with groupings of companies that provide similar products and services all together.
Consultative Sales: The idea of consultative sales is for salespeople to engage in deep conversations with exhibitors and sponsors about their event objectives, and then selling offerings tailored to those objectives. Sometimes referred to as value-based selling or other names, this approach prioritizes deeper engagement with specific customers rather than strictly transactional interactions. While the approach has been adopted and adapted by plenty of organizations, RX has really led the charge of taking the term mainstream; and you can find more information about how RX executes its strategy here (check out the last question on page 34).
Shoulder Days: These refer to the days before or after an event. When bleisure (business + leisure) travel is up, attendees may opt to spend a few days before or after an event at the destination for some R&R.
Bolt-Ons: Speaking of shoulder days, bolt-ons refer to events that are attached to a flagship, large-scale event on either the front or back end of the official event dates — whether or not these bolt-ons are officially associated with the main event is another nuance. If they’re not, the industry has long-held the belief that they are parasitical, but even that sentiment has earned some challengers in recent years as the need to drive and prove high ROI for exhibitors has become a top-of-mind challenge, and unofficial bolt-ons can drive value for exhibitors/sponsors and attendees alike.
Agentic AI: Try as we may, it doesn’t appear that we are escaping AI. The newest (well, maybe not newest but very recent) thing spotted on the horizon with this technology that your executive leaders are likely looking at? Agentic AI, which are models that have the ability to carry out multiple systems with very minimal human interference/supervision. Not only can agentic AI produce content like generative AI can, but it can also use that content to do multi-step tasks.
Attendee Retention: This one may feel self-explanatory, but it’s growing in importance and in frequency of being talked about. Attendee retention for trade shows hovers around 30%, according to Freeman data, meaning of every 100 people at a show, only 30 are returning the next year. This is becoming a talking point because as workforce demographics change, and loyal audiences begin to retire and stop coming to shows, event organizers have a heightened focus on retaining younger attendees to maintain the size of their events and continue growing them sustainably.
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