Ask a commercial director which pharma events are growing and you will get the same four or five names, all of them large, all of them expensive, and all of them growing considerably more slowly than the answer implies.
Attendance is a vanity number, exhibitor retention is not
Delegate attendance is easy to grow and easy to overstate. Free passes, co-located events, student days and press accreditation all count. An organizer under pressure can add several thousand bodies to a headline figure without a single additional buyer walking the floor.
Exhibitors cannot be manufactured the same way. A company that books nine square metres has made a decision with a budget attached, and a company that books again the following year has made that decision twice.
A show can add 8,000 delegates and lose 200 exhibitors in the same year. One of those numbers goes in the press release.
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