When you exhibit at a trade show, you’re setting up a special place to which you hope to draw an audience for a performance in which you will create an engaging and memorable experience for them. It’s theater.
Every Leader is an Artist by Michael O’Malley and William F. Baker contains a useful discussion on how to think about stagecraft within a business context. They point out that putting on a successful performance requires us to think about how we’re going to capture attention to draw an audience and how to create a sense of anticipation that focuses their attention on what we think is important for them to notice and remember as well as how to create an experience on stage that will maintain that focus through the performance.
“Creating something alluring doesn’t occur by accident. Once a place has been framed by its physical attributes, and the expectant audience is positioned within the observational space, something has to happen. In addition, that something has to be different from what is routinely available in our daily lives. We attend the theater in anticipation of new, arresting experiences....A host of other aids, notably referred to as mise en scene (‘putting on stage’), contributes to the total experience by directing onlookers’ attention to the production through nonverbal means: the set, the positioning and movements of the actors, the music, the costumes, the props, the lighting, and so forth. They are all used in combination to create a distinctive and memorable world that enlivens the content of the action and intensifies our experiences.”
It is in creating the allure that captures the audience’s attention and brings them to your stage in anticipation of your performance that Restaurant Daily News can be a big help. Your ad in the daily reaches your potential audience to capture their attention in the morning before they reach the convention center and the exhibit hall where you’re putting on your show. Your editorial material focuses their attention on what’s important for them to know about you and creates that sense of anticipation so that they arrive at your booth with an aroused interest in what you’re going to show them.
Just as no theater company would arrive
in your hometown to put on their show without advertising the
upcoming attraction, you also shouldn’t rely on the quality of your
show alone to draw your audience. As O’Malley and Baker point out,
arts organizations actively regulate the anticipatory process and
reinforce excitement: “The anticipation often is enhanced by a
preparatory hook such as an advertisement that plants an idea that is
difficult to get out of one’s
head about the future encounter.”
Restaurant Daily News is your best choice of a vehicle to do this
during NRA. The show daily is cost-effective, thoroughly distributed
in a wide variety of places to reach a potential audience before they
arrive at McCormick Place and is unique in offering you editorial
space as a means of building anticipation in your target buyers for
the experience that you will offer them once they reach your booth.
Time is running out to place your advertisement in Restaurant Daily
News. Call 520.721.1300 today!
Restaurant Daily News is a publication of Oser Communications Group, an independent publishing company not affiliated with the National Restaurant Association. It is not an official publication of the NRA show.
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