At the end of the PPAI Expo, we always have a greater sense of the state of the industry, whether that’s through the things distributors are talking about, the products on display in the supplier booths, the decorating trends we notice on samples, or what we’re hearing directly from the organization itself.
Dale Denham, who has been at the helm of PPAI as president and CEO since July 2021, sat down with us to discuss what he’s taking away from this year’s event, such as the organization’s approach to attracting the right people to the show, how it leads by example with its branding, and what distributors can look forward to in 2024 and 2025.
This year, PPAI implemented a fee for non-members attending, which Denham says made for fewer attendees overall, but the ones who did come meant business, rather than seeing it just as an opportunity to fill a bag full of free stuff.
“I’m not afraid to reduce our attendance,” Denham says. “I am afraid to have the wrong attendance.”
Denham says that suppliers were happy with the conversations they were having with distributors, as it was more centered around serious business opportunities than just “trick-or-treating.”
Attendee feedback also played into his answer when asked about what the expo can reveal about the near future. He says it’s tough to predict, as one person will say one thing and another person will have a different opinion.
“I’m not yet able to get a pulse on what is actually happening or going to happen,” he says. “But it is an election year, which is typically really good for our industry. We have pretty good expectations, But, what people are telling me is that they are expecting flat to slightly up, but nobody has the data to back that up. That’s what people are planning. To my knowledge, nobody has told me they’re planning for double-digit growth.”
Denham says that this is a byproduct of the rapid growth a lot of people within the industry have seen over the last couple of years, combined with the economy overall. The experts he follows predicted a strong 2025. So, what does that mean for the distributor?
“It means they should invest this year to be ready for next year,” Denham says. “Even if they are slow, they should take their time to prospect, get those accounts ready for when the time is right, and/or fix their systems and processes so that they’re ready for the bigger business coming in 2025. I don’t think this is a year to re-trench at all, but I do think it’s a year that you’re going to have to work a little harder to get the same amount of sales for some of these distributors. But they have to get ready for 2025, whether that’s prospecting to have new orders coming in 2025 or fixing their internal processes and systems.”
Looking around the show floor, if you really try your hardest to notice a difference, you might have noticed not different branding, but a more cohesive look around the convention center. Denham says that despite tweaking the brand’s color scheme and branding aesthetic during his tenure, the expo branding never matched, making the whole thing inconsistent.
And Denham says that, considering the association’s goal is to be a guiding force in the promo industry, it doesn’t look good if they don’t practice what they preach.
“This is the first time we’ve done Expo to match all of that branding,” he says. “And it’s so subtle most people don’t notice, but to us it’s dramatic. So you just look at that purple and you know it’s the PPAI booth. Intentionally, you see our purple and green, you know you’re at a PPAI event, and it has had an impact on the feel. … We believe our job to elevate the industry is to set the right example.”
“It’s kind of exciting, because we’re elevating everything that we do, and it’s showing up on our brand material, and it makes me very happy,” he continued. “What we had before wasn’t ugly. It was just inconsistent, and now everything is consistent.”
