The reason so much carpet is needed is that for every trade show, at every exhibition centre – from the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham to the Wales Millennium Centre to the Farnborough International Exhibition and Conference Centre – a new carpet is fitted. For two or three days it cushions the footsteps of attendees, guides them from zone to zone, absorbs their caffeinated flatus and the hubbub of their sales pitches and meetings. And then it’s rolled up, churned into pellets, heated and extruded to become car dashboards, plant pots, sunglasses. Manufacturers love it because it’s cheap, and they can say they’re using recycled plastic. It is all around us, right now, in the chairs in which we sit, the phones in our hands, in our toothbrushes, packaging our food. The trade-show carpet goes on forever.
The Confex has a Kantian purity: the ding an sich of corporate events. It has no separate theme or context, it is undiluted by anything outside itself. It is the place to experience the trade show as it really is, and Britain as it really is: a land of meetings and branded tote bags. At the beginning of the 18th century, half the population of England worked on farms. A few generations later we were, according to Napoleon, a nation of shopkeepers. Today we are a nation of delegates, a conference-based society. The economic contribution of the professional events industry is nearly five times that of all the country’s farms. “This,” the carpet man tells me, “is what most of the creative industry really looks like.”
The Confex is at the heart of this industry. It is where the people who put on trade shows find venues, staging, food, merchandise, lighting, furniture, executive entertainment and seamless transport solutions. It is where the lanyard class orders its lanyards.
Of the three lanyard suppliers I speak to, not one has heard of the phrase “the lanyard class”. The disdain on the political right for urban professionals and HR departments has not registered with the people cutting the fabric, and yet these British businesses feel its effects. One lanyard manufacturer tells me that a few years ago his company made tens of thousands of rainbow lanyards per year, but in the changing political climate, large businesses are less enthusiastic about Pride month. Government departments were a big customer, but they too have “cut right back”, or switched to a cheaper product imported from China.
At the gates of the Confex, silver orbs hang in the air, bouncing on the updraft from hidden fans. The words “thought bubble” are written on the orbs. Beyond them, a stand demonstrates how chocolate lollipops can be printed with corporate brands. In The Golden Bough, the Victorian anthropologist James George Frazer documents the ancient and widespread practice – from Europe to Japan to India to the Aztec empire – of devouring one’s god. The Logopop is the latest iteration of that ritual, a secular eucharist: the body of BP, the blood of Invesco Perpetual. Nearby, a machine creates an alcoholic vapour that you inhale through a straw. One of the Logopop staff asks if I can guess the flavour. Salted caramel seems a safe bet. She shakes her head. “Pornstar martini.”
I speak to a man standing beside a trade-show stand advertising his company, which makes trade-show stands. To emphasise the reflective nature of the edifice, the stand-builders have formed their company’s logo from a huge mirror. They can build a stand in two to six hours. The frames can be taken apart and reused, but the Foamex panels that form the walls quickly become scuffed. We look across the Confex floor, a town erected in a morning. About a quarter of everything here will be thrown away at the end of the show, he tells me.
The Foamex panels allow every surface in the Confex to be covered with language, much of it arcane. One stand declares itself to be the place where Rigid Legacy Systems Are Replaced by Flexible Modern Technology; another asks you to Love Your Visitor Lounge. Dream With Us, invites another. Not Just Bags, claims a stand that is absolutely covered in bags. A stand the size of a one-bedroom flat says: “We Make Cool Shit”. The walls of the stand are Perspex, filled with bright yellow balls; are they the cool shit? Is the cool shit inside the balls? A marketing executive explains: the cool shit is “mostly PowerPoint presentations”.
Shit is rarely discussed at trade shows, with the exception of the World Plumbing Conference, and yet it is one of the key logistical challenges. When tens of thousands of highly caffeinated businesspeople assemble in a single building, even state-of-the-art facilities may struggle to cope with the faecal load. The atmosphere in the gents is thick, unacceptably humid, but even here the work of the trade show goes on. From the next cubicle I hear a grunt, a splash and a soft digital chime as a Confex delegate, maximising his productivity, despatches a stool and an email at exactly the same time.
Back on the conference floor, a man is thumping a drum. He tells me drumming boosts corporate performance; he has drummed at the house of the CEO of the food chain Leon. He has drummed with the sales teams from Google, and in a hotel in Manchester he drummed with 250 Kellogg’s executives. Across the gangway, a man who sells LED lightboxes looks on, visibly upset at having been allocated a stand directly opposite someone who spends several hours a day tunelessly slapping a bucket.
In a netted-off space, thumping music fills the air and a huge screen shows an AI-generated video of an astronaut dancing on the moon. On the floor, a swarm of small drones sits waiting for take-off. The drones can form your company’s brand in mid-air. As we wait for the display to begin, the man in front of me asks the woman next to him, “Do drones interest you?” She pauses for a moment to consider. “Well, no,” she says.
The drones are only the beginning of the amusements on offer. Everywhere, there are interactive games and team-building experiences themed around The Traitors and Harry Potter. A stand is done up as a giant sandcastle. Frowning men use remote-controlled toy diggers to try to pick up business cards. A group of adults whoops as one of them wins a soft toy from a machine. A man throws ball after ball at a basketball arcade game, the machine trilling encouragement. Even the meetings are made cute, playful, reimagined as “Braindates”.
For those who tire of infantilising activities, there is a Calm Hub, where they can put on headphones and listen to a talk on Holding It Together On Site, or receive instructions on Grounding Before The Day Gets Away With You. Four people sit on the Calm Hub’s deeply cushioned benches; three of them are on their phones, scrolling. Delegates who feel insufficiently coddled can repair to the nearby SensoryCalm Quiet Room, an office in which the lights have been dimmed and a soothing fragrance dispersed. There are wellness magazines, but it is too dark to read them. A woman reclines on a large beanbag covered with soft synthetic hair, her phone held in front of her face, her thumb pushing restlessly at the LinkedIn app.
At one end of the show floor there is, inevitably, an AI and Data Zone. A man tells me his AI service can take almost all the work out of attending a trade show – the research, the scheduling, the note-taking and summarising – leaving human attendees free to nibble branded edible balloons and play games under fake trees in a room the size of an aircraft hangar. Behind him, on a screen, is a vision of a possible future: AI agents attending digital conferences. Like many industries, perhaps, the trade show is destined to end in a data centre, in a building silent but for the whirring of fans. But not yet. At the exit to Confex a sign reads: “See you at the next one.” This carpet will be replaced within days for an ophthalmology conference, and then again for the Cloud and Cyber Security Expo, then the Baby Show, then the Recruitment Agency Expo, and then PestEx, the UK’s premier event for exterminators.
Is this work? Is this our economy? A British politician will always prefer to have their photo taken in a factory rather than an office. They disdain their own “email jobs” and gaze longingly at the great German Mittelstand of small businesses making high-quality car parts and electronics. Work, they think, is the manful creation of goods. They cling to Adam Smith’s idea of productive labour (making things) over unproductive labour (doing things). But the real economy does not care for such nostalgic delusion. In the real world, almost all of Britain’s work – 83 per cent of our jobs, 82 per cent of our GDP – is in services, and we are unusually, disproportionately good at it, the world’s second-largest services exporter. Our economy runs on intangibles: finance, law, accountancy, hospitality. Events, dear boy – synergistic, actionable, professionally catered events. The carpet changes and the stands are rebuilt, but the trade show goes on and on.
by Will Dunn, The New Statesman | Read more:
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