For years there has been a critical demand within the sign industry for a book on the structural engineering of signs. This comprehensive text more than meets that demand -- it exceeds it. Sign companies, ...
A Chinese sign show wasn't greatly different than an ISA Sign Expo.
I received an e-mail from Haifeng Wang, the editor of China Sign magazine, on May 10. She told me a Hong Kong-based magazine was stealing our articles, photos and all, and translating and publishing them. Darek Johnson's international acclaim may have grown in the process.
A day later, Haifeng invited me to speak at the 12th Shanghai International Ad Technology & Equipment Exhibition (I'll refer to it as "The Show"). Arrangements were made, and I took the 16-hour flight from Chicago to Shanghai on June 26 for the three-day exhibition.
Here are some of my impressions about The Show, the Chinese sign industry and China itself, as presumptuous as that might be, based on three days of empirical investigation.
Before I left the United States, I researched The Show on the English-language website of Gray Business Promotion and was quite surprised to read that 98,000 people attended the 2004 show. I don't believe that's true for the 2005 show. Although it was spread across four buildings, and seemed about the size of an ISA international show, The Show didn't appear to have attracted even twice the record 21,000 that the most recent ISA Sign Expo drew. Again, I would essentially equate the two shows. The day I spoke, as part of an all-day seminar series, approximately 60 people attended, so there weren't any other show proceedings that would have kept people from the exhibit hall.
The Show very much reminded me of an ISA Sign Expo. The biggest distinction is my guesstimate that 80% of the exhibitors were Chinese, and only 20% were companies we would see at an ISA show. And yes, large-format digital printers dominated; also, LEDs were everywhere. Even though neon proliferates outside the hall on Shanghai buildings, neon-product exhibitors are even more scarce than in the United States. I saw two. Exhibitors approached attendees much more agressively than is done in the United States.
Did you enjoy this article? Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
