Heli-Expo Show Day: When You Absolutely, Positively Cannot Be There

At Rotor & Wing, we are scheduled to attend 17 different helicopter-related trade shows in 2008. I like visiting my friends in the industry and having the chance to do business face to face, but I suspect you will agree that 17 different shows is too much for even the heartiest road warrior.

I also suspect that many of you feel the same way about trade shows... there are a lot of good shows dedicated to different aspects of the helicopter business all over the world that you might like to attend, if it were not for the fact that you also have the duties of a day-to-day job that still need to get done somehow. We all have to make trade-offs, and sometimes a very important show ends up on the cutting-room floor of our edited travel schedule.

Enter Show Day, a new publication from Rotor & Wing.

What you see on the facing page is Volume I, Issue I of an all-new publication we are rolling out. Each Show Day will be a compilation of all of the important news and press announcements from the first day of eight of the most important shows we will be attending in the coming months. These shows represent a cross-section of our marketplace — from niche markets to shows focusing on key geographic regions all over the world. What you see here is the Heli-Expo 2008 edition. Other Show Day publications will be produced for the Quad-A (Army Aviation Association of America) Annual Convention, the AHS (American Helicopter Society International) Forum 64, the ALEA (Airborne Law Enforcement Association) Conference and Exposition, the Farnborough Air Show (focusing specifically on helicopter news and vendors), Helitech 2008 in Portugal, AMTC ’08 (the Air Medical Transport Conference), and the Dubai Helishow.

Show Day is a huge bonus for vendors who want to get their messages out to our readers and subscribers and for readers who may not be able to attend each show that they would like.

Show Day solves a lot of problems for a lot of people. For our editorial staff, it gives us as much as 10 times more space in which to report on each of these major industry events. That is a huge bonus for vendors who want to get their messages out to people like you, our readers and subscribers. It is a bonus for you, our readers who may not be able to attend each show that you would like to attend. And it offers marketers a single, cohesive yet targeted approach toward trade show marketing in a very non-cohesive market.

We will not be binding every issue of Show Day into the middle of R&W and mailing it out to all of you as we have this month. We understand that every reader is not interested in every show we attend. This was simply our way of premiering the publication.

In the future, Show Day publications will be packaged with the next available issue of R&W and mailed to a targeted list of those of you who would seem to be the most interested in each particular edition. Top military personnel will receive the Quad-A edition. Top law enforcement and civil government subscribers will receive the ALEA edition, etc.

We look forward to providing this valuable additional editorial coverage throughout the year and we welcome your comments on this and for future editions of Show Day.