K beech!! You know where to find David k from coastline these days? He owes me on a couple broadcast deals. I know he’s hard to collect from.

A couple years ago Hustler told me they wouldn’t have a booth anymore, I’m not even sure if the have a b2b suite. A booth on the convention floor doesn’t help you sell any product, it’s all for show. Ad space in AVN used to make sense because it’s a trade magazine that goes out to adult video stores and you wanted a big presence so the video store owners would buy your companies vhs/dvds/toys. But now that everything is online, advertising in AVN has become a mystery to me.

With annual events it’s common to form separate corporations for contractual purposes so that leaves me with no clue who will pocket the AVN event revenue …I am sure the event planners and powers that be should walk away with a tidy payday unless they are running the event like a party with open bar and all you can eat table service.

Once an event meets their guest room block they get more comped guest rooms for Host (sponsoring) Committee members plus free or substantially reduced fees for reserved ballrooms and segregated secure merchandise rooms.

Merchandisers pay hefty up front fees for those segregated secure rooms close to the action and it doesn’t matter if the booth is a secure room, ten-top rectangle banquet table or facility provided locking kiosk …everyone pays a percentage of sales over and above fixed cost booth rental to the event organizers.

Most event booth contracts call for incremental increases to the non-refundable portion of rental with no refund after finalizing event materials with printer. Thirty day cancellations usually pay 50% of the fixed fee because there is still time to remove or change placement on event materials and resell (up sell premium) booth locations. Unless the event is tiny and loses its primary sponsor the event itself doesn’t suffer even if the final numbers aren’t as nice.

As for the second part of this …reducing advertising frequency or placement is often a result of exchanging discounted rates for a guaranteed minimum.

Despite the money trouble rumors certain to crop up in the coming days it makes sense for them to quietly walk away and take their business elsewhere until their contractual obligations with AVN have run their course. So whoever it is I’d treat money trouble rumors as poor loser sour grapes until or unless they stop paying their suppliers/personnel or start opening new lines of credit here there and everywhere.

If someone already paid, drops out, and they can’t get their money back then it is easy to assume that they are having financial problems that prevent them from doing the show. Instead of boycotting AVN they just give them less money for less publicity? If this is true and the company does not want to be known then they aren’t doing it out of protest. They may be playing it off as that though.

Does AVN even own these expos anymore aside from the name? (If that)

One can say “I’m not showing up” and they can say “You have to”. If there isn’t a contract forcing them to show that company can then say “OK”, not show up, and the expo is left with vacant floorspace that they can cover in advertisements. They don’t want that.

However, the noble thing to do would be to show up, build a booth reminiscent of a child’s lemonade stand, place a harmonica-playing toothless hobo in it, and have him wear a dirty Pornhub shirt. Paying performers to appear wouldn’t hurt .

Shalom