If "a good exhibition is no different from a good magazine," what can this company teach us?

Its founder believes all your attention should go to the audience first.

In October 2017, an exhibition called The Best of British Show opens in Shanghai, showing specialty goods from the UK, from food to travel. In December comes the Dream Home Lifestyle Show, a copy of London's 108-year-old Ideal Home Show, given over to everything to do with the home.

Both are run by Media 10, a company founded in 2003 in Essex, England, by 10 founders. It now runs 35 exhibitions and 10 magazines across the UK, China and South Africa. Lee Newton, its founder and executive director, dropped out of high school, went into trade media at 20 and, after a few years at a publishing company, left to start his own media company selling database services to trade publishers.

A few years later another British publisher bought Newton's company. As its CEO he went on to launch more magazines and websites, among them Icon, a magazine about architecture and design that Media 10 still runs today. Mike Dynan, now Media 10's head in China, became Newton's partner around the same time.

After stepping down from the management job at his own company, Newton had another business idea. He went to Britain's Channel 4 to buy the rights to the hit home-renovation program Grand Design, and publish a design magazine called Grand Design Magazine.

Making and promoting those architecture and design magazines got Newton and his partners into design, architecture and home-improvement trade shows all over the world. That experience became the foundation of Media 10. "We knew exactly what kind of show we wanted to put on," Dynan told QDaily in an interview.

In 1908 the Daily Mail started the Ideal Home Show at Olympia in London as a marketing campaign for the paper. To sum up what the show was for, it quoted a line from King George V: "The foundations of national glory are set in the homes of the people."

By our own day its decline was plain — "one monotonous experience, badly managed." In 2009 the 24-day show drew just 4,900 people on its opening day. Vogue Kitchens, a custom cabinetry brand that had exhibited 10 years running, said in an interview that it had "already given up on exhibiting in 2010," because the organizers "simply weren't bringing visitors into the show."

In early 2010, Media 10 announced it would buy the 100-year-old Ideal Home Show from DMG Media, the events company under the Daily Mail, and repackage it.

"I have a rule about how I do things: if you want to make money out of a show, you spend heavily early on, build a reputation, and make yourself a brand people trust," Newton said in an interview. "Treat a show this way: its entrance is the magazine cover. Every 'you are here' board inside the show is an inside page, and the information has to follow a clear logic. We make an event the way we'd make a magazine feature — it has to stay on one particular subject."

Put all your attention on the audience first, Newton argues — for a magazine, that means the readers — rather than on exhibitors, sponsors or venue suppliers. Start from the audience, and everything about designing and planning a show falls into place on its own.

Asked at a press conference in Shanghai what he had actually paid for the Ideal Home Show, Newton dodged with a bit of English slyness: he said nothing, only smiled, gave the reporter a reproachful look and patted him on the arm.

What is clear is that he bought at a bad moment. Neither exhibitors nor consumers had much attention to spare for consumer shows just then; they would rather get product news from television advertising, which kept getting cheaper. And the 2008 financial crisis had left everyone low. The trade show site Exhibition World, in a year-end 2010 report on the British exhibition industry, said that "in 2010 the UK exhibition industry was barely larger than it had been in 1992."

But Media 10 seemed willing to spend big.

Lee Newton set out to build an "immersive exhibition experience." For the new Ideal Home Show his staff designed a complete city "block": five full-size buildings, with streets and gardens running through them, plus seven other themed zones. Every room was designed and decorated down to the detail and fitted out with the newest appliances, kitchens and bathroom fixtures.

"At a show you have to bring in the products and brands consumers can't easily buy the rest of the time — the newest and oddest, or the ones with a special offer. That's what pulls consumers in," Dynan said. They also built an edible chocolate garden, Britain's first "floating" office, and puppy houses in the latest styles.

Which was, oddly enough, exactly what the Daily Mail had done in its day.

With a newspaper's instinct, the Daily Mail had caught the British longing for an "ideal home." People came in crowds to look at finished show homes and gardens with fountains and ponds, and to buy the newest decorating materials, furniture and kitchenware at the show. The Ideal Home Show was thought of as a consumer show that was both "educational and entertaining," and as the Daily Mail's "most successful social experiment."

Media 10 went on to succeed, and the numbers say so: running seven days shorter than the old format, it drew 250,000 visitors, 100,000 more than in 2009.

Media 10 moved step by step into more trade shows thrown off by design and lifestyle. In 2012 it bought 100% Design and quickly made it one of London's most important design trade fairs; in 2014 it bought the Cake & Bake Shows and the eyewear fair 100% Optical; in 2015 it launched the luxury show Luxury Made.

"Media 10's own staff handle almost everything about a show — sales, design and planning, marketing. Each show has an operating team of about 20 people," Dynan said.

Newton and Dynan had in fact come to China as early as 2007. "Dynan and I walked the streets of Shanghai for a full 10 days, trying to study the city's culture and its exhibition business, and to work out what Media 10 could do in Shanghai with what we already had," Newton said. "In the end we didn't find the right opening, but we saw a fast-growing emerging market."

The "right opening" Newton meant was, more precisely, the right Chinese partner. It took another seven years to appear.

The key figure was Philip Dodd, a British editor and critic who had also worked as a BBC broadcaster. In the late 1980s Dodd advised the head of the BBC's music and arts department, planning culture and arts programs and writing scripts. He is best known for joining the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) as director in 1997 and pulling the institution — which at one point carried a £1 million deficit — out of trouble, lifting attendance from 25,000 in 1997 to 75,000 in 2004.

The ICA under Dodd was also the first British arts institution to hold a contemporary art exhibition in China, back in 1999. In 2004 he left to found Made in China, a cultural consultancy devoted to cultural and artistic exchange projects between China and Britain. Made in China was a strategic adviser to Art Basel Hong Kong and took part in the 2007 Shanghai eArts Festival, among other projects.

Over the decade and more after the end of the 20th century, Dodd watched China's art trading market grow richer year by year, and museums, galleries and private collections appear in numbers. He saw quickly how much demand that enormous market would one day have for design products.

"In a country like China, with 600 million middle-class consumers, this is where the future and the nature of design will be redefined," Dodd said in an interview in 2013. "And Design Shanghai amounts to a test of the water in the Chinese design market."

Dodd went to Media 10, which knew how to run design shows, and with Shanghai Art Fair International Exhibition Co. and Shanghai International Culture, Film & TV (Group) Co. as local Chinese partners, held the first Design Shanghai at the Shanghai Exhibition Center on West Nanjing Road.

Because it filled a hole in the design corner of China's exhibition business, Design Shanghai became at once the largest international design trade fair in the country.

The first show's theme was "When East Meets West," sponsored by the British car brands Jaguar and Land Rover. Drawing on what it had built up in Britain, Media 10 brought in more than 150 design brands. Of those, 90% were coming to China for the first time, among them famous furniture makers like Alessi, Magis, Fritz Hansen, Tom Dixon and HAY — names that normally turned up only at the Milan Furniture Fair or in interior design magazines. Through the show, Media 10 brought the people directly in charge of these brands, and their designers, to the Chinese market.

"A lot of foreign brands are nervous about coming into the Chinese market," Dynan said. "Because the market is so big, and there are regional and cultural differences, government rules, language and so on. So we have to translate for them, teach them how the Chinese market works and explain the complicated import-export rules and regulations. In the end we've become one of the bridges between the Chinese market and the Western design industry."

Someone on the China marketing team at Alessi, the Italian furniture brand that has taken part since the first show, told QDaily: "We pick different pieces for different trade fairs depending on the theme. For Design Shanghai we lean toward showing conceptual, cutting-edge products rather than our best sellers or our most practical ones, because Design Shanghai has a certain 'academic' and 'avant-garde' character."

In four years, visitor numbers have not grown much — about 47,000 people came in 2014; this year Design Shanghai drew 50,000, of whom designers and architects made up about 45%. But with several big design names exhibiting regularly, Design Shanghai is still the most important design trade fair on the Chinese mainland.

Asked how they draw Chinese consumers, Newton says it is not so different from how they run shows in Britain, because "the home is what people care about most and where they spend the most time; making and improving domestic space is a hard need in any country," and "we still put the work into designing the whole experience of a show — eating, drinking, looking, playing, buying."

Dynan does admit that "the British market is a bit more traditional. Compared with leaning on smartphones and social media, the British still have real enthusiasm for old media like newspapers and magazines. But in China everything changes so fast; what people like can be completely different in a short space of time." His conclusion, even so, is that "China is an exciting, challenging market."

Cover image via: Media 10