Everyone who has ever launched a trade show has been in the “chicken or the egg” conundrum. Sponsors like the idea of your show but don’t want to commit until they see who else is committing. But no one is willing to be the first to jump into the pool. I’ve seen many an unscrupulous trade show organizer (usually someone brand new to the industry who has never organized an event) outright lying about who is sponsoring the event. They launch their website with several impressive logos. Yet when asked, the sponsor has never heard of the event and has no idea why their logo is on the event site. The inexperienced organizer’s hope, of course, is that the company is too large to find out what is going on and by the time they do, they will have secured their largest competitor based on the false information and they will come on board anyway.

But it never works that way. Every time I’ve seen this happen, the event implodes after the first show or never happens at all. And why wouldn’t it - if that’s how they handle their business you can imagine how they’ll treat their exhibitors down the road.

The ethical way to get that first big sponsor to come on board, of course, is to play the “if” game. “If I got XYZ company to come on board, would you do the same?” Get two big players in the industry to come on board together, thereby, alleviating the “I don’t want to be first” nervousness.

But what happens when one of the “big boys” gives you a verbal YES but needs a week to get the CFO to sign off? This is a dangerous time. Two choices here: announce it and pray the paperwork gets signed so that you can capitalize on it NOW and bring in other exhibitors, or, hold your tongue - as hard as it may be - and wait for the signed contract.

I don’t know if this is what happened with E for All, the show launched to replace E3, but it looks like they may have taken the first choice and got burned. The trouble is, when you go ahead and announce a verbal commitment, if they don’t come on board you end up doing more damage than not announcing it all. In this day and age, when bloggers and online news websites can post in minutes, you may simply fan the flames of talk about how your launch isn’t going as well as hoped, and how several large companies aren’t coming either. All of a sudden, you find yourself worse off than if you had never announced the big guy at all.

In the end, we’re better off waiting until the deal is official. The damage done by having them back out would outweigh any benefit gained by announcing it early.