November 16, 2007-The million car lovers expected to attend aren't the audience the industry hopes to impress.Starting today and for the following nine days, more than a million people are expected to plunk down $10 each to attend the Los Angeles Auto Show. Little do they know, the show is already over.The spectacle that is the automobile exposition is a breathtaking demonstration of the organizational skill, planning, logistics, design, vision, ambition and piles of money possessed by carmakers, which in a matter of days have once again erected a 760,000-square-foot temple in which to worship the four-wheeled vehicle.All this, though, is not for you, dear reader. It's for us, the media.
Before the show opens to the public, thousands of reporters, photographers and bloggers are wined, dined and entertained for two days by the kingpins of Detroit, Tokyo and Wolfsburg, Germany, all in the pursuit of good press.Car shows are "all about making a venue to create publicity," said Andy Fuzesi, general manager and co-owner of the L.A. show.Last year, Fuzesi bowed to pressure from carmakers and moved the show five weeks earlier to attract more press and end overlap with the show in Detroit. It cost him a 17% drop in paid attendance. "It's about addressing the needs of the industry."Car shows are almost as old as cars themselves. The New York Automobile Show, founded in 1900, claims to be the nation's oldest.As big as those numbers seem, they're a drop in the bucket. The biggest automakers can spend upward of $10 million on their "stand" -- the lighting, stages, speakers, video screens and rotating car turntables that make up a display -- says Robert Vallee, CEO of George P. Johnson Co., known as GPJ, one of the two or three largest event-display houses in the car-show business. Add to that carpeting, electricity, transport, on-site product specialists, accommodations, advertising and public relations, Vallee says, and the tab for a single automaker can reach $50 million.
