We said farewell to Earls Court with a fantastic party, I remember. Now we were back; round the corner and up the back stairs to the press office, hang up the coat and gaze out of the window over the show. Yep! It was a boat show.

What had Brooke been going on about? He insisted he rued the day it was called the EC Boat Show. But he then went ahead and created one.

And it really wasn’t a bad show. OK, it was a small show. But it was all there. And it surprised a lot of us. What James Brooke and his team did in just about 10 months was a truly astonishing feat and BB offers its congratulations to all concerned.

There were great little bits. Cowes High Street – what a great section. The Yacht Brokers’ Village – excellent. The Pool – it seemed as if we’d never been away.

But the show lacked one thing.

Nobody came. No - that's not fair; of course people came. But it was painfully clear the attendance was nowhere near Brooke's forecast of 220,000.

Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Hopefully someone did some research and will come up with the answer because I can’t see any good reason why the crowds stayed away so emphatically. It was almost as if they had all grouped together and made a decision to stay away.

OK, the consumer advertising was really not good. How can you create advertising about boats and a new boat show and not show at least one boat in the advertisement? It was all too designy, with abstract shapes here and there. And one treatment had lots of copy to read. Never really a good idea. What was that about a picture being worth a thousand words?

It might have been worth thousands through the turnstiles.

But in the best tradition of every exhibition with no visitors, the organisers decided their show would not be judged by visitor numbers. Oh no.

‘The 2007 Whyte & Mackay Earls Court Boat Show has been a fantastic success,’ Brooke tries to convince us in the final press release. ‘The measure of its success,’ he continued, ‘has been based on two things; exhibitor feedback and visitor feedback.’

Sorry Mr Brooke. In the real world, that means sweet Fanny Adams. Nobody is going to base a decision that could involve spending many thousands of pounds on the say-so of Joe Dokes who sold three contra-rotating floggle grommets on the Tuesday.

What a potential exhibitor wants to know is how many people went to the show. Especially if it’s a retail show – like a show set to run a week or two before Christmas. Retailers want one thing only. Footfall.

And they didn’t get it.

Many, however, did business. But those that didn't were angry.

Remained solid
It is, however, a measure of this show that the exhibitors remained pretty solid behind Brooke and his team. When an exhibitor meeting was set up for the first Sunday night after what must have been the most disappointing first weekend for everybody concerned, Brooke told me he had been extremely nervous about going ‘to face the music’, as he put it. But he took a deep breath and walked into the meeting.

And he was greeted by a standing ovation. That took his breath away. And it got better. There was a lot of talking done, mainly about the bad advertising. Brooke introduced his main investor – not Whyte & Mackay, but a man called Robert Court, who’s a director of Tilney Group Limited (part of Deutsche Bank), a director of Glanmore Property Fund Limited, Glaneuro and UK Property Fund Limited. ‘I’ve been with them from the start,’ he told me. ‘And I’m with them all the way.’

Indeed, he stumped up another £200k for a new advertising campaign that featured pictures of boats. What a good idea. Why didn’t the ECBS agency think of that?

The new campaign broke on the Thursday and helped make it probably the best day of the entire show.

Backing up the advertising was another campaign that involved 50 promo girls giving away 100,000 2for1 ticket offers throughout London. ‘It was fantastic,’ said one exhibitor (who wished to remain anonymous) of the Sunday meeting. ‘They sat and listened, then went away and did what was necessary. It was unlike anything you’d get from National Boat Shows.’

As to whether the additional marketing did any good, nobody can say because Brooke refused point blank to give me visitor figures. He even claims not to know them himself, insisting he has no interest in them. I’m not entirely certain that’s an enviable trait in an exhibition organiser.

Guarded response
A quick word with Chris Murdoch of Nauticalia brought a guarded response. Murdoch knows the retail business so well he can tell NBS how many people came to a show by the take on his stand. 'We only had a limited range at the ECBS on the Piplers stand,' he told me, 'but my guess would be they had no more than 20,000 over the course of the show.'

Another quick chat with Andy Goddard at Andark brought a higher estimate at 40,000. Take your pick. 

Will the show be back next year? I think it will - the dates are already booked for November 29 to December 7. And certainly Court gave it his full backing. The Whyte & Mackay stance was less convincing, with the new management team appearing to be undecided about the show. I was assured by John Vincent – who used to run the company before selling it to Dr Vijay Mallya – that the Whyte & Mackay executives at the show were not those who took the vital ECBS decisions.

The ECBS has a five year deal with Whyte & Mackay. And it’s unlikely Whyte & Mackay is displeased with the results it got from the show. The brand name was everywhere – perhaps overly so, say some, to the detriment of the show itself. And all those tickets given away required contact details to be completed to validate them.

So the Whyte & Mackay database grew by a few thousand names. And, as the database is the key to modern marketing, I doubt that Whyte & Mackay was overly unhappy with its investment.

I emailed Alok Gupta, Mallya’s PA, for clarification. He emailed back that he had sent his reply to the ECBS PR people. The ECBS PR people somehow never got round to talking to my people...

I suspect Indian billionaires tend not to get involved with lost causes. Mallya turned up at the show on opening day and gladhanded his way around, which was, in reality, unnecessary.

He bought the ailing Spyker F1 team the week after buying White & Mackay and he’s quoted in The Sunday Times as insisting he doesn’t get involved in losing money and reckons he can make £25m easily with Spyker.

Perhaps he can help the ECBS do the same thing.

Peter Nash
Editor