CTIA Moves Big Mobile Show to Fall

Get ready for a big fall week for mobile—in 2014. In a change a long time coming, the CTIA is moving its big annual cell phone industry trade show to the fall, running from September 9-11 in Las Vegas.

For consumers, that means you shouldn't buy any phones just before that week, because many holiday releases will probably be announced at the show.

"There's no one event that really has the gravitational pull to bring it all together in one location for the fall. We want to do that," CTIA vice president of operations Rob Mesirow said.

The CTIA's clout used to be big enough to throw two shows a year, a consumer-oriented one in March and a more businessy show in the fall. But the shows' prominence has been suffering. As the U.S. mobile market has aligned with the rest of the world, U.S. announcements have been folded into the Mobile World Congress, the big February show that used to be Europe-focused. Other announcements have moved to the Consumer Electronic Show in January.

That left the March CTIA show at the rear end of a triple-trade-show centipede, which the organization tried to fix by moving the show to May in 2012. That was a decent idea, but not quite good enough, and while CTIA 2012 in New Orleans filled a big convention hall, it didn't have the buzz provided by high-profile manufacturer announcements. (Take a look at our CTIA 2012 coverage and judge for yourself.)

Fall CTIA, meanwhile, basically collapsed. This year it became MobileCon, a networking event for IT managers. Mesirow and the CTIA are passionate about a lot of lower-profile but growing business-to-business markets, like health care, energy, mobile payments, and "smart cities," but it looks like those weren't quite enough to sustain a big show without a mainstream consumer component.

The new show will let CTIA bring in "strategic partnerships" for various vertical markets, strengthening the business-to-business part of the show while also creating consumer buzz, the CTIA said in a press release.

Fall Needs a Big Phone Show
I've been asking the CTIA for years to merge its shows and move the big one to the fall. There's a huge rush of product releases in the run-up to the holidays, and this year manufacturers sent all of us in the press running around the country willy-nilly chasing them. Everybody ended up exhausted. Mobile phone store owners and buyers, meanwhile, never got to check out the handsets introduced at exclusive press events held from New York to San Francisco.

"Our largest demographic is the retailers. Big-box down to mom-and-pop online retailers, they're all there ... and 93 percent of them said they would support this super show in September," Mesirow said.

A big show puts press, manufacturers, and everyone who runs a cell-phone store in the same place. As such, it makes life easier for everyone. I really don't want to have another fall ping-ponging around the country because every company in mobile feels it needs to throw its own event a week apart.

"The timing of the 2014 show will deliver the perfect stage for companies to debut mobile consumer products and services for the annual holiday buying season," Mesirow said.

Sprint and Ericsson are both enthusiastic about the shift, according to quotes in the CTIA's press release. But trust me. I know the industry. Everyone will be thrilled.

If this is such a good change (and it is) why not make it in 2013? To be fair, a trade show is a big ship to turn, and Mesirow said that "we need just one more year" to merge the shows and bring in partners.

I can't wait.