About MATSO
Central to the IAEE MATSO Council culture is ensuring a wide-open exchange of ideas to foster discovering solutions, networking with other show professionals, guiding new strategies and policies, sharing ideas and making a difference.
Defining The Major American Trade Show
Major American Trade Shows are comprised of not-for-profit and for-profit exhibitions with at least 200,000 NSF of exhibition space.
Major American Trade Show Organizers (MATSO) History
The founding of MATSO began in the late 1970s and formalized as a corporation in 1985 when it was originally chartered in Chicago as a means of coordinating dialogue among the city’s major trade show producers. Over the years, the exchanges focused on operational challenges particularly relevant to events of scale and complexity. There was a larger vision to broaden its geographic reach beyond Chicago and expand the internal focus from solely operations to include all functional aspects of major show production, including marketing and sales, legislation, labor, international challenges and operation. The founders wanted to create a collective voice reflecting the unique perspective of the producers of major, industry-leading events. MATSO’s initial fundamentals included:
- Wide-open exchange of ideas and solutions in a competition-free environment
- A forum to support in-depth problem-solving as a group , addressing major-scale challenges that threaten the stability of the industry
- Ongoing dialogue to support establishing meaningful Best Practices for major events
- The collective voice to influence the industry marketplace for the betterment of major event producers
- Perpetuating a non-commercial environment
Your Data is Critical!
MATSO show data is instrumental in measuring economic impact.
CEIR Index
The CEIR Index is an established and trusted tool for exhibition and event professionals. It is representative of the entire universe of business to business exhibitions and includes geometric averaging of the four metrics – NSF, Exhibitors, Attendees and Revenue as well as a predictive element for the upcoming years.
Please submit your event data to get your sector report free of charge once the report is available.
By entering your data into the Event Performance Analyzer, you will get access to charts that compare your event’s performance to CEIR Index sector results, your competitive peer set! Charts are downloadable and this is free to use!
The information submitted is held in strict confidence. Only aggregated, group data is reported.
If you have questions on submitting data, please email economist@ceir.org.
