CHICAGO — Maritz announced the acquisition Congress Data Services (CDS) of Free man July 1. The agreement follows the April announcement that CDS was selected as a full-service strategic registration and integration partner for Information markets“Portfolio of North American Events.
The acquisition of CDS, an event registration, business intelligence and lead management partner, will increase Maritz’s market share while combining decades of expertise in serving association events and trade shows.
Trade Fair Manager We spoke with David Peckinpaugh, Maritz President and CEO, to learn more about the acquisition and what it means for customers.
CDS Integration into Maritz
Maritz has advised its customers that they will not experience any immediate changes as soon as the integration process begins.
“CDS will be integrated into Maritz, and I want to make that clear, because our number one priority is our customers,” Peckinpaugh said. “We’re not going to do anything that’s going to cause them stress or create dissatisfaction, so we’re going to be patient. We have an optimization team and an optimization process that we’re launching, and we have a very realistic timeline. It’s not going to be a year, but probably three years to really work through this. While that’s really exciting news, it’s going to take time and we’re going to make sure that we’re meeting the expectations of the market and, more importantly, our customers, and that we’re taking great care of our employees.”
From friendly competition to singular strength
In the Fastest Class 50 of 2023Maritz served 14 shows as the Official Recording Contractor and 5 shows as the Official Housing Contractor, while CDS served 22 shows as the Official Recording Contractor. For the 2022 Gold 100 Class, Maritz served as the Official Recording Contractor for 26 shows and the Official Housing Contractor for 11 shows, and CDS served as the Official Recording Contractor for 23 shows.
“We’re very excited about bringing talent to CDS,” Peckinpaugh said. “We’ve always respected CDS as a major competitor. I think there’s been kind of a friendly competition, and we’ve seen customers move from one company to the other, we’ve competed, and I think we’ve done that very effectively for both sides. So I’m very excited about bringing talent, we have over 200 people, top executives, high-performing employees, and they have a great customer base that’s been very loyal to them for many years. There’s a reason for that, and it’s because of their employees.”
Solving challenges through innovation
At a time when exhibitor and attendee expectations, buying cycles and purchase timelines are evolving, the combined expertise of Maritz and CDS will help provide insights and reveal trends that will drive innovation in the marketplace, such as new technology solutions.
“At the end of the day, a lot of our customers are really buying our people. The technology and all that stuff is an enhancement, but it’s the teams that they work with and the expertise of our teams that are really why we win and keep business,” Peckinpaugh said. “And we want to continue to build on that, accelerate that and build on that to continue to advance the value proposition that we have.”
Related to this. Late trade show registrations are not all pain and gain.
Peckinpaugh shared that the company is launching an internal technology summit in St. Louis, with Maritz and CDS executives taking a deep dive into all things technology.
“As I said, we probably have a three-year window to complete the integration and create new tools and solutions,” he said. “It’s way too early for me to give any information or predictions on what that’s going to look like, but it’s going to be a collaboration. Both sides of the equation are at work: Maritz and CDS. We use the word optimization because that’s exactly how we see it; it’s the best of both worlds. One is not better than the other, but we want the best of what we put together, and that’s what’s going to drive our products and solutions going forward.”
Previously acquired by Freeman in 2019 to strengthen its registration offerings, CDS registration data helps provide analytics and insights to help drive greater event success.
“Predictive analytics is a huge part of who we are and what we do,” Peckinpaugh said. “Any time you can add more data, or richer, deeper data to that data set, it only improves what you can do for your customers. Our customers own the data, but we’re able to combine that data to aggregate it in a way that then allows us to do things like trend reporting, which we do regularly. We’re now adding hundreds of shows to that aggregate data, and it just makes it stronger, better, more accurate, and more predictive.”
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.