We went, we saw... we were exhausted!

Posted 25 Oct 2010

On Saturday 23/10/2010 My wife & I drive to Telford & visited the Christian Resources Exhibition (CRE). If you haven’t been before (as we hadn’t) then it’s well worth a visit. There are all sorts of companies represented there, from book sellers to church furniture manufacturers to Christian music retailers, & from projection suppliers to sound & lighting specialists. I was very interested to see a couple of Christian artists, & there was even a silversmith present. We really went to see if it would be worthwhile for us to have a trade stand there in the future, in order to promote the Bible Cartoons Project.
The experience was very intense, with all sorts of people jumping out at us from their stands, trying to get us to sign up for things, or else giving us lots of flyers & promotional materials. After about an hour of this, we needed to retire to the cafe & have a stiff cup of coffee, to fortify us for a 2nd onslaught of flyer-distributing exhibitors! After another hour, we had hands full of flyers, & were ready to sit in a darkened room to recover from it all! The trade stands aren’t cheap, so I suppose that fact was at the back of every exhibitors mind, & they all wanted to grab every passerby’s attention, to help to justify the high cost of being there.
We had a good conversation with an animation artist, who produces 8 minute short films for Sunday School/Young Children’s workers. We also sampled some milk chocolate from a Christian chocolate company who are trying to get the Christian Easter message back into Easter! They have printed a short Christian message & some very subtle, small crosses onto their Easter egg packaging, but a supermarket buyer was reluctant to sell the eggs, saying “What does Easter have to do with Christianity”… huh?! Easter is ALL ABOUT Christ & Christianity! This just shows how far we have drifted away, as a nation, from the knowledge of the Gospel.
All in all a useful visit – if a little overwhelming! We came away thinking that perhaps we might book a trade stand at some point in the future, but we felt there are other avenues of marketing & promotion which we will need to pursue first, such as getting the Bible Cartoons “brand” known & recognised. If we can achieve that, then perhaps a trade stand at CRE may be useful in the future, to consolidate our marketing efforts.

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