A statement in square metres

Dubai's technology show opens today, and the biggest stands in the hall were not built for the visitors.

Walk it and look at who is standing on them. The two-storey stand with the majlis upstairs, the proper coffee, the wall of screens nobody is watching: at eleven in the morning the people on it are the exhibitor's own chairman, a visiting delegation from a ministry, two partners who flew in for the signing photograph, and the regional head, who has been on the phone since eight making sure the chairman's walk-through goes well. The visitors with the lanyards move around the edge of it like weather.

Nothing about this has gone wrong. This is the job the stand was hired to do.

In the Gulf an exhibition stand is a public statement of standing before it is anything else. It says, in square metres and in the height of the structure and in who was invited upstairs, that this company is serious about this market, that it belongs at the centre of the hall and not beside the fire exit, that the partner who bet on it bet well. The ministry sees it. The competitor across the aisle sees it. Above all the exhibitor's own leadership sees it, and remembers, and that memory is what the regional team is really building.

Then, every year, in November, somebody asks for the leads.

Judged as a lead machine, the stand is the most expensive week of the year. Divide the build by the badges scanned and the number is absurd, and somebody in finance says so. Judged as a statement, the same week may be the cheapest thing the company does: five days that settle, for a year, whether the market believes you are here to stay.

The mistake was never the stand, and it was never the leads. It is measuring the thing as the one it is not.