Shocking:

FAOL Community Fly Anglers Online
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In From Angling Trade Magazine:

[FONT=Verdana]On December 1, the American Fly Fishing Trade Association and Nielsen Media Group issued separate press announcements that said the organizations had dissolved their agreement relative to Nielsen producing the Fly Fishing Retailer World Trade Expo with AFFTA’s endorsement.

There will be an AFFTA endorsed trade show sometime in 2010, according to AFFTA board sources.

It won’t be run by Nielsen Media Group, which ran the FFR in recent years, according to both AFFTA and Nielsen (see separate announcements below).

AFFTA Release

Nielsen Release

Nielsen will integrate fly fishing into its Outdoor Retailer Summer Market event in August, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

AFFTA could possibly work with Chuck Furimsky, director of the Fly Fishing Show consumer events on a trade show–Furimsky is planning a separate industry trade show for fall 2010 to take place in Florida.

We expect that AFFTA will announce additional plans in the near future, and we will post that information at anglingtrade.com as it becomes available.

What does all this mean?

For starters, AFFTA is now free to communicate the status of its trade event plans to the media and other members of the industry. Contractual obligations restricted AFFTA from communicating on the status of its negotiations with Nielsen in recent months, and exploring other trade event options.

Nielsen, for its part, continues to emphasize a belief that the fly industry would be best served by assimilating with other markets, and that a stand-alone trade event is likely not financially feasible.

AFFTA, however, relies on the trade event as a major source of revenue… revenue used to support the various programs the organization executes in support of its mission, namely growing the sport of fly fishing. (According to sources, gross income for the 2009 event was somewhere @ $460,000, in 2007, gross income was over $700,000… exhibitor numbers went from 234 in 2007 to 146 in 2009).

The next few months will be pivotal in charting a new direction for the industry, its trade show(s), and the trade organization itself. And the role retailers play in determining how this industry finds common ground, and works in support of a larger objective–sustaining and growing the sport–is now greater than ever.

Regards,

Kirk Deeter & Tim Romano

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Let me say up front that FAOL is NOT a member of AFFTA, we didn’t like their attitude and attempted greenmail to get us to join. That said, I would sure love to know how they spent [FONT=Verdana]$700,000 “growing the sport of fly fishing.”
Any ideas?
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Not a fan of their attitudes and tactices, either Deanna. And the line seems to be growing longer by the day. So I’m not overly self-conscious about my opinion. I actually had a REALLY outrageous experience with a past president of AFFTA that I won’t go into.

But I personally agree with Neilsen’s basic assessment of what needs to happen. And I think AFFTA has an unrealistic concept of their own market value in today’s outdoor rec economy. As such, I think they’ve done a poor job of “leadership” of an industry in real peril. But I’m not so sure there was a workable solution for the Neilsen-AFFTA marriage to last. We need casting ponds that take up a lot of space. The economics of that is very difficult to make work in a multi-sport venue. There is so little $$$ in fly fishing compared to so many other forms of outdoor rec that it makes no sense to allocate the equivalent of a basketball court worth of floor space to us. Things like this spelled the end of the relationship.

And if the fly fishing industry wants to avoid the end of an annual trade show, we’re going to have to get VERY, VERY creative. Traditional models just aren’t going to work. And further isolation is just speeding up the death spiral.

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The precipitous drop in participation in 2009 apparently left Neilsen hemmoraging badly. They simply need to stop the acute bleeding.

I think the many fly shop owner simply did not have the business results in this economic environment that would allow them to go.

How AFFTA is going to put together a 2010 Show that is going to be economically feasible is a daunting task?

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On the other hand the ICast Show, as I understand it, has grown substantially. Just saying…

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VERY good point, LF. And pretty much gets to my point: the zenophobic tendancies of the fly fishing industry are making matters worse. I believe that the future of fly fishing is in identifying and successfully capitalizing on bridges to “gateway” sports and hobbies across the spectrum of outdoor recreation and even arts & crafts (with regard to fly tying, rod building/making, netmaking, etc.). There are people/businesses in our industry successfully doing this. Some have been successful at it for quite some time. And we need to learn from THEM…instead of making fun of or outright rejecting them. And I’m not just talking about the bix box retailer-mfgs like Orvis, LL Bean, and Bass Pro Shops. I’m talking about small companies like the boutique The Painted Trout, the number of fly shops that, on the verge of bankruptcy, retooled themselves into mountain bike/backpacking/hiking/kayaking/flyfishing/coffee shops and are now VERY successful, and TFO (who, in January, is making a huge move into the bait-spincasting segment without diminishing their commitment to fly fishing).

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By flying all over the world and fly fishing…:lol: