The SEMA Show, set for Nov. 5-8 in Las Vegas, NV, is already one of the best-attended trade shows in the U.S., but this year, it’s casting a much wider net with SEMA Live.
“We're hoping to give people a behind the scenes look at the show and broadcast it to a global audience,” said Tom Gattuso, vice president of events for SEMA.
SEMA Live will be available on SEMA’s YouTube channel beginning Nov. 5, and will broadcast live content during all hours the show is open -- 31 total -- bringing custom car reveals, celebrity interviews, educational opportunities and new tool and product demos to everyone with an internet connection.
Similar to how live sporting events are covered, SEMA Live will have an anchor desk and field reporters, including one person reporting from a stage outside the Las Vegas Convention Center where the build contests are held.
Each day of the show will be broken down into 80 segments, filled with “everything from walking through an exhibitor's booth and finding out what new products are there, to a serendipitous interview with a celebrity that just happens to be at the show, to some of our keynote speakers,” Gattuso said. “We're really hoping that this thing is going to be a combination of what's cool, what's new, and where the industry's headed in terms of trends and innovation.”
Since pandemic shutdowns ended, the SEMA Show has been the most-attended trade show in North America, winning the title in 2021, 2022 and 2023. Last year was also the show’s biggest year ever, with 160,000 attendees.
This year is on track to be another high-water mark -- Gattuso said more than 2,400 exhibitors will be there, beating 2019’s previous record numbers, and attendee registration is on pace to at least equal if not surpass 2023.
So why is the live stream important if everyone in the automotive aftermarket industry is already in Las Vegas?
Gattuso said the NFL is a great example.
“The NFL had an opportunity in the late 1960s to put their product on television, but the NFL owners were most interested in selling seats at their stadium and hot dogs and beer. They felt like television would inhibit that, and they were against it at the beginning,” Gattuso said. “They finally agreed, and it brought the football product to a much wider audience. They found that their stadiums filled even more than they had, and there was still a huge fan base that was interested in watching it on television.”
SEMA Live will bring the SEMA Show experience to people who may be inspired to attend a future show in-person, or continue to watch it remotely, Gattuso said.
And while it might feel like the entire industry is at SEMA, like all trade shows, most people in attendance live within a small geographic radius.
“We have 140 countries represented and all 50 states, but the majority of our people come from west of the Rockies,” Gattuso said. “We want to be able to let people who can't travel there to see what's going on, and then be able to make decisions on whether it fits for them or not.”
When planning the segments, Gattuso said SEMA focused on the “value centers” of the show. Priorities will include showing new products on display, walking the show floor to look at exhibitor booths and custom builds, speaking to celebrities in attendance, and interviewing presenters and speakers to give viewers a feel for the educational opportunities at the show.
The SEMA Show has “this weird, cool factor that there's a lot of business that happens, there's a lot of trend spotting. There's all these really cool vehicle builds. And then, hey, there's Travis Pastrana and Kane Brown at the Nitro Circus booth as the motorcycles are doing backflips,” Gatusso said. “We want to draw people in to this iconic event that we've got.”
SEMA Live is simply a way to leverage the show’s content in a way SEMA itself has never done, but other media partners have.
“Social media kind of set everything on edge, and we found that people who came to the show would just take walkarounds [videos] of all the cars, post 1,500 car walkarounds, and they would get tens of millions of views,” Gattuso said. “We said, ‘OK, well, that's great for that person, but we have all the cars, so what could we do that wouldn't step on anyone's toes but complemented what our partners were doing?’ And this became that answer.”
After the SEMA Show ends, the live streamed content will be broken down into shorter videos geared toward specific areas, like collision repair for instance, that can be viewed at any time on the YouTube channel.
“We're going to have hundreds of hours of coverage that we're going to be able to edit and customize for a unique user experience, like we've never been able to do before,” Gattuso said.
While SEMA Live will only be available on the SEMA YouTube channel, direct links to it will be on the SEMA Show website, on its social media channels and in the mobile app.
“I'm hoping it's going to be hard to miss,” Gattuso said.
Abby Andrews