Summer Slowdown?
Hi Friends!
At this point and everybody knows how robust the car show season is here in Arizona. Usually starting in late September or early October, there’s reasonably significant events virtually every weekend all the way up until the end of May. Once the Mercury rises however, everything dies and it dies quick and by the time June rolls around we go through what everybody else goes through during colder, winter months, we park our car and essentially board up our garages.
From the perspective of an advertising agency located in Arizona, this works great for us. Not only are we busy with local happenings and things going on in other warm weather states like Nevada, California, Florida, etc but we generally stay consistent or get even a little bit busier in the summer months, when the Northeast, East Coast, South and Midwest starts to get their cars and motorcycles out of the garage and take them out to play. Of course, we have significant groups of gatherings like Monterey Car Week to look forward to as well.
This year seems like it’s been a little bit of a different animal. As you have seen, for the last several weeks we have been advertising Monterey Car Week advertising deadlines. Usually, we get really busy when this happens, there’s a lot of enthusiasm and not only are the Monterey advertisers coming in, but smaller shows and other more regional festivals jump on board too. Simply put, that didn’t happen this year. The interest we received regarding Monterey was down significantly and the smaller shows and events just don’t seem to be happening at all.
There’s obviously a lot of new players in Monterey that are trying new things and a lot of existing pillar events have been sold or changed hands in the last 12 months as well. Also, events like Chattanooga Motorcar Festival and Velocity International have paused their 2025 efforts, reportedly due to things like “economic uncertainty”.
I think instability within our government currently is definitely causing a lot of anxiety and it’s preventing a lot of activity in a lot of different places right now. Not so sure it should affect things like regional gatherings and car events however, but from our perspective, there just seems to be less going on.
Could it be economy, government, generational transfers of events, sales of events or just plain fatigue? The likelihood is that it’s a combination of all of these things. The real worry however is that people just aren’t interested in getting together right now.
I’ve been saying it for years and I’ll continue to say it: collector cars and collector car events aren’t really about the cars. They’re about the people. I’m very confident in and excited about what’s going on here in Arizona and in other warm weather states, but it would really be a shame to lose the people element of all of this everywhere else.
That’s it for this week……
Darin Roberge
