dmg events Brand Guidelines: DMGT’s Exhibition Arm, The Big 5 & a Johannesburg Hub

Owned by the company behind the Daily Mail.

dmg events belongs to DMGT, the Daily Mail and General Trust. In March 2016 InPublishing described it as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Daily Mail & General Trust plc, “an international portfolio of digital, information, media and events businesses,” and the company’s own website still says the same. The company says it was established in 1989 and calls itself a global exhibitions and publishing company; it spells its name in lower case.

The parent is far older. English Wikipedia traces DMGT to the launch of the Daily Mail in 1896 by Harold and Alfred Harmsworth; the group was incorporated in 1922 and its shares were first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1932. In January 2022 DMGT left the London Stock Exchange after an offer from Rothermere Continuation Limited, the holding company of its chairman, the 4th Viscount Rothermere, Wikipedia says. Its head office is at Northcliffe House in Kensington, London, alongside the group’s newspapers.

The show most closely tied to dmg events is The Big 5, a construction exhibition held every year in Dubai in late November. English Wikipedia says the show grew out of an event called Arab Water and from the amalgamation of five product-focused events linked to construction, and that it found a permanent home at the Dubai World Trade Centre as that venue was developed. When dmg events acquired the exhibition in 2000, according to Wikipedia, it covered some 12,000 square metres; the article now gives over 100,000 square metres of gross floor space.

From Dubai to a hub in Johannesburg.

The Big 5 now runs with a cluster of specialist shows alongside it. English Wikipedia names heavy equipment, concrete, HVAC and refrigeration, stone, solar, and urban design and landscape events; the dmg events website lists the 2026 edition, from 23 to 26 November, as Big 5 Global, with shows such as HVACR World, Totally Concrete and Urban Design & Landscape running at the same time. Since 2010 the show has put more weight on education through conferences and workshops, Wikipedia says, and in 2018 it launched a Women in Construction Forum & Awards. The education sessions carry certification overseen by the UK-based CPD Certification Service, so attendance can count towards membership standing in bodies such as RICS or the CIOB, according to the article.

The Big 5 name has also been taken to other markets. The company’s event calendar lists Big 5 Construct shows in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa, alongside INDEX, the Dubai interiors show, and The Hotel Show, a hospitality show also held in Dubai.

Africa became a deliberate expansion. In March 2016, InPublishing reported, dmg events bought Exhibition Management Services (EMS), a long-established organiser headquartered in Johannesburg. The deal added five shows, including the SAITEX retail-products show, Africa’s Big Seven for food and drink, the WAMPEX mining and power show in Ghana and a Cape Town industry showcase. With them, dmg events ran 12 events across the continent, including construction and interiors in Morocco, oil and gas in Egypt, and construction and coatings in Kenya. The Johannesburg company was to be renamed dmg EMS Africa and report to the Middle East, Asia and Africa division.

The chief executive, Geoff Dickinson, said the acquisition was “part of our strategy to become key event players in Africa,” and that EMS offered “a strategic hub in Africa’s largest economy.” Matt Denton, then president of the Middle East, Asia and Africa division, said the team already had plans to grow the business “with fresh launches supported from our new Johannesburg hub.”

How show organisers present themselves.

Exhibition and trade-fair organisers sell two things at once: the shows themselves and the places that hold them. Their corporate websites reflect that split. GL events, for example, divides its group page into Live, Venues and Exhibitions, while Easyfairs gives its owned halls in Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden their own section and logo files alongside the group mark.

Most of the visible branding belongs to the shows rather than the parent company. A group may run more than a hundred show brands, each with its own name, logo and audience, so the corporate identity often works as an endorsement in the background. Many show names simply state a sector, a material or a place, as Global Industrie, UK Metals Expo and Packaging Première do, while others, such as Sirha or Première Vision, work as names in their own right.

Photography does much of the work. Organisers publish wide shots of busy aisles, stands and halls, and some credit the photographer by name beside the show and city, as GL events does on its exhibitions page. Venue pages lean on floor areas, hall counts and plain descriptions of what the space can be shaped into, from a small trade show to a large conference.

Behind the shows sit practical tools for exhibitors and visitors, described plainly: online portals, exhibitor packages, floor plans and visitor registration. Corporate pages then cover the owners, the board and the venues held under ownership or concession, often with a dated history timeline. This guide sets out what can be checked about each organiser — who founded it, who owns it and which shows and venues it runs — and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

A portfolio of more than a hundred events, the company says.

Today the company describes itself on its website as running over 115 events a year that attract more than 650,000 visitors, from 13 offices in 10 countries, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, South Africa, the UK, Canada and Singapore; those figures are its own. Geoff Dickinson is still named as chief executive. Its calendar groups the shows by sector, among them coatings, construction, energy, food and hospitality, and interiors.

Energy is a large part of the portfolio. In a press release on its agreement with Deutsche Messe AG, dmg events named ADIPEC, Gastech and India Energy Week among its energy platforms. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding at the UFI Global Congress in Hong Kong, held from 19 to 22 November 2025, to develop a new global energy exhibition and conference to launch in Germany in 2027. The memorandum was signed by Christopher Hudson, president of dmg events, and Jochen Köckler, chairman of the board of Deutsche Messe; the release described it as the start of a broader dialogue between the two organisers.

For a design guide, dmg events shows how an organiser can keep a plain lower-case corporate name while its show brands, from The Big 5 to INDEX, carry the visible identity in each market. Compare Deutsche Messe, its partner on the new energy event, and Informa, another owner of trade events. For this guide we use navy, a desert amber and sandstone with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep dmg events’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.