Oh yes, no doubt still shady. Consumers have no obligation to read the exhibitor fine-print.
The “print” advertising misrepresents who is actually going to be there. SHN took advantage of the loophole but the expo is also taking advantage of the terminology by advertising to potential exhibitors and consumers the number of “companies represented”. They can say that their shows have 300 companies represented when in reality there is only a subset of the actual companies in attendance.
I guess it comes down to whether the distributors have a legal right to utilize third party tradenames, essentially acting as a company representative, and whether the tradeshow has a legal right to utilize those tradenames in promotional materials. This is what makes this shady from a business perspective. As a business person, I’d opt to avoid such ambiguity as it wouldn’t look good pisssing off a subset of the consumers.
From a consumer perspective, I would think twice about doing business with those tradenames simply because I’d feel slighted. If the tradenames (e.g. BOG, Mephisto) don’t call out this situation in their distributor contracts, they probably should. If there are no contracts, then I’d say both SHN and the tradeshow could be infringing on trademarks.