The famous football manager, Carlo Ancellotti, in his autobiography ‘Quiet Leadership’, talked about the ‘arc’ of a football manager’s career with a single club. The manager comes in, signs some players and makes changes. The players react to the changes and, as industrial management gurus established years ago, any change often has a positive effect. However, eventually, the manager has done all he can within the constraints of the club and its budgets and its time to, one way or another, move on. Trade shows are often the same and seem to have a ‘natural life’.
Comdex, came and went. CeBIT came and went. Many have come and gone, but somehow, the ISE show that just took place has managed to go from strength to strength, when there were some serious doubts as to how it would go this year. The organisers said that the show saw 58,107 different attendees from 155 countries over the four days in Barcelona. I was unable to attend, which was particularly disappointing as the clash with Display Week last year meant I missed it then as well. In particular, the move to Barcelona was an interesting topic to me as I was one of those canvassed about possible locations back in February 2018 when a move from the RAI in Amsterdam was being decided upon.
I had suggested Barcelona as a venue partly because it does such a good job of hosting the Mobile World Congress (MWC) which also takes place around this time of the year. The facilities are very good and the city can absorb a large number of visitors without too much stress. It’s not Las Vegas, but equally, it’s not Hannover! Furthermore, at this time of the year it’s not as cold, typically, as Amsterdam is – although I have seen snow at MWC!
The A/V industry has a lot of smaller firms and individual contractors that work in the field and there was a real concern that many of the local integrators in Germany, France and Benelux who might have just driven or taken a train to the RAI, might not attend. Now, I haven’t seen the breakdown of who did attend, and perhaps they didn’t jump on a plane, but the numbers suggest that many may have done. Barcelona is one of the most popular destinations in Europe for ‘weekend breaks’, so it’s well served by low cost airlines.
Some years ago, my company organised a number of conferences and I learned a big lesson about siting conferences and events. The destination needs to be attractive enough for a delegate to want to visit, but not look too much like, as my American friends would say, a ‘boondoggle’ or a vacation. If it does, it might not be signed off by the corporate financial doorkeepers. I’m reminded that in the early days of microcomputers, training companies would offer computer technology or programming courses, where one of the benefits was that delegates would get a free low cost PC (Sinclair ZX81 or similar). That offer was on a separate sheet of paper to the weighty business and training benefits, so that someone proposing the course to their boss could get their support, but also get hold of the latest gadget at the employer’s expense. Very crafty!
Of course, if the business need to visit is important enough, people will even go to shows such as CeBIT in Hannover. Sometimes the weather was lovely, but often not, and there was little accommodation, dining or entertainment in the evening. In one crucial respect, if you are in the A/V industry, you really have to go to see (or hear) the products. You really can’t judge the quality of displays or audio online. If you are thinking of investing in, installing or recommending a big and expensive LED or LCD video wall, you have to have seen one to get any sense of the capability of the maker. (although it is often said that ‘anyone can make one good one’).
However, that has not saved a lot of shows. Since the very first ISE (or Integrated Systems Europe as it was then) in Geneva in 2004, the show moved to Amsterdam, then Brussels in 2006 before settling in for a long haul in Amsterdam. However, it was pushing the limits of the RAI in terms of space and had to find a new venue.
I was very pleased to see the success of ISE. Prior to its arrival, one of the major A/V shows was Photokina in Cologne and that only took place every couple of years. There had been various attempts to develop a European show to balance Infocomm in the US, but with limited success and lives. There were a number of ‘Infocomm Europe’ events. The first show in Geneva was popular with delegates, but a pain for exhibitors as there was a lot of extra bureaucracy because Switzerland is outside the EU.
ISE last year was very limited by Covid and in 2020 it was the last major show I visited before the lockdowns (I remember taking care to wash my hands after absent-mindedly shaking the hands of some Chinese exhibitors!). The peak of visitors was 81,268 in 2019, before the threat of Covid and that dropped to 52,000 in 2020 as the world was reacting to the virus. Chinese companies will still have been deterred from booking in 2023, so we probably won’t get a good sense of whether it is back to ‘business as usual’ until next year.
Anyway, I had a look in my database and compiled the chart below. 80K – 100K visitors may be the optimum size for the event, although I suspect that Mike Blackburn and his team might have a different view!
