It’s time for InfoComm International to consider adding a fourth day to the annual June show that has officially become the largest pro AV event in North America.
I know it’s not going to happen in 2018 and it’s unlikely to happen before InfoComm’s existing contracts with the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando and Las Vegas Convention Center run out. Maybe it’ll be another 10 years before it happens, if it happens at all.
But, after seeing a record 44,077 people register for InfoComm 2017, and with the addition of myriad new education and training sessions to the show schedule in the past several years, InfoComm International is starting to become a victim of its own success.
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Because InfoComm is packing so much great content and education into such a short period of time, it’s starting to force those who have traditionally focused on walking the trade show floor to choose whether they should head for the back of the hall and find hidden gems or sit in a classroom and learn about how they can best utilize the newest technologies in their installations.
I started to hear and read people discussing on social media the need for a fourth trade show day before InfoComm 2017 and casually asked many of the folks I talked to at the show about the idea. The reaction to the possibility was decidedly mixed, to be fair, and has continued to be so since I wrote a blog about it in the week after InfoComm celebrated its new attendance record.
The biggest reason InfoComm International should consider adding another day on the trade show floor is to give its attendees more time to make their way from booth to booth to booth. This year, the show featured more than 950 booths across its 545,000 square feet of exhibition space, meaning attendees would have had to have visited more than 300 booths every day to get to all of them in three days.
Adding a fourth day could also help InfoComm increase the show’s attendance even more than it did this year. Skeptics wondered how much bigger Integrated Systems Europe could be when it added a fourth day to its show in 2016. Since then, ISE has smashed its attendance records both years, topping 73,000 people in 2017.
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I’m realistic enough to know it’s going to be a while before InfoComm adds a fourth day to its June show and my feet aren’t necessarily prepared for another full day of walking the floor, anyway. But it’s an inevitability if show organizers want to keep the event growing and being able to trumpet new attendance records in the long term.
Now we’ll see if InfoComm considers adding another city or maybe more than one to the rotation that brings the show from Orlando to Vegas every other year.
