Speaking at the PLASA Awards for Innovation and Sustainability 2014, held on the penultimate day of the show, PLASA's CEO Matthew Griffiths revealed some of the changes for 2015, which will redevelop the scope and delivery of the event. Under the leadership of Christopher Toulmin, PLASA's Director of the Events Division, the show is being remodelled to become a PLASA Member-focused event: developments will include moving from four days to three days, introducing a new floor plan concept, expanding the education offering and investing further in the audio, staging, AV and broadcast elements of the live entertainment technology business at the show to accompany the phenomenally successful lighting element.
Reflecting on PLASA London 2014 and looking forward to next year's show, Event Director James Ashwood said: "PLASA events has a new team, with a new vision for evolving and developing the PLASA show for the benefit of its exhibiting members. We are at the start of this exciting journey, and moving ahead with confidence; this has been reflected in the 80% rebook onsite for 2015.
"The overall number of attendees for the show was just over 11,000, putting us slightly ahead of 2013, with a surprise increase of 55% in the number of re-visits to the show, demonstrating that people have been returning on more than one day."
One of the talking points throughout this year's show was the Robe Arena - a 1,000sq.m stand, which created a huge, immersive space adjacent to the main show floor. The lighting manufacturer's decision to 'go big' and try something completely different as a one-off, centred on its 20th anniversary celebrations and on providing a showcase for the launch of the new BMFL Spot lighting fixture.
Managing director of Robe UK, Mick Hannaford, said: "The biggest problem we have is this is a one-off. This is our 20th anniversary, we have a big product to launch, but the space itself has worked so well. As opposed to being huddled up, like we normally are because we always have a busy stand, we've been able to have more meaningful conversations. It's worked really well . . . it's going to be very difficult to ever do anything much less than this - it's been so successful. Whatever the extra money we spent was, it has been worth it."
Exhibitors spoke about being happy with the number of good quality visitors they were seeing and with the number of business-related conversations they were having. Clay Paky's Chief Operational Officer, Pio Nahum, said: "In general, the attendance has been very good and we had the perfect showcase for our new products, so I think it has definitely been a good exhibition. From our viewpoint, we are here in this corner and we have a lot of people all the time because of our presentation, so our stand has been crowded all the time. The quality of the visitors has been very good. We had a very good attendance of visitors, especially from the UK and also some visitors from abroad, from international markets. We're on the same level as last year, which is about 20% of our visitors have been international."
Shure Distribution UK's Managing Director, Peter James, commented: "In the last four or five years we've been very specific about our objective - why we're here and who we expect to talk to - and we align all our activities and our communication to the model of who we see the visitor demographic being and it hasn't let us down yet. The show's been great. I believe it's delivered on what we expected this year, as it has every other year."
On being Silver Sponsor, Peter added: "It's nice to have that alignmen
