Trade show operators are sometimes a bit cagey about what facts and figures they make available once the events close, but when a show is on a roll, I guess there’s no real concern.
Integrated Systems Europe was booming in Amsterdam, and after the major hiccup brought on by a global pandemic, the show is now, very clearly, booming in its more recent home of Barcelona.
The core numbers on headcount and exhibitor footprint were released right after the 2026 show, but now the show has pushed out a much richer and deeper set of facts and figures for trade media, reflecting what went on and who was there.
Total visits over the show’s four days were north of 212,500 – though that count incorporates people who came and went several times over four days. I knew Wednesday (Day 2) was the busiest day, but did not know Thursday (Day 3) was slightly busier than Tuesday, the opening day.
Friday used to be pokey for foot traffic, but in 2026 it still pulled in more than 34,000 people – about 16% of the total count for the week.
When the 92,176 unique attendees is broken down, a surprising (at least to me) stat reveals more than 25,000 attendees were exhibitors, or 27.21% of the overall number. So more than 1 in 4 people at ISE were there on show-and-tell or booth build duty of some kind.
Quite interesting was a stat showing more than 29,400 people were hitting ISE for the first time.
There were 684 media people, which is kind of mind-wobbling, because I can’t come up with more than a dozen or so AV titles. Then again, let’s assume just as digital signage is a niche the pro audio crowd knows zip about, I know zip about pro audio and its publications. Or home automation.
Demographics stats show it was almost 4:1 male to female in 2026, and I am guessing that may have been even higher if the exhibitor attendees was factored out. It’s still very much a male-dominated show and industry – though the industry has come a long, long way since I started paying attention many years back.
It also skews older, with the biggest age bubble 45-54 years.
About 25% of the registrants were C-level people, and the next biggest cohort was “manager.” Almost 41% of attendees said they were in a position that controlled budgets and made the final decision on purchases.
More than 78% of attendees were from, surprise!, Europe, and Spaniards were by many multiples the biggest group, accounting for more than 30% of the total. The UK was next, then Germany, then China (that would skew HEAVILY to exhibitors), then France. About 3,400 came over from the US and roughly 750 from Canada. I swear it was me and a couple of other people coming from Canada 10 years ago.
Pro AV integrators, of course, represented the largest percentage of attendees, followed by distribution and reseller firms. The biggest sectors these people said they are involved in are sports and entertainment venues, workplace and retail.
In terms of end-users, the two biggest chunks of visitors were people involved in education, and an entertainment bucket that includes cinema, theaters, museums and theme parks. Retail was a third the size of those top two categories, while areas I thought would see a lot of activity (like hospitality, mass transport and health care) didn’t have particularly large groups of people looking around.
That may owe to those sectors having particularly good, focused events – like HIMSS for health systems and NRF in New York just days earlier for retail tech and Euroshop a few weeks after ISE.
One happy stat for the digital signage crowd was the response from AV channel and end-user registrants about what interested them. Audio systems had the biggest interest, but then it was video projection and digital signage/DooH tech. It helps that ISE has a somewhat dedicated hall for digital signage, though a LOT of companies were elsewhere – especially the major display firms that were in the showcase halls.
The next big pro AV macro-show is Infocomm in June in Blast Furnace, NV. The next ISE is Feb 2-5, 2027, back in Barcelona.
Already have my flat re-booked!