Seminars on the Show Floor at an Aquaculture Expo: Noise and Light

A seminar stage in the middle of the floor looks sensible on the drawing. On the real day, the booth on the left is test-running paddle aerators, the booth on the right starts pumps in bursts. The speaker is explaining feed conversion ratio. The back row only hears machinery.

This article is about seminars on the show floor, which the CEM guides treat as important because the show floor is where farmers learn the most, even though it was never designed for learning.

The show floor is a classroom

The CEM guides see the exhibit hall as an experiential learning environment. Visitors discover new products, new uses and companies they have never heard of, through a conversation at the booth or a few seconds spent glancing at a display to decide whether to stop. The guides urge organizers to treat the hall as an extension of the education program: knowledge centers, interactive displays, hands-on demonstrations, places where attendees learn from other attendees alongside what sales staff say. To get there, the organizer has to recruit exhibitors, because they hold a lot of insight into products, processes and markets.

For an aquaculture show this is easy to picture: a corner for water-quality testing with several instruments side by side, a table of microscopes, a probiotic sample viewing area. But a seminar stage on that same floor also takes in all of its noise.

Three challenges the guides name

The CEM guides name three challenges for education on the exhibit floor, with ways to reduce each.

Sound

Adjust speaker placement. Add "center fill" speakers at the front of the stage and "delay" speakers in the back half of the room so listeners at the rear hear at the same level as those in front. If space allows, consider curved line-array speakers as used in concert venues. Use a wireless microphone to cut feedback and to let the speaker walk among the audience.

Lighting

Decide who you are lighting: the in-room audience or the camera audience. Use a spotlight as a focal point to draw attention where you want it.

Audiovisual equipment

Make sure the screen is large enough for the depth of the room. Use a "running spares" design with two stacked projectors showing the same image: if one fails, the picture only dims and the talk goes on.

Choosing where the stage goes

In the site selection section, the guides advise deciding the position of staging on the show floor so that noise from the floor is contained away from the stage and the stage does not carry onto the floor. The floor plan section likewise says to weigh noise risk when placing demonstration areas and theaters inside the hall. On sound level, the general rule is a maximum of 85 dB for booth activities.

At an aquaculture show the familiar noise sources include aerators, pumps, automatic feeders on test runs and video speakers in booths. A few practical suggestions:

1. Put the stage in a quiet corner of the floor, away from equipment running, yet beside a traffic route. The guides also note that feature areas help bring people into parts of the hall that are normally slow.
2. Use sound-absorbing walls or drape around the stage, and turn the stage so the speakers do not point straight at a row of booths.
3. For sessions that must be heard clearly, such as diagnostic practice, consider wireless headsets for the audience. This is a suggestion beyond the guides, so ask the audio contractor about cost and reliability.
4. Write the maximum noise level into the exhibitor rules in advance, so the person walking the floor has something to point to, as the article on the floor manager describes.

One thing worth doing before opening day: test the sound once the hall is built and the booths are running their machines, not while the room is still empty. An empty floor and a full floor give very different results, and adjusting speakers after visitors have arrived is always harder.

Session times and booth hours

The guides observe that feature areas and demonstration areas keep visitors on the floor longer, but can also pull them away from the business they were doing with exhibitors. For seminars this gets concrete: a session at the time group visitors arrive will drain the booths. A few ways to reduce that:

• Fewer large sessions, more gaps. Leave 30 to 45 minutes between sessions for visitors to return to booths.
• Avoid scheduling a popular session when groups pour in during the morning. Receiving groups is covered in the article on the bus-in program.
• Ask the exhibitors first. An exhibitor advisory committee is a natural place to do this.

Seating, distances and screen sizes for each type of session are in the article on seminar room setup.

Try this picture. The organizer places the stage beside the water-monitoring area, a quiet zone with plenty of visitors. For the first two days, equipment exhibitors complain that few people pass their booths. On day three the organizer moves two sessions to the afternoon, visitors walk the equipment aisle on the way to the stage, and the complaints stop.

Need sound and stage planning for an aquaculture show?

If you need the stage position checked against the plan, a technical brief for the audio and lighting contractor or a session schedule that does not compete with the booths, you can send a request through the quote page or book a call with Nguyen Anh Trung. Send the floor plan and the list of planned demonstration areas.

However good the speaker, the loudspeaker still has to be in the right place.