Michael Blackman

Michael Blackman is the Managing Director of Integrated Systems Events, the organiser of Integrated Systems Europe. AAn avid tech fan, he holds an MSc in Digital Business from the University of Salford and has been involved in technology publishing and events for more than 40 years, and for more than 20 years he has focused on the AV sector with ISE.

Michael started his career by studying marketing, with a diploma in international industrial and consumer advertising and marketing. After working at publications including the Financial Times and Personal Computer World magazine, he moved into exhibitions when he was headhunted to build the Personal Computer World show. He relocated to Germany after getting headhunted to launch a series of computer and technology events there.

He set up his own business as an event and marketing consultant and spent a decade creating events for companies, advising them on how to put on events, and helping them present themselves in the marketplace, primarily across Europe. He then got the offer to build up a standalone tradeshow for the professional AV community - the starting point of Integrated Systems Europe. Working initially with a team of three, he launched ISE in a single exhibition hall in Geneva in 2004.

Since then, Michael has grown the event massively: floor space has increased more than thirty-fold, attendee numbers twenty-fold and exhibitor numbers eleven-fold. Today, Integrated Systems Europe is the world’s largest exhibition and conference for professional commercial and residential audiovisual and electronic systems integration.

He has created many initiatives within ISE that have driven this growth. This includes a growing lineup of sector conferences – including Smart Building Conference, Digital Signage Summit and Content Production & Distribution Summit – as well as Hosted Buyer programmes and business matchmaking tools. These have all helped to focus the market and facilitated access to potential new customers, accelerating industry growth. These efforts will reach a new pinnacle at the European-Latin American AV Summit at ISE 2024.

In recent years, he has increasingly focused on attracting AV end-users from key market verticals to ISE. This has been a major contributor to raising the profile of the professional AV industry among the wider world of business and technology.

Since ISE started a new chapter in Barcelona, Michael has forged new relationships with the Catalonian government, with the Mayor of Barcelona and with many national and regional authorities that bolster the continuing development of ISE and drive the development of the AV systems integration industry in Southern Europe.

Under his stewardship, ISE has become an unmissable show. It’s a marketplace for new solutions, a forum for new ideas, a meeting-place where deals are done. This industry is all about integration; Michael Blackman has made ISE integral to it.