"It certainly exceeded our expectations, launching a show in the current economic climate carries a degree of risk, but we’re absolutely delighted and the feedback has been extremely positive," said Cross Media 2012 event director Nick Craig Waller.

More than 2,500 visitors attended the show across its two days last week, made up of marketers (59%), print professionals (28%) and publishers (13%). As well as more than 70 exhibitors, the show featured six theatres that between them played host to 60 seminars boasting a line up of speakers from brands such as BBC Worldwide, Crew Clothing, Tesco and Sony.

"2,500 was our [visitor] target, the show was around 600sqm, so the visitor density was beyond our wildest dreams, we’ve got a really solid platform to grow from on an annual basis, with a view to how we’re going to work it into Ipex 2014," said Craig Waller.

This year’s event benefited from Informa’s purchase of rival show Media Pro in July, with around 25% of the latter October event’s exhibitors converted to Cross Media. However, according to Craig Waller, the close proximity of the acquisition to the two shows’ dates and the number of exhibitors signed up to both events limited the impact on this year’s cycle, but he said that he expected the true benefit would be felt in 2013.

Next year’s show will also be hosted at the Business Design Centre on 23 and 24 October.

According to Craig Waller, while Informa was pleased with format of the show, one of the changes he would look to implement next year would be a more staggered seminar schedule, to introduce more time for visitors to spend on the showfloor.

"The seminar sessions were absolutely rammed, the hunger for content across the three main areas of the show, from the printers, publishers and marketers was a revelation and we’ll certainly build on that. But there will be tweaks that we can make next year, because, as hard as we try, we’re never going to get everything perfect in the first year."

This article originally appeared at printweek.com