Attended by 1,500 professional visitors, Abla 2008 has taken its place as one of the main events bringing together the communication, marketing and design sectors and SMEs From 6 to 8 February, Gipuzkoa’s Trade Fair Centre Ficoba was the venue for the second year running for Abla 2008, the Communication, Design, Marketing and Supports Trade Fair. Despite its short history, Abla has achieved consolidation and is now a well-known event, recognised throughout Spain. This is demonstrated by the diverse geographical origin of the visitors taking part in Abla 2008. From now on, like all the professional trade fairs held at Ficoba, Abla will be held on a two-yearly basis, and so the next fair will be in 2010.

 Abla’s conference and congress programme enjoyed great success for the second year running, becoming one of the event’s main points of attraction for visitors. All the conferences on offer, both those of a technical nature and those concerned with creativity and the new technologies, yielded excellent results and were highly valued by the public. In particular, two conferences filled to capacity: those given by the well-known publicist César García, the author of the book “El Libro de Bob”, and Guillermo Viglione, the Chairman and Creative Director of the agency Dimensión.

As regards exhibitions, Abla achieved a high visitor-exhibitor ratio (1,500 visitors for the 25 exhibitors). However, as Ficoba’s manager Iñigo Marquet tells us, “our objective for future fairs is to find formats that will allow us to increase the number of exhibitors. Abla has succeeded in attracting professionals from the communication, marketing and design sectors, but we need to continue focusing most of our efforts on capturing visitors from small and medium enterprises, as they are a large potential market of great interest for this type of products and services”.

The first two Abla fairs were held on a yearly basis with the aim of consolidating the trade fair/conference brand name, and the results obtained prove that this has indeed been the case. In the words of Iñigo Marquet, “Abla is a recognised, well-known event, and not just in our closest environment: it is now known all over Spain. But we shouldn’t rest on our laurels: we need to take on different challenges. As I was saying, we need to be able to attract new consumers and also a larger number of exhibitors, who are still somewhat reticent, probably due to the lack of a trade fair culture in this sector”.

Like all the professional trade fairs promoted by Ficoba, Abla will be held every two years as from the next event, which will take place in 2010.