Relocating from its decades-long home of London to the Spanish city of Barcelona in 2025, the world’s biggest industry trade show, ICE, will be 20% bigger this year at 120,000 square feet, while the anticipated 55,000+ visitors are expected to conduct more than a million meetings between them. IAG speaks with Jody Frost, Brand Strategist at ICE organizer Clarion Events, to find out what visitors can expect from the very first ICE Barcelona, taking place at Fira Barcelona Gran Via from 2o to 22 January.
Inside Asian Gaming: The first ever ICE Barcelona is just over a week away now. Given the relocation from London to Barcelona this year and all that’s involved in moving a show of this size, how are you feeling?
Jody Frost: I suppose excitement is probably the foremost emotion, amongst a mix of others that you can probably understand. No one, certainly in our industry, has moved a show of this size because a show of this size has never existed for the gaming sector. There are other shows that have moved of similar kind of sizes and we’ve actually worked closely with some of those individual shows like Mobile World Congress and IFC, which both have moved from Central European locations into Barcelona and specifically to the Fira, and I think what we’ve tried to do as best as possible is to understand any of the challenges and use as much intelligence and forethought to try and ensure that everything goes as smoothly as possible.
Will it all go smoothly? I have absolutely no doubt there will be some challenges and some learnings. I very much doubt we’ll get it 100% right in year one. But I think the fundamental thing that we’re really, really super clear about is that the move to Barcelona was driven by the industry.
ExCeL London is a great venue. We’re very, very, fond of them as a venue and as a partner, we’ve worked with them for many years and will continue to do so with some of our other sister shows, however we just needed more space and we needed to open up new opportunities, which only really Barcelona and Fira could do.
We’ve grown the show by about 20% this year. In truth, we could have taken more space if we really wanted to, however moving a show of this size – we are anticipating somewhere between 55,000 and 60,000 people registering for the show – just means there will be an awful lot of learnings.
With this new venue, ICE is going to feel very different. It’s a totally different layout. We’ve got new halls for iGB Affiliate at the front, which is Hall 1 and is our affiliate proposition and sister show, and for those customers who have a really heavy weighing towards iGaming which is Hall 2. Then we have Hall 3 which will be land-based and Halls 4 and 5 which will be for sports betting, payments and all the other wonderful sectors of our industry. So, we’ve been able to sectorize the show in a way that we just couldn’t do before in ExCeL.

We’ve also got three different ways into the actual venue itself. At ExCeL we would have the west entrance as the main drag where everyone would come through, so you’d have that huge influx at the beginning of every show when the doors opened, but now we have three separate entrances.
It’s going to be different, it’s going to be very exciting and we are very much looking forward to seeing how it pans out. And there is a healthy degree of nervousness that goes along with that.
IAG: What can visitors expect when they turn up in Barcelona?
JF: That is a really good question. There’s so much more this year that we’ve been able to do, along with all of the challenges and relearning and relocating. There are so many more opportunities to explore the city of Barcelona for start. It’s a wonderful city for entertaining. There’s so many great places to go and see and it’s got a huge amount of culture.
In respect to the show, having that ability to sectorize and grow for the future is huge. The industry is in such good health and good growth, and you can see the trajectory that we’re all going on, so we need to be able to facilitate the extra space that our customers and visitors are going to need going forward and indeed what they need today.
I always default back to: What is ICE? In its simplest terms it is where the world of gaming goes to do business. It’s a truly international show, so we need to cater for every sector of the market. For example, what can customers from Asia expect? I think, very broadly, it’s going to be the greatest gathering of gaming professionals ever to happen. There has been no other show to this point that has had so many people together, so with that comes a whole new world of opportunities.
We’ve got more meetings and more networking. ICE is only three days but we’re using the term World Gaming Week and putting ICE at the center of it – staring with what we’re terming “Day Zero” which is kind of a social networking thing on the Sunday where we’re inviting people to come and join us for a drink ahead of the show. They will have the ability to come pick up their badges, to meet people, to network.
As you know from going to ICE, three days is just hectic. You blink and you almost miss it through a world of loads of business meetings, loads of networking, loads of things going on.
So, we’re trying very much to elongate that. We don’t want to grow the show in terms of the days it’s open, but being able to provide different ways to connect and I suppose bond as an industry, but also to innovate, to get those meetings and to grow business, allowing for additional ways to do that outside of the actual show floor is really important to us because that’s what the industry is asking us for.
Fundamentally, this year we’re very much focused on exploring a new venue and a new city, and you’ll see that coming across in some of our creatives that explore the new ecosystem of gaming. But what’s behind that is very much an opportunity to come and meet a lot more innovators in the industry, depending on what your objectives are at the show.
Because it’s such a huge scale of show, there is literally nothing that you won’t be able to do and maximize when you come to ICE and iGB Affiliate this year.

IAG: ICE has always had a certain buzz and an atmosphere about it that you can feel as soon as you walk through the doors on the first day. Are you confident you’ll be able to maintain that at the new venue?
JF: You are right about the atmosphere and as a brand person I’m very aware that we don’t own ICE in that way. We’re the people that host it and put the show on and facilitate it but it’s the industry that really owns the show. And I think what’s very different about ICE specifically is that there is no other show that attracts every single corner of the gaming industry. So, we represent absolutely everything within the good and the great of the entirety of the industry.
There are other really good shows out there, niche shows and shows that focus on iGaming or affiliates, but ICE truly is the place where the world of gaming goes to do business.
There’s a lovely term that one of one of my colleagues mentioned, which is you can almost see all the commerce and all the meetings happening in small little groups everywhere you look. There are deals being done, introductions being made, opportunities being opened – all these micro meetings within a show of such scale. When I first started working with the team, the big thing for me was saying that what really sets ICE apart is the size and scale of it, but that’s only an advantage if you leverage the size and scale effectively. It can’t just be big for the sake of it. We’ve got to do something with that and make it really clear what our intention is. So, fundamentally, our role is to make sure that we provide one place where everybody at one point in time can coalesce and come together. And that’s really what we’ve tried to build.
In previous years we’ve had offshoots of different versions of ICE in different continents and whilst that’s certainly one way that you can build a business, what’s really special about ICE is it’s the one place that everyone comes to. The big growth markets for the industry are at the moment are around LATAM, APAC and the United States and they are really the kind of key areas that we’re looking to continue to attract. We already have a really good contingent of visitors from those places and we’re looking to grow that, particularly some developing companies.
Part of my role, leading the marketing function, is to make sure that we’re getting penetration into those markets. Equally, that will grow over time, but fundamentally the vision has always been for ICE to create a one point in time where everybody in the industry can come together as a community, as an industry, and meet and greet anybody they could ever wish to make contact with at ICE.
Because you are able to do so many meetings over the three days, it’s actually incredibly efficient. I know there are people at ICE who are literally back-to-back meetings for three days, perhaps with a short break for lunch and to take a breath, but they’ll have between 16 and 20 meetings in the day.
Of course, not everyone’s involved to that kind of level, but when you extrapolate it, last year we estimated that there were over a million meetings done at ICE in one form or another, whether it be on the show floor or as part of World Gaming Week, and this year we expect that to be even higher.
So, ICE just enables so much to be done in that period, more so than any other show can lay testament to. Our job is to make sure that everything runs smoothly, that people can get to the venue, that they can have the facilities they need and the experience that they want.

IAG: That’s easier said than done at a new venue.
JF: As a business, Clarion Events has a very, very high standard of event delivery which simply comes down to our operations team being among the best in the business and being able to deliver the quality of event that’s expected. Getting that many people into a place at the same time is a tricky thing – having 50,000 people trying to walk through a door at the same time is always going to be a challenge. But we like to think that we are experienced in that and will do the best job that is possible.
And one of the reasons that Fira and Barcelona won the bid [to replace London] was because of the team they have, their size, their ability in managing an event of this size and their ability to marshal the support of the city as well to ensure that everything is done to make the experience as fun and as positive as possible. Will we probably get a few things wrong this year? Absolutely. Will we fix it next year? Yes, absolutely we will. But we’ve also put forward a great case that the show will be as good as it can be and we’re really confident about it.
IAG: What are the key new features visitors should take the time to check out at ICE Barcelona?
JF: There’s a couple of new things. First and foremost, everything that we’ve done, we constantly look to innovate and make sure that all of our features are relevant and add value to the industry itself. The industry is changing all the time and our main opportunity to reflect that and help inspire the industry is through our features.
One of those features, the Customer Protection Zone, has been upgraded to the Sustainable Gambling Zone, which has become one of the most important features for the industry and for the show to really represent player protection, to look at the sustainable and healthy growth of the industry and really lean in from that perspective.
We also have a whole new area of the show. Now that we have sectorized halls, what we’ve been able to do is devote one area of the show, which is going to sit between Halls 4 and 5, to most of our features. This year we’ll have a center stage opportunity for new innovations to come out and for new product launches to be staged – anything that our customers want to shine a bit of a spotlight on and really give some extra emphasis to when they are launching new products. We know that more products are launched at ICE than at any other show. A lot of our customers will hold back their product launches for ICE and it’s such a critical time for the industry to see all of that.
As you will know being one of our really highly valued media partners, in previous years the media partners were sporadically spread around the show. This year we have an area called Media City, where all of our media partners can really own a space in the show.
We’ll have our Fast Forward feature, which was new last year but has been adapted. Like with everything we do, we have taken loads of learnings from last year about what was good and what people really enjoyed about it, what they wanted to see more of. Fast forward is an area of the show where everything forward-facing that we are looking to drive in terms of initiatives like the sustainable gambling initiative, will be housed. While that’s not technically a new area for the show, it’s very much enhanced and built on previous years and there will be a load of new innovations coming out from that. We will also have our Pitch ICE feature which has been a really popular and useful feature for all of our startups and for any sort of innovative new technologies. That will provide a home where people who have some brilliant ideas and are true innovators can put a spotlight on what they’re doing and potentially attract some investment or that interest from other customers and people who are going to be exhibiting and visiting us.
And something we couldn’t really do in London; one of the lovely things about being in Barcelona is the weather. We can’t guarantee sunny skies and no rain but we’re a pretty good chance and based on the early weather reports it’s looking good, so we now have the Avenida, which is an outdoor space for people just to take a breath away from the show floor. As you know, it’s a really intense show. There’s so much going on so it’s quite nice to create some different areas where people can go, breathe, network in a slightly different environment and have that outdoor experience of being in Barcelona.
Those are some of the key features that we’re doing but of course there are a host of other things going on.

IAG: You mentioned earlier about extending the show outside of the three core show days. Can you elaborate on that?
JF: Sure. Day Zero is a new opportunity for us. It’s a meet and greet feature for people to come and collect their badges but also join us for a drink, grab some tapas and have a social networking opportunity. We will also have some other things happening on 23 January after the show, because Barcelona is such a wonderful city and it’s actually far more cost effective to go and visit Barcelona while already there during this period. We’re hoping that people will come and enjoy the city, use World Gaming Week to its maximum capacity to get as much business done while they’re there and also to have a really pleasant experience.
There is a world of different things to explore, the architecture is amazing. In my previous life as a photographer, having had the opportunity to walk around and do a few video shoots in and around Barcelona, the light is just fantastic. The food is great too, so it’s a really cool city just to kind of hang out in.
A lot of people will have been to Barcelona before but if you’re there for the first time we’ve provided a load of guides and videos around things that you should really do from the people who live in Barcelona and work in the industry.
One other piece that we’ve got, which is a big feature of the show and which we trialled at iGB Live last year, which is our Amsterdam show, is a new AI Concierge through the WhatsApp platform. It’s a really amazing bit of kit and while it’s not a show floor feature it’s certainly a feature of the show.
ICE AI Concierge is basically that thing in your pocket where if you have any questions about the show – what time it opens, how to get there, who’s speaking, all those things – any questions you’ve got, you can just pop it into WhatsApp and within a few seconds it will spit back an answer to you. It’s an incredibly clever bit of tech and something we’re really excited about.
IAG: Finally Jody, while many people will have been to ICE London before there will also be plenty of first time visitors. What would be your advice anyone coming to ICE for the first time?
JF: I would say definitely spend a bit of time to try and prep your experience. I’m not going to teach people how to suck eggs – they know to pre-book their meetings and to see who’s going to be there, to have a look at the show floor – but definitely try and plan out what you’re going to do. We’ve included as part of this year’s show a kind of event schedule, which is on the website. That’s not easy because there are hundreds if not thousands of events going on within and around ICE that our customers put on, including parties and networking opportunities. What we’ve been doing this year is very much trying to capture all of that into an event schedule, so you should be able to go to the schedule and see what’s on for that day, and pick and plan what you’re going to do.
The three days will go by in a heartbeat, so having a really good schedule plan of where you want to be and what you want to see is the best way to make sure you don’t miss anything.
Naturally, if you’re anything like myself, best laid plans and all that – things will change and will be flexible – but definitely try to pre-prepare for where you want to go.
And I would also say allow yourself a day or two either side of the show to familiarize yourself with the city and enjoy Barcelona. Take a minute to look around and just marvel at this amazing experience ICE has become over years.
To register for ICE Barcelona, visit www.icegaming.com.
To register for iGB Affiliate, visit www.barcelona.igbaffiliate.com.