With Intersec 2026 just a few months away, Peter Mawson sat down with Messe Frankfurt Portfolio Director, Nathan Waugh. In this exclusive interview, Waugh reveals what visitors can expect from the first show under his directorship, including a fully hosted matchmaking service for top buyers, and a better personalised experience for general visitors via the app, as well as plans for a platform which engages the security community, not just during Intersec, but all year round….

Peter Mawson: You’ve been in the job for a little over a year now. What sort of approach will we see from you and your new team for Intersec 2026?

Nathan Waugh: “Firstly, I don’t position myself as an industry expert, we are trade show experts and what I want to build with my team is a fantastic show and a brand that delivers excellent results for our stakeholders.

“We don’t have be industry experts immediately because we’ve got our media partners, our associations, all the key stakeholders that we can learn from. In my experience in the events industry, I’ve seen that, sometimes, too much knowledge can almost work against you, because then you think you’re an industry expert, or know it all, So, I won’t pitch myself as an industry expert because that’s not my job. My job as a trade show expert is to take those industry experts, put them together and create something really rich and meaningful for the industry.

“The industry knowledge and the connections are important. You build those as you go through the process, but for me it’s about going forward and saying not just how do we make these not just these three the best that they can possibly be for all of our stakeholders, but keep up the wider communication and engagement with the security community throughout the year.”

PM: “So, what do you envision that looking like?

NW: “For me, it’s about elevating it a little bit beyond the trade show brand model to become a kind of conduit or a thought leader for the whole industry.

“We don’t want to be a thought generator as such, but a kind of hub where all that thought leadership comes from. We have this opportunity to have this fantastic platform where you can get together all these key voices, and bring them together in a room through different methods, whether it’s round tables or sessions we deliver at the show, and then we can kind of curate and package that content with the support and partnership with some of our key media partners to really act as this hub for the global security industry.

“That’s the kind of thing that I want to try and implement and try and get to where the three days are really just the peak of what we’re doing where we get everybody together. But the reality is that the conversation continues beyond that process, which then starts to grow and evolve from there.

“And there have been some changes in the in the structure of the team, but the ethos and the culture should remain consistent throughout that. The culture is that we do these things with the objective of delivering a fantastic experience both on site during the show, and all year around that.”

PM: “And are there any new things we can expect to see at the show itself. What are you bringing in that’s got your stamp on it?”

NW: “I went to Intersec last year as a visitor, almost as a kind of a mystery shopper, if you will. But the event was fantastic. It made all the key metrics, and there was a fantastic audience there. So, I think for me it’s very much a process of evolution rather than revolution in terms of where I take the brand.

“One of the things we did do is some deep-dive qualitative research during the show to really drill down into what our key stakeholders felt about the event and what they wanted.

“This included building up some key personas of who’s coming, both on the exhibitor side and the visitor side, because once you identify these key personas and in a trade show, and there may only be three or four personas of a visitor side, so it identifies what the person is coming to the event for.

“I looked at those personas, and in conjunction with the team, we really brainstormed this to how we can deliver on these personas.

“One thing we plan to implement, which came out of that brainstorming, is a full concierge, white-glove, matchmaking service, in which we identify a very select number of people that we want to give a personalised itinerary to. These will be people with top procurement responsibilities, in the public or private sector. We will then work out what types of things they’re looking for, and then match that with a really targeted set of meetings and exhibitor visits, so the experience is as productive as possible, and we will manage the whole process.

“And that doesn’t necessarily mean meeting all the large exhibitors either. Of course, there’ll be a portion of that, but there may also be an SME that’s coming to the show for the first time from Germany, for example, and they might have a product that we think that buyer would really be interested in. So, that hosted experience is going to be a really critical part of what we do at the show.

“This will be supported by technology whereby we plug in what they’re interested in and we can kind of mould an itinerary from there, but some of it will be very much a person-to-person thing, you know, we are a people business and we want to make sure that we don’t jump fully fledged into just using technology.

“That being said, technology is great and we expect to have a huge number of interactions within our app for the 2026 show, in terms of people finding their way around the show, and building their own personalised itinerary.

“So, we anticipate there being several tiers, so some of it, as I mentioned, will be driven through our app system where we’ll be encouraging people to interact within the app and arrange meetings without much involvement from us, and some of that will be the other end of the scale with a hyper-personalised experience where we’ll be creating itineraries for people to deliver at the show, because if we do that, and if we can make sure that those people have a super productive experience, then they will go away and advocate for the show and tell more people about it. So, I think that’s one of the things that I really am focused on.”

PM: “Do you think expectations have changed of trade shows now, vs when you started?”

“In my 20 years in the trade show industry I’ve seen quite a lot of changes in the way trade shows are run. You know, at the start of my career, it was very much a case of putting buyers and sellers together in a big room and then kind of expecting them to get on with it.

The expectations of stakeholders are different now, and rightly so. They want to come away from a trade show with connections, but also knowledge. They want to have networking experience. They want to be inspired and, to a certain extent, entertained, and they want to have that sort of instagrammable moment that they can come away and think well, that was, you know, fantastic. That was a bit of a bit of fun and engagement.

“And they’re also quite time poor. They want their time there to be as efficient as possible, you know? So, we want to make sure that that is as easy as possible for people, both from a concierge perspective for a kind of top tranche, but also ensuring that those kind of content and features are all at the events and people have that kind of wow factor. You know, they have.

“We want to make sure that all of the visitors find something to excite and interest them at the at the event. That’s the kind of key driving goal for us.”

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