The seminar has also roped in international speakers like Martin Pegler, the renowned guru of visual merchandising and store design, as well as Martin Kingdon, POP Advertising International director general, UK and Ireland.

Pegler is one of the most respected authorities on visual merchandising and store design. His book Visual merchandising & Display is currently in its fourth edition and is still prescribed reading for students and professionals in the field. Kingdon on the other hand, has spoken extensively across the world on various aspects of the display market and specialises in the effectiveness of retail displays and layouts and also on brand and retailer attitudes to in-store communications.

According to Pegler, "POP industry has become the visual arm and now encompasses store design, visual merchandising, point of purchase, store construction and exhibit design. All the extensions of visual field are involved in presentation. It is all about making things look better and more desirable than they may actually be".

Other well-known speakers include Raghu Pillai -RPG Enterprises retail sector president and CEO, HLL VP/head - personal wash business Gopal Vittal, ACNielsen ORG-MARG director client servicing Nehal Medha, RAMMS India director and president R Kannan and Ravi Poovaiah - Faculty in visual communication and product design at the Industrial Design Centre (IDC), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay.

POP Asia 2005 will showcase the best and latest international trends in point-of-purchase advertising.This will be the first time that an event will bring the industry buyers and sellers into direct contact from across continents. This exhibition-cum-conference aims at being the ultimate destination of producers and end users of POP who will be provided a ready platform to forge mutually rewarding business partnerships.

The event has already confirmed participation from POP designers, POP manufacturers, sign makers, electronic signage makers, visual merchandising and store fixtures, creative agencies, exhibition designers, modular systems, POP technology. These will be from both developed and emerging markets in Europe, Middle East, China, Far and South East Asia and the Indian sub continent. Depending on the company profile, exhibitors will be classified into four distinct pavilions: absolute POP, retail signs, V M and storefix and cutting edge technologies.

The Indian POP advertising industry currently stands at around Rs 180 billion and is on the upswing growing at a healthy 30-40 per cent annually. Organised retail has also grown three-fold from Rs 495 billion in 2000 to Rs 1485 billion today, with a potential to expand to around Rs 3600 billion in 2005. About 25 million square feet of organised retail space would be added to the existing eight million by the year 2005.