When attendees approached the Wausau Tile Inc. booth at the 2008 American Institute of Architects Minnesota show, it was hard to miss the company’s product display. A manufacturer of outdoor furnishings, Wausau gave prominent placement to one of its 5-foot-long, metal park benches in its 10-by-10 booth. The orange enameled bench looked almost like a piece of modern art plopped down in the middle of the trade show floor. The front-and-center brightly colored bench certainly attracted attendees’ attention. But because it was the same bench pictured in the mailers Wausau sent to attendees before the show, the display was also a recognizable reminder that connected the booth to the company’s pre-show promotions.
 With huge earthmovers and trucks towering over attendees at the 2008 ConExpo/Con-Agg show, Volvo Construction Equipment Inc. needed a standout method to show off its new, environmentally sound HybriPower engine for heavy equipment. So the company devised a colorful way to highlight it. While Volvo’s corporate blue dominated the color scheme of the exhibit, the section featuring the HybriPower engine and an earthmover equipped with the eco-friendly motor boasted an overhead, circular banner that glowed with a green light instead of blue. Measuring 35 feet across, the banner featured the text: “It’s a Volvo. It’s innovation. It’s eco-friendly. It’s safety.” As it turns out, going Green doesn’t have to leave you feeling blue.
 
When you’re a book publisher with thousands of books in inventory, displaying a majority of your titles in a 10-by-10-foot booth is pretty much impossible — unless you’re AbeBooks Inc. For the 2008 Public Library Association
show in Minneapolis, AbeBooks created a back-wall graphic of a woman stretched out on the ground reading a book, along with the text “AbeBooks.com, passion for books.” Attendees were drawn to the eye-catching image, but a second glance lured them in for a closer look. For instead of an actual image of a woman, the photo comprised thousands of tiny images of the company’s book covers crafted into a lovely mosaic. According to the old adage, a picture’s worth a thousand words. But a picture with 1,000 cover images says, “Come on in, and let’s talk books.”
 
Who needs fancy light fixtures when you’ve got ingenuity? At the 2009 International Builders’ Show, Multicoat Products Systems, which makes waterproofing, concrete coatings, and stucco systems, found a fresh way to brighten its booth. The company took six of the lidded buckets in which its products are packaged, drilled holes in the top and bottom of the containers, and ran a strip of lights through the holes. Placed at the edge of its booth space, the resulting 8-foot-tall custom light fixture illuminated the booth and put the company’s products in the best possible light.
When you need to demonstrate a lawn-mowing robot in the middle of an exhibit hall, creativity is a requirement. So for its 10-by-10-foot booth at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show, BamaBots covered part of its exhibit floor with live green grass. Throughout the show, booth staffers periodically turned on one of BamaBots’ grass-chomping robot mowers and let it go in the exhibit. Given the meager height of the grass, few blades were actually cut during the show. However, the demo acted as both a traffic builder that stopped attendees in their tracks and a straightforward product demonstration that needed no further explanation.
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Fleetwood Fixtures understands that the current economy is on everyone’s mind. So at GlobalShop 2009, the retail-fixture manufacturer presented a display that appealed to the tightwad in everyone. Using its line of products, Fleetwood created two retail vignettes that were virtually mirror images of each other, but came with two dramatically different price tags. The goal was to show that it’s possible to deliver a brand impression on a budget — without diluting its impact. When attendees asked about the near-identical displays, booth staffers explained that the display on the right cost 40 percent less than the one on the left, demonstrating that with a little creativity, it’s possible to cut costs and still look good.
 It takes more than a robotic arm picking up and repositioning tiny medical devices on a counter to impress the seasoned crowd at the Medical Design & Manufacturing Minneapolis show. That’s why Eden Prairie, MN-based Braas Co. decided to add a sense of childlike whimsy — and creativity — to its robotic demo. Throughout the 2008 show, its robotic machinery continually drew the company’s logo on a Magna Doodle children’s toy and then erased it. Equal parts inventive and memorable, the clever activity was a far cry from competitors’ ho-hum pick-and-place robo demonstrations.
For most trade shows, installation-and-dismantle labor companies require exhibitors to purchase a minimum of four hours worth of labor. But if you have a small exhibit, four hours is often more than enough, and you end up paying for hours you don’t use. Michelle Smith, of Smith Consulting, says sometimes, depending on the show, her I&D company has let her partner up with another small-booth exhibitor to share a single four-hour slot. For example, if she and another exhibitor each need two hours of I&D labor and use the same installation company, they purchase the four-hour minimum between them and split the cost. The partnering strategy doesn’t always work in all cases, but according to Smith, it’s definitely worth investigating if you are looking to cut costs.
What's The Big Idea?
Do you have a clever exhibit-related tip? Did your last exhibit have an über-cool traffic builder?
Contact Travis Stanton at tstanton@exhibitormagazine.com.
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