Employee training is no laughing matter — or is it? Either way, a clown-themed booth might be just what you need to drive home this oh-so-serious point. Mimeo.com, an online and on-demand printing business, used a “Be Clown Free” theme at the 2006 Workforce Performance Conference to demonstrate that it understands the importance of training employees properly — and that there are no copy-shop clowns in its operation. Mimeo.com’s room drop the first night of the show included a “100% Clown Free” pin and an inflatable clown punching bag. First-day visitors to the booth received T-shirts with “100% Clown Free” text and a smiling clown face. Mimeo.com staffers walking the show floor also gave iPod Shuffles to the first 50 attendees they saw wearing the shirts. When the show ended, the online printing company had drawn 230 of the show’s 360 attendees to its booth, with a solid 10 percent placing orders within 90 days. No joke.
Construction workers aren’t afraid of a little dirt; in fact, many may remember their childhood days filled with mud pies and sand boxes. So to entice this construction-industry crowd to stop by its booth and learn about its products, Unique Paving Material Corp. placed a trowel and a container full of its paving material on a table at the front of its booth at Conex Minnesota. And sure enough, the mostly-male audience found it hard to resist playing in the bucket of black glop. As soon as attendees paused to play, a booth staffer started a dialogue, proving that sometimes, down and dirty can be a good thing.
Nomadic Display wanted to make sure attendees at EXHIBITOR2006 knew about its new online store. So Nomadic, which sells portable and modular exhibits, gave booth visitors a gift card good for free shipping crates when they purchased a specific display online. But since gift cards, like business cards, tend to go “poof” once they enter your pocket, Nomadic distributed the gift cards inside tiny 5-inch-tall shopping carts branded with the online store’s URL. The carts tied directly to Nomadic’s online-shopping message, and kept the company’s gift cards on attendees’ minds long after the show. Now that’s some super marketing.
 To give attendees a fun-filled testing ground for its digital cameras, Panasonic Corp. of North America brought the beach to the trade show floor at the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Complete with a 15-by-40-foot faux shore filled with sand, three swimsuit-clad models, and back-wall graphics featuring a water skier and an ocean view, the sunny milieu created a picture-perfect photo opportunity for visitors that wasn’t another attendees-in-a-booth snap. Of course, staffers hovered nearby to answer questions or point out the camera’s options. The fun-in-the-sun scene generated buzz, attracted attendees, and had prospects pointing and clicking throughout the four-day show.
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A company that espouses a healthier world should have a booth that reflects that ideology as well. That’s why the Compost Tea Co., which makes all-natural compost tea sprays to help vegetation grow, fashioned its booth out of recycled materials and living plants for the All Things Organic show. A barn façade at the back of its 10-by-10-foot booth was made of wood from a 100-year-old barn, as were the planters holding miniature gardens. Sod covered the floor, and old apple crates held products. In a world dominated by Mother Earth-dissing booths, the Compost Tea Co. exhibit was a breath of fresh air.
CommScope Inc., a cable and connectivity manufacturer, wanted its Extremeflex cable to make a memorable impression on attendees. So at the 2007 Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association Wireless show, CommScope brought in three former Cirque du Soleil acrobats. Clad in shiny silver costumes designed to mimic the cable, the acrobats each performed a five-minute show and rotated performances so one of the three shows was offered every 30 minutes. After each show, booth staffers explained the correlation between the flexibility of the performers and the cable. CommScope attracted 70 percent of show attendees, leading to nearly 450 qualified leads and a flexible image that was hard to forget.
With today’s technology, it really is a small world after all. Tandberg, a videoconferencing provider, drove that message home with a demonstration at ITU Telecom World 2003 in Geneva. The company set up live videoconferences on the corners of its booth. Aided by cameras aimed at the aisles, on-screen employees in Sweden, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Germany called out things such as, “Stop and talk to me. I’m in Norway.” The activity not only demonstrated Tandberg’s product, it stopped attendees in their tracks.
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