I Scream, You Scream

The typical trade show floor breeds endless tales of woe: Stuff gets broken. Exhibitors run out of giveaways. Booth equipment loses power. When any one of these snafus strike, you’ve got a big problem. But when all of these problems occur at the same show, you’ve got a disaster, requiring the ability to stay cool and revise on the fly.

Quick thinking and flexibility definitely were part of my basic requirements at EXHIBITOR2008 in Las Vegas, where my company, Skyline Exhibits of St. Paul, MN, planned to showcase our inexpensive, low-carbon-impact exhibit option. We built our booth out of fabric and other lightweight materials, and that “light weight” concept inspired our slogan: “Put your exhibit on a diet and still look delicious.” To highlight the “diet” and “delicious” part of our slogan, we decided to give away Weight Watchers ice-cream bars to attendees.

Prior to the show, I priced mini freezers to house the ice cream, deciding on a pair of 7-cubic-foot iceboxes I found at a local Best Buy. But I wanted to save money and keep our shipping-related carbon emissions to a bare minimum, so I decided that rather than buy them in Minnesota and ship them to the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, I’d purchase the same models from a Best Buy in Las Vegas.

I also made a list of stores near Mandalay Bay that carried the Weight Watchers treats. Since I couldn’t be certain if one store would have enough bars to fill our freezers for the entire show — or if I might need to make an ice-cream supply run during the day — my list included several stores and their distances from the convention center. I figured I’d hit the farther stores for any morning ice-cream runs, when I’d have extra time to get back to the show hall, and I’d shop at the closer grocers for any quick, midday, re-supply trips. This way I wouldn’t completely deplete the nearby stores’ supplies, and I’d still be able to have ice cream in my booth at all times.

When I arrived in Vegas two days before the show, setup seemed to be going smoothly. So I headed out to a local Best Buy, bought a pair of those freezers, and arranged for them to be delivered to the convention center. Then I headed back to the show floor to wait for the drayage guys to deposit them in my booth.

Unfortunately, I waited and waited and waited. Eventually, I checked with show services and found my freezers had been delivered to our client’s booth space by mistake. Wanting to make sure the freezers found the right home, I began looking for a forklift driver so I could personally oversee the delivery, and that’s when disaster No. 2 struck.

Another installation crew was rigging our client’s booth, and a spotter took his eyes off the action while one of his co-workers was maneuvering a boom. Suddenly the boom was dropped right on top of one of my brand new freezers. Once the dust settled, I checked my icebox, and sure enough, it was broken, never to freeze a fudgesicle again.

I immediately envisioned endless ice-cream runs to local stores, continually refilling the remaining freezer, and quickly realized that one freezer wouldn’t be enough to get us through three days on the show floor. Fortunately, however, someone from the installation company offered not only to buy me a new freezer, but also to have it delivered to my booth. So off he went, and within a few hours I had two iceboxes — the replacement one slightly smaller than my original — in our exhibit. I plugged in the bigger one at the front of our booth, where it’d house ice cream for attendees. Then I moved the little one to the back of the space, where we’d store the remainder of the ice cream.

Finally, I turned the freezers on, drove to a grocery store, and bought enough ice cream to fill both freezers. When I got back to the booth, I stocked my freezers and checked to make sure they were sufficiently frigid and were attached to outlets that would be powered on all night. My preparations done, I went to bed feeling confident about our booth and our tasty giveaways.

When I arrived on the show floor the next day, however, I found problem No. 3. Apparently someone had switched the plug on the larger freezer from one outlet to another, the latter of which was powered off during the night. That meant most of my ice cream had melted and my promotion was in peril. While we could probably re-freeze the melted treats, I didn’t want to hand out less-than-perfect ice cream to attendees. So with one freezer full of squishy ice-cream bars, and the smaller freezer holding too few treats to get us through the next day, I had to come up with a cool solution before the show floor opened in about an hour.

Prior to the show, I’d estimated we’d need a couple of hundred bars to treat everyone who came by the booth, but more than half of that inventory was now melted like a snowman in July. So I knew I’d eventually have to make a mid-show run for treats.

First, I plugged my big icebox back into the right outlet. Then the staff and I moved the frozen ice cream from the small freezer into the larger one, and transferred the mushy stuff to the small freezer where it could refreeze and possibly be eaten by not-so-picky staffers.

By the time we’d finished shuffling the ice cream, the show was about to open, so I stuck around for a few minutes to see how our promotion would go over. As it turned out, our ice cream moved like hot cakes. Unfortunately, that meant I needed to hit a store — and a close one at that — fast.

I took out my list of grocery stores in the area and located one very close to the convention hall. I then raced to the store, bought enough ice cream to make it through the first day, and zoomed back to place it in the freezers.

Based on our promotion’s popularity throughout day one, I soon realized I’d need to continually re-supply our freezers throughout the show, which meant making daily re-supply runs to those nearby grocery stores. So for the next two days, my mornings started with a frantic trip to a store a considerable distance from Mandalay Bay. Then halfway through show hours each afternoon, I made a mad dash to a store closer to the expo hall for another batch of treats.

By show close, we’d handed out a lot more ice cream than we’d planned — but that also meant more traffic to our booth. Plus, we’d managed to ditch the re-frozen bars on the union guys as a special treat for a quick teardown. But thanks to my list of grocery stores — not to mention my quick trips and cool thinking — neither our booth nor the local stores ever ran out of the Weight Watchers treats.

— Nik Fradgley, trade show coordinator, Skyline Exhibits, St. Paul, MN