Sleeping on My Troubles

Losing a booth might sound like a nightmare, but losing the graphics for your company’s new promotional campaign along with it can be a total terror. Fortunately, after sleeping on my troubles, I came up with a solution to both problems that worked like a dream.

In April, I shipped my company’s pop-up exhibit via FedEx Corp. from our offices in Belgium to Washington, DC, for the Arthroscopy Association of North America show.

With the show set to start bright and early Thursday morning, I’d planned for our U.S. colleague to arrive early Wednesday to set up the exhibit. Meanwhile, I’d fly in from Belgium later that afternoon, when he’d pick me up from the airport.

When I’d boarded my plane in Europe, everything appeared to be going smoothly, but when I landed in Washington, my U.S. colleague immediately broke the bad news. While our booth literature was safe and accounted for, the booth and graphics were both missing in action.

We quickly made our way to the hotel where I called one of our FedEx reps, who broke even more bad news. While tracking indicated that our shipment had arrived in Memphis, TN, it had promptly disappeared without a trace.
Since I’m not one to panic, and because I had a killer case of jet lag, I decided to get some sleep. After all, I had no idea who to call here in the states, and our offices in Belgium were closed for the night. Plus, I hoped that I just might get lucky and my exhibit would turn up in the morning.

Given the different time zones and my missing-booth jitters, I woke up at 4 a.m. and checked on my booth, which was still AWOL according to FedEx’s tracking system. Since I was awake and it was 10 a.m. in Belgium, I called my co-workers for a long-distance brainstorming session.

While we talked, I remembered that Nomadic Display, the maker of our pop-up, had an emergency help number. Well, I had an emergency, and I needed help. So after speaking with my Nomadic rep in Belgium, he agreed to contact Nomadic’s Washington office to see if local reps could loan me a booth. The plan was flawless except for one problem: The show opened at 7 a.m. in Washington, and the local Nomadic office in the states didn’t open until 8:30 a.m. But seeing no other option, my rep went ahead with the request, e-mailing the Washington office instructions to deliver a booth to me a.s.a.p.

Shortly before 7 a.m., I made my way to the show floor where I unpacked our booth literature in our otherwise empty space. For the first 90 minutes of the show, I handed out brochures, told the tale of our missing booth, made final calls to FedEx, and counted down to the moment the local Nomadic office would open.

At 8:30 a.m., I called Nomadic’s Washington office. Having received the e-mail from the Belgium office, the reps offered to loan me a pop-up exhibit with walls made of a carpet-like material. They also suggested I send them our electronic files so they could reproduce our large-format graphics and put a Velcro backing on them. The graphics would then hang from the carpet-like walls. As soon as I got off the phone, I called my co-workers in Belgium and asked them to upload the graphics files to the local Nomadic FTP site.

As I headed back to my booth around 9 a.m., I knew I wasn’t out of the woods yet. But around noon, I began to see a clearing ahead when workers from Nomadic showed up with a booth and graphics to replace my wayward pop-up.

By 1 p.m., I was back in business, with our borrowed exhibit property up and running and catching the eyes of intrigued passersby for the next three days of the show.

Believe it or not, FedEx never found my missing booth or graphics, but the new graphics — which ended up being a bit small for our rented pop-up — were later turned into a display for a tabletop exhibit. And while the show got off to a nightmarish start, our trip to the United States had a relatively dreamy ending.

— Sven Maenhout, international marketing director, TiGenix n.v., Leuven, Belgium

Triple Trouble

When a trio of troubles came at me during the 2007 Interop show in Las Vegas, I had to develop three quick solutions to keep one crisis after another from fouling up my exhibit’s aesthetics.

The first problem was with the 8-by-3-foot vinyl panels that would make up our conference room. Before we’d arrived, a forklift scratched the panels with varying degrees of damage.

The second problem came about because we reconfigured our booth for this show. A set of black cabinets used to hold electronics equipment needed to stand vertically instead of horizontally. Unfortunately, when we arrived on the show floor, we discovered this meant an unpainted side of the cabinet would now be exposed.
We discovered our final setup problem when a one-piece banner we’d ordered to span the booth proclaiming “Best Antivirus of 2006” showed up in two pieces, split right down the middle.

With the trio of errors making my exhibit look like a makeshift booth at best, I tackled each problem one by one.

Unable to get replacements for the vinyl panels before the show, I worked with the installation team to determine how to best arrange our panels so the damage would be hidden from attendees while they were inside the conference room. We also made sure the most damaged panels faced out toward the area with the least traffic.

Turning next to my cabinets, I got some black duct tape and carefully covered their exposed, unpainted sides. I even used a black marker to touch up any spots the tape missed.

Then I called my printer and asked it to send a new banner printed in one long piece so there would be no seam in the middle. Unfortunately, the show would open before the new banner would arrive, so using Velcro, I joined the two halves of our banner and waited on the replacement. When a replacement showed up too short, I kept the two-piece banner up and gave the printer one more try, ordering the banner again in one piece, and making it ship it overnight.

The final banner showed up in one piece, but without the quotation marks around our message. So before the show started on the second day, I handed my co-worker my trusty black marker and sent him up a ladder to add quotes by hand.

Finally, thanks to some tricky positioning, black tape, and a Sharpie, my booth looked fabulous.

— Yvette Lee, event and trade show specialist, ESET LLC, San Diego