T R A F F I C  B U I L D E R
	Exhibitor: Intel Corp. Creative: Live Marketing, Chicago, 312-787-4800, www.livemarketing.com; 2LK Design Ltd.; Farnham, Surrey, United Kingdom, 44-01252-727727, www.2lk.com Production: The Taylor Group, Brampton, Ontario, Canada, 800-605-6519, www.taylorinc.com Show: International Consumer Electronics Show, 2007 Budget: $400,000 Goals: Generate 40,000 attendee/product interactions. Use viral marketing to increase awareness of Core 2 Duo multi-core processors. Exceed 2006’s 79,000 visitors. Create buzz about the booth. Results: Generated more than 45,000 attendee/product interactions, a 50-percent increase from 2006. Uploaded more than 190 videos to YouTube, with more than 20,000 hits. Convinced more than 500 attendees to dance on the Multiply Your Grooves stage. Drew more than 85,000 attendees to the booth. Earned news coverage in television, print, and online sources.

busy trade show floor isn’t the most conducive place for an exhibitor to go into a long, involved explanation of a complicated new high-tech product. That holds especially true when the show is the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) with more than 2,700 exhibitors competing for the attention of 140,000 attendees. So how do you make a complex, high-tech product easy to understand in a way that entices attendees to line up for the privilege?

That was the challenge facing Intel Corp. at CES in 2007. Six months before the show, Intel introduced its Core 2 Duo multi-core processor, a technological advance that offers faster computing and smoother gaming in laptops and PCs. Two months after launching the Core 2 Duo, the company kicked off a multimedia “Multiply Your Grooves” advertising campaign to spread the word. The ads featured multiple images of a person dancing or playing games, demonstrating the concept that having multiple cores in a computer is almost like cloning a person to get more done at the same time. The only problem was that consumers didn’t necessarily understand the tangible benefits of Intel’s new multi-core processors.

“We’re an engineering company; we’re very technical,” says Victor Torregroza, events program manager for Intel’s corporate event marketing group.

With an overall strategy of educating CES attendees on the benefits of multi-core processing, and ultimately convincing them to purchase Core 2 Duo-enabled computers, Intel’s trade show team needed to figure out how to make the technology accessible in a limited amount of time.

Connecting the Dots

Hoping to increase booth traffic over the previous year, Intel set out to explain the benefits of multi-core processing through experiential activities easily digested by even the most tech-challenged attendees. “You’ve got to connect the dots for people, make them care,” says Jerrie Ames, senior creative director at Live Marketing. “Attendees want to know how multi-core will make their computing better, how it will enhance their gaming.”

Intel teamed up with trade show and events agency Live Marketing, and British design firm 2LK Design Ltd. Together, the trade show trio rethought Intel’s entire booth design and concentrated on three experiential activities where attendees could interact with the multi-core processors. The three activities, including a racing game and a green-screen activity, differed greatly from each other, appealing to a wide range of attendees.

“There’s a lot going on here, but the purpose was to involve people in activities that demonstrate this dual-core capacity,” said one Sizzle Awards judge. “So rather than offer one activity to snag one type of audience, they created multiple activities for multiple types of audiences.”

Intel put the focus of its 100-by-120-foot booth on the multi-core processing experience to make the technology understandable, accessible, and most important, desirable. The three experiential areas of the exhibit provided an array of experiences designed to make a strong impact on attendees’ senses and feelings.

To generate booth traffic and educate attendees about its Core 2 Duo processors, Intel Corp. divided its exhibit into three experiential areas.

The Exploratorium Visitors began Intel’s experiential journey at an area known internally as the Exploratorium. Situated in the center of the exhibit, it contained six diverse activities. Every 20 minutes, a high-energy live performer swung into a lively patter in front of the Exploratorium, drawing a crowd into the booth, where she gave a brief three-minute product presentation before asking the audience to “follow me” to the various stations.

First, there was the Demystify Multi-Core station where four revved-up 45-second videos ran one after the other and explained exactly how the technology works. To show how multiple cores enhance computer gaming, one video showed a side-by-side comparison of the same game played on a single-core powered computer and on a dual-core computer, which moved much faster.

Easy-to-understand phrases such as “it’s like having two engines under one hood” helped attendees grasp the benefits of the Core 2 Duo processor.

	“There’s a lot going on here, but the purpose was to involve people in activities that demonstrate this dual-core capacity,” said one Sizzle Awards judge.

Attendees then moved on to one of the other five stations in the Exploratorium to dig deeper into the benefits of multi-core processing through additional interactive activities.

At one station, visitors could add or delete a core while using a number of computing applications, so they could appreciate the difference the multi-core processor makes. Videos or games that flowed smoothly while using a multi-core processor stuttered when the computer was limited to a single core.

Other visitors explored Second Life, the online, 3-D virtual world, while simultaneously doing a complicated, processing-heavy task in the background. This displayed the nimble way the Core 2 Duo juggles different applications without faltering.

Gaming fans got the chance to play next-generation games enhanced by the duo-core processor. The speed at which the dual processors worked enabled the games to move fluidly and quickly, giving the players the fast-paced action needed for optimal game playing.

At another station, booth visitors could set up a Skype Internet videoconference on a laptop, including the transfer of a large file, demonstrating how effortless and smooth multiple cores made the task.

With six stations, visitors could participate in the activities most suited to their interests and lifestyles, or check out all of them to receive a more in-depth experience. Each station was intended to last at least 90 seconds to give attendees time to experience the activities and allow one-on-one time with a staffer. The activities could be extended to five or six minutes if there was more interest. The quick turnaround made the Exploratorium fun, fast, and educational. More than 8,000 visitors invested a minimum of 10 minutes in the area, taking part in at least two or more of the activities.

Need for Speed

Intel’s second experiential area was situated to one side of the Exploratorium. There, four full-sized Formula 1 race cars put attendees in the driver’s seat. The cars in the BMW Sauber F1 Team Racing Experience may not have had engines, but the fiberglass vehicles with race simulators powered by multi-core processors transformed exhibit visitors into race-car drivers flying down a high-speed track.

With multiple cores powering the racing simulator, the participants enjoyed a smoother, faster, more vivid driving experience than if powered by traditional processors. If the simulator only had access to a single core, the drivers would have seen hesitation in the action and less graphic detail.

Some 1,300 visitors tested their driving skills on the racing simulators, designed to relate the high performance and exhilaration of F1 racing to the high performance and exhilaration of using a multi-core processor, Torregroza says.

	“Come on, 85,000 people visited the booth? If that’s not building traffic, I don’t know what is.”

Multiply Your Grooves

In the third area, dubbed the Multiply Your Grooves stage, Live Marketing employees asked attendees to get up and dance in front of a green screen. Intel staffers used four cameras to record every dance move.

Using the Adobe Premier Elements 3.0 application and multi-core technology, Intel staffers edited the four individual videos down to a 30-second commercial that showed the person boogying in quadruplicate, just like the television commercials. The activity constructed a direct link between the booth and Intel’s “Multiply Your Grooves” campaign.

“What really thrilled me is that a PC editing demo doesn’t usually attract attention,” Ames says. “But attendees were crowded around the editing area five and six deep, standing on their tippy-toes to watch the process.”

Staffers downloaded each attendee’s commercial to a thumb drive for them to take home. The entire process took a mere five minutes, demonstrating the advantage of multi-core in a very visible way.

More than 500 attendees took the stage during the four-day show in front of audiences totaling more than 10,000. Of the hundreds of dancers, nearly 200 uploaded their commercials to YouTube, which in turn generated more than 20,000 hits.

“I loved the green-screen activity,” said one judge. “It had huge stopping power and gave the promotion a life after the show.”

Online Education

While Intel’s multiple in-booth activities allowed for more one-on-one conversations between staffers and attendees, those interactions would have been lost opportunities if staff hadn’t been adequately trained.

Before the show, the company set up a 30-minute online course on multi-core processing and the company’s CES booth, allowing Intel employees scattered around the world to log on and learn.

Torregroza says that the required course was designed to impart Intel’s key messages to the employees who would be working in the booth, as well as teach them how to make those messages relevant to the attendees’ everyday lives.

The tutorial underscored the need for speed. Staffers were told they had 30 seconds to get attendees on a computer and help them experience the magic of multi-core processing themselves. As attendees progressed through the on-screen activities, staffers looked at what the attendees were experiencing and used those examples to point out the benefits of multi-core processing in the participants’ lives.

Let Me Count The Ways

The training course accomplished its mission. In a survey done after the 2007 CES show, the percentage of attendees who said they were likely to purchase Intel products after their experience increased by 15 percent over 2006 results.

By the end of the show, more than 45,000 attendees sampled what Intel’s multi-core processor had to offer, an increase of more than 50 percent from the 30,000 visitors who showed up at the 2006 CES Intel booth.

Not all the increases were in the double digits. The number of visitors who walked through the booth increased roughly 7 percent, from 79,000 to 85,000. But Intel saw a 50-percent increase in the number of attendees who stayed in the booth and tried out the activities in 2007.

Besides the thousands of YouTube hits received by the Multiply Your Grooves commercials, the booth also found an unusual cheerleader in the form of rapper MC Hammer. He visited the booth twice and wrote on his Web site about the technology used to produce the Multiply Your Grooves commercials.

The Intel booth was judged newsworthy by traditional news sources, as well. The exhibit earned coverage in The Wall Street Journal and on WCBS in New York. More recognition came from online publications such as Mac World, and Yahoo! Tech.

The buzz and energy created by Intel at the 2007 CES show served one more purpose — impressing the panel of judges for this year’s Sizzle Awards. As one them said, “Come on, 85,000 people visited the booth? If that’s not building traffic, I don’t know what is.” e