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To be competitive today, fair exhibitors not only got to grab attention to their fair displays inside the exhibit hall but also beyond the exhibit floor.
More and more, creative fair exhibitors attract crowds to their fair booth by using nearby venues as a springboard. Attracting attention at neighboring hotels where the fair visitors are staying or public places where attendees frequent, may be a good start. This goes for neighboring restaurants, bus routes, cabs and native night clubs also .
Increasingly, rather than letting a custom or fair diplay rental at the expo stand on its own, savvy marketers are adding value by identifying key places outside the fair to tee up traffic to the fair display arena.
Event Marketer Magazine spotted three brands that successfully made the tie-in connection to their fair booth from sites outside the exposition hall.
The first was in Chicago. GE Healthcare launched their campaign, Healthcare Reimagined at the Radiological Society of North America fair in Chicago in 2005. They were on the lookout for popular locations outside the fair hall to reinforce awareness of their fair display presence. consistent with Sean Burke of GE Healthcare’s Diagnostic Imaging and Services, “We were trying to find something different that might create word of mouth and buzz.”
The fair had over 60,000 attendees staying in Chicago. GE came up with the concept of all-white-clad “molecule people” that roamed Chicago sites before and after show hours, in nearby hotels and on the RSNA bus routes, also as at neighboring restaurants and night clubs.
Wearing branding for GE Healthcare, the all white molecule actors batted around giant inflatable molecule structures and used bubble machines to finish the design and feel of what they wanted to portray. They were ready to visually and kinetically capture the health care aspect of GE Diagnostic Imaging. This played on to the imagery created at their fair exhibit.
The second was at a consumer oriented show in Washington DC. A month before the Auto Show, Chevrolet started its awareness campaign at sites round the capital city. They found out mini tailgating parties out of the backs of Chevy Silverado Hybrids at construction sites, Washington University, Home Depot stores and commuter rail stations. Consumers need to drink coffee and play Xbox 360 games. Chevy representatives gave out cards to visitors they might redeem at the fair for an opportunity to win a Silverado Hybrid.
Chevy wanted to drive traffic to the fair display. It worked. The results were measurable and dramatic. Because the scan cards were handed out at dealers and at the tailgate parties, over 20,000 consumers visited the fair booth or were ready to scan their cards with Chevy reps within the convention main lobby. The scan cards brought in 1,900 dealer leads.
The third one was in Las Vegas . That city may be a natural for all kinds of fair display marketers every hour of the day. At the Specialty Equipment Market Association show in Las Vegas in 2005, Yahoo! wanted to draw attention to a custom auto internet site among car enthusiasts. in order that they decided to customize two Mitsubishis inside their fair display booth.
To complete their exposure they went outside to showcase their cars on the Las Vegas Strip. Yahoo! hit it big. Knowing that Las Vegas is usually awake 24/7, they were ready to pack up traffic on the Las Vegas Strip at 3 a.m. Even at that point , throngs of individuals watched their two custom Mitsubishis race down the strip. “We didn’t want to only do a booth and pass things out,” says Bennett Porter Yahoo!’s senior director-buzz marketing. Emulating Sinatra , he continues, “We wanted to try to to it our way.”
The above are just a couple of of the samples of how you'll use outlying venues to tie into your fair display.
So let’s say your firm is within the electronics field and you would like exposure for your upcoming fair appearance within the San Francisco Bay Area. With the high tech industry so heavily concentrated in Silicon Valley , California, many of the high tech leaders live there.
There’s Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Apple Computer Inc. based in Cupertino, eBay based in San Jose, and Google headquartered in Mountain View, to call a couple of . you'll specialise in Silicon Valley executives and market to them within close access to Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco , Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, and therefore the Santa Clara and San Jose Conference Centers.
The hotels, restaurants, athletic clubs and other popular sites make them targets for top tech fair tie in messages once the high tech fair involves town.
It’s smart to think outside the fair exhibit hall box to compound your fair exhibit investment.