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ad:tech Exhibit Hall – Booth Fails and Observations
The ad:tech exhibit hall was an interesting place. There was a booth filled with 2,000 plush purple octopi (that were all given away), a booth with (possibly – and intentionally) offensive t-shirts, and of course a ton of the usual booths. I wrote about the exhibit hall back in 2007 and noted the preponderance of names including”ad”, “click”, and “web” as well as the odd names. This year was much the same.
Of 240 total booths, 23 had a variant of “ad” including 18 that started with it. But the new word that took top honors was “media” with 27 booths where the company had media in the name somewhere. Click and web were not as popular as they once were, although companies starting with e- or i- numbered 13. It did feel like the late 90’s with companies with names that meant nothing or were put together from a few buzzwords. What does media really mean?
Weird names? Yep, they were there too. Can you tell me what Acquisio, bloosky interactive, eXelate, Flypaper, mBlox, Plasmid Media, or Tatto (not Tattoo) Media do? I do have to thank bloosky for use of their booth. They took an extended break the second day and the booth consisted of very cool liquid color floor tiles and comfortable seating surrounded by velvet ropes. Jeremy Schoemaker set up inside and I acted as bouncer for the lounge. Winner for weird names has got to be 2ergo. Not only don’t I know how to pronounce their name, but I have no idea what they do or what industry they might be in based on the name.
But then there were the booth fails. Most of the ones I noticed first were booths where the booth was completely missing a tag line or other description of what they did. When you design a booth for a trade show, you better make sure that a casual attendee can tell exactly what you do and what your value proposition is in ten seconds of looking at the booth when it is empty.
Look at the booths pictured. You have facebookster.com, a company that will rise and fall with Facebook, until they get sued for trademark infringement. After that, Flypaper. I guess the site is so sticky that your customers get stuck and stay there until they die of thirst and starvation. Next comes Netezza. What else can I say about them? Really. I mean what else can I say? Since I didn’t go and talk to them, I had no way to know a thing about them until the second day when they added the card that actually said something about them.
Brandojo (or whatever their name is) has a very colorful and eye catching booth, but they have no explanation of what they do or why we should talk to them Maybe they are a brand builder, or maybe they sell brand name products, or maybe they are a Karate studio. Worse yet for them, there is no description of them in the ad:tech program or handouts, so I can’t even look them up in the literature!
Then there is the logo/name designed by artists but not vetted by a human being. It took a long time to figure out the name of adap.tv because they created such a fanciful font. I think the small version actually is easier to read than when you see it in person. I could tell that the characters were supposed to be letters, but I had to look them up to be sure what their name really was.
It was day two of the show when I took the picture of the empty booth, but if you are going to have one be sure you can staff it full time. Clicks2Customers paid the same for their booth as everyone else, but how much value can you get when there is nobody there at the booth. I can give a workshop on how to man a trade show booth effectively, but step one is to at least be there. An empty booth with a stack of literature is pretty much worthless. You need to be at the booth and actively reaching out to everyone that walks by, but that is fodder for another post…
What is worse than a booth with no tag line and just a weird name? A booth with only a tag line and no name. Great. I know you do E-mail Marketing Software, but who are you? The booth will not cost any more to produce if you add in your Web site and a value proposition. How am I supposed to find you or tell someone to go check your booth out?
The last example is a booth that shows that when you have a weird name that means nothing, you just obfuscate the message with tone of graphics and text that will take 15 minutes to figure out.
Come on people, stop letting artists and engineers design your booths! It does not have to look amazing. It does not have to tell every detail of what you do and how you do it. All you have to do is make an eye catching booth that attracts some attention, has your name/site, your tag line, and your value proposition. If you have an elevator pitch, adapt that. If not, use Dan Janal’s Fool-Proof Positioning Statement and adapt that for your booth.
Personally I think booths that have a lot of information on them save me from listening to a drawn out pitch.
Remember, most niche based companies don’t want to waste the time speaking to irrelevant audiences.