We get a lot of questions about graphics, so I thought it would make sense to do a basic primer that some of the less experienced exhibitors can get their heads around the various pros/cons of different graphic options.

Laminated inkjet mural panels: These are printed on a flexible media (paper) and then laminated (front) or encapsulated (front and back). Laminated murals are produced on an inkject printer and are durable because they are laminated. They do, however, require care against kinking and bending, and they must be packed and shipped with care. Premium versions may include a light blocking material to limit the images being “washed out” by ambient lighting behind the graphics. With care, laminated mural panels may last for several years and many trade shows. Typically, these graphics are used on pop up displays, modular displays and truss displays and they are attached using a combination of hangers and magnets.

Unlaminated inkjet mural panels: These graphics are printed generally on heavy (18-22 mm), flexible PVC media on a flat-bed printer. Generally, they are less expensive to produce than laminated panels since there is a single layer (the PVC). The inks used are water-proof and cured using ultraviolet light (UV) . But since these panels are unlaminated, the printed surface is exposed to potential damage (scratches, etc) more easily than laminated panels. We advise exhibitors using unlaminated panels to plan to use unlaminated panels for 6 months or a few shows. Typically, these graphics are used on pop up displays or modular displays and truss displays and they are attached using a combination of hangers and magnets.

Fabric graphics: These graphics are printed on heavy polyester fabric using a process that embeds the dye into the fabric itself (the dye sublimation printing puts dye in, not on, the fabric). Fabric graphics are vibrant and deep – they are particularly effective for color saturated images with a lot of color. Fabric graphics are also convenient – they can be left on a frame or folded and packed. Kinking is not an issue (as it can be with mural panels), but you should carry a travel steamer since fabric can develop wrinkles. Typically, fabric graphics are used on fabric pop up displays or modular displays and truss displays and are attached using Velcro or metal clips.

Vinyl graphics: These graphics are printed on flexible PVC or vinyl media using an inkjet printer. They can be produced using a wide range of weights of vinyl – from 6 oz to 15 oz – depending on the application. Vinyl graphics are usually unlaminated and can be scratched, so they need to be used, packed and shipped with care. Although vinyl graphics are flexible they should not be folded as they can crease. Typically, these graphics are used on banner stands, hanging displays and other event banners and are attached using Velcro or grommets and cable ties.

Impact Displays offers trade show displays, trade show booths and trade show exhibits as well as a range of graphics.

Trade shows are hectic, detail intensive events. Even if you’re a pro, there will be snafus - with your trade show display, graphics, accessories, etc. Most of these are recoverable. And some of them may turn out better than what you had originally planned. Every situation is unique, but here’s a guide for a successful Plan B (or Plan C).

The Prep

1. Take the contact details of your main service providers – the general, the display house, the graphics company, etc.
2. Take the details of your deliveries – the tracking #s, the delivery addresses, etc.
3. Have a copy of your Exhibitor Handbook.

At the Show

1. Your trade show display is damaged – what to do? Field repair it. Most people won’t ever notice it. Duct tape is a miracle. Next best? Call your exhibit house – maybe they can rush deliver a new display in time. Last resort? Rent from the general contractor. Your graphics may fit well enough.

2. Your trade show display is missing/wasn’t delivered. Contact the shipper and delivery venue (hotel, etc) – its whereabouts may be known. And, contact your exhibit house – did they ship it correctly? Can they help? Lastly, rent a new display – you can usually have graphics produced in a few hours.

3. Your graphics are damaged or missing. Evaluate how serious the problem is – again, few prospects notice the small stuff. Next best? Have your exhibit provider get new graphics for you (they already have your files). Lastly, get new graphics on site.

4. Accessories didn’t get delivered? Do without - less may be more. If you have to have them, rent them at the show. Or go to Home Depot or IKEA for a replacement. You can jury rig just about anything well enough to last a few days.

You can’t cover every contingency, so don’t try to. Come prepared to overlook the little things and invent work-arounds for the big things. Keep your head and you can have a productive trade show even if the sky is falling.

Impact Displays sells trade show displays and graphics to work in any budget. We have compiled a list of tips to make your trade show a success - please contact us to receive our complimentary guide to exhibiting.

Want to have a truly successful trade show? It’s essential to develop a focus – without a focus, you’re just showing up and hoping it will work out. You can have a great trade show display, a sweet pop up display and awesome trade show graphics. But hese won’t matter if you’re not focused. And There are a lot of distractions leading up to the show and at the show itself, making focus difficult. Find focus by establishing goals well before the event. Broadly, you can think of trade show goals in four categories:

1. Sales Goals - these lead to sales revenues directly.

2. Public Relations Goals. These goals drive the image of your company. They create buzz, atmosphere, credibility and lead indirectly to sales by making an impression on competitors, customers, partners, the media, etc.

3. Partner Goals - these drive collaboration and networking value and lead indirectly to sales. Partners can include any companies in your ecosystem that your company works with for mutual benefit (eg – suppliers, service providers, etc)

4. Competition Goals - these goals help your company better understand how your competitors are developing product, marketing and selling, forming partnerships, broadening reach, etc.

With the right focus, you can set goals – which means quantifying the focus areas. Identify the number and type of goals most important to your company and establish the path to achieve the goal. It’s important to remember that goals change and reflect a company’s needs – partnerships may be less important than sales today but that may be reversed in the future, for example. Also, it’s critical to set realistic goals, set a path to achieve them and follow up. But with the right goals you’ll be on your way to an effective trade show!

Impact Displays sells trade show displays and graphics to work in any budget. We have compiled a list of tips to make your trade show a success - please contact us to receive our complimentary guide to exhibiting.

If you’re using a larger booth space -
20 x 20 or larger (or plan to), at some point you’ll have to contend with how to design meeting areas in your booth to handle the different types of customer and prospect situations you’ll encounter. Typically, you’ll want to have low, intermediate and high intensity engagement areas to correspond to the the level of seriousness of the meeting and the investment you’ll make in the customer or prospect.

Low intensity areas are the stations or information kiosks around the periphery of your booth. These are typically not staffed and provide casual visitors an opportunity to enter the booth space without inhibition. Successful exhibitors might have a collection of marketing materials, white papers, display cases or informational videos/photos at these stations. One of your staffers might let a prospect engage with the media at the periphery for 30 or 60 seconds before casually approaching to qualify.

Inside the perimeter of your booth, you can have a few stations for seated conversations. Bar-height tables and stools or low upholstered furniture and coffee table set ups work well. The important aspect of these intermediate areas is that they be casual but allow substantive discussion to take place. These areas should be reserved for escalation from the periphery or scheduled meetings - but not staffed. Your staff should have access to materials that will be useful in a discussion - collateral or laptops with demos, etc. So keep these close by or available.

The inner sanctum is the conference or meeting room. These are for scheduled meetings with highly qualified prospects or existing customers. It’s important that the conference room be light and clean and not crowded. Typically you don’t want collateral in the meeting room because it can seem cluttered.

When choosing furniture, remember - appearance matters. If you’re renting make sure the furniture will not look out of place with the design and theme of your display. And, if you’re renting, make sure your provider replaces their furniture often and can ensure it will look good.

Impact Displays can help you design larger spaces and appropriate meeting points in your booth to engage with customers and increase your success at your next trade show.

Impact Displays sells trade show displays and graphics to work in any budget. We have compiled a list of tips to make your trade show a success - please contact us to receive our complimentary guide to exhibiting.

I was at the ad:tech show this week. Good buzz and vibe – clearly, dollars are flowing back into the online ad market. When we go to these shows we get good tips on what’s working and what’s tired in displays. This is an image driven show – lots of splash, iconic logos (think Google, Facebook, Linkedin, etc) and branding.

It got me thinking – what makes a great graphic? Is it content? Is it color? Image? Typeface? The answer obviously depends on your company and its identity. If you’re lucky and everyone knows your company, the name alone (writ large) will do. But if your company is not so well known, what do you use to get the attendees interested?

Sue me for the unscientific nature of this survey, but specific information comes in a distant 3rd to image and color when it comes to attracting attention. We are visual before we are contextual. We respond to vivid colors, exciting, unusual or attractive imagery. I saw a lot of displays that not only had great imagery, but incorporated the imagery into the design of their display. For example, Plenty of Fish (www.plentyoffish.com) had a cool flowing oceanic theme on a 10×20 serpentine pop up display. It was very compelling for a basic display. And it had (pretty much) zero product/service information. Which made me walk up and ask “what exactly do you folks do?”

This is not to say you should not have informationally rich graphics - in some situations these graphics work best. But think about the attendee – what are they likely to be attracted by? How informed and knowledgeable are they? Can you make them more informed by putting information on a graphic? Or do you need a visually stimulating image to create an interaction. In general, I find companies working too hard to “make the sale” before the attendee is in the booth, which is just not going to be effective.

In order of preference, this is what I think get’s attention:

1. Color
2. Simplicity (of image)
3. Size
4. Action or connotation of action
5. Information

Try it out for your company – think about what you want to use to bring people in to ask “what do you folks do?”

Impact Displays offers a broad range of graphics and display solutions to make people want to work with your company.

Impact Displays sells trade show displays and graphics to work in any budget. We have compiled a list of tips to make your trade show a success - please contact us to receive our complimentary guide to exhibiting.

Ok, so NBER says we’re not yet out of the woods – we’re still in a recession. That feels right to us - many of our customers are still cautious about committing or over-committing to their next show. We get it (boy do we). And as a value-oriented exhibit house we know how to do it for less but we’re always interested in learning and implementing best practices to economize.

So it was with great interest that we read the February 2010 Exhibitor magazine profile of one Doreen Paquette, the event and trade show coordinator of Wacker Chemical Corp. It seems Ms. Paquette recently was able to slice 46% - $57,000 from her 20 x 30 space. Forget whether you typically use a space this large (or small) or whether your budget is even as large as her savings. Who wouldn’t want to know how to save 46% and still attend the show, right? We sure wanted to know.

So we devoured the article. Ran our own calculations. To be clear, Doreen Paquette is a very, very resourceful person (who also, incidentally, knows the value of being at a show versus the cost of not attending). But I’ll give you the punchline you weren’t expecting: the vast majority of the savings were related to show services, not display costs.

Now, for a truly accurate accounting we should impute costs to the display assets Wacker owns but didn’t bring when it downsized – the article doesn’t detail this so we can only guess. But the list of display-related savings amounted to more than $40,000 and 80% of these cost reductions – more than $32,000 - came from service charges, rather than display costs: shipping, drayage and I&D. You have to stop and think what all that money goes for – this is a 600 square foot space. That’s a space big enough to park 2-3 cars in. But it’s not like they’re actually building a garage – they display will be gone in 5 days.

It’s a great story – and a big shout out to Doreen for persevering. Management should applaud her. But in the back of their minds, the executives at Wacker – and every other large exhibitor - should be asking themselves “how long has that been going on?” And why does it cost more money to bring my display the 100 feet from outside the hall to the booth than it does to bring it 2,000 miles from my headquarters to the hall?

The message is simple – with hard work and good planning you can avoid giving your budget to the show services group for driving forklifts and operating screwdrivers. You can spend it on getting visibility with customers and moving your business forward. That’s a lesson we can all use right now!

Impact Displays offers a range of trade show display and graphics solutions that will drive your face to face investment returns through the roof. (And with all that extra business you won’t even care about buying a new roof!). We have compiled a list of tips to make your trade show a success - please contact us to receive our complimentary guide to exhibiting.

We go to a lot of shows - sometimes we’re working directly with a customer and sometimes were trolling for the latest, the best, the worst, etc. We never leave the show floor without seeing something that makes us scratch our heads.

What often surprises us is not why companies went so “over the top” but why they invested so little. Obviously, we design and sell displays for a living, so we come at the business of recommendations with a certain bias. But we’re straight-shooters and we steer clients away from excess - there are many display investments we have advised against making, even thought they would have driven revenues for us. But a potetially worse strategy is to dramatically under-invest in your display. You can’t assume that just because your company has rented space and will be present that you’ve maximized the return on your investment.

We’ve all seen these booths - maybe you’ve been one of the companies that did this (no offense intended). They have a folding table, a tablecloth, a pipe-and-drape set up and a few forlorn graphics taped or pinned to the drape. You have to be honest - no one will be impressed by the stature of your company or its apparent stability with this type of booth. It won’t matter if you have a radically better product or service - the odds are strongly against anyone at the show stopping at your booth to find out.

Trade shows are about looking the part - marketing at or above your place in the market. So if you’re going to attend - and there are a lot of direct and indirect costs if you decide to go at all - you absolutely must look the part. You must look good. Most people react negatively when they see a company that’s skimping on budget. They rarely give them the benefit of the doubt - it’s human nature. Successful companies “punch above their weight” in the marketing and image department. There’s real value in looking good.

Impact Displays sells trade show displays and graphics to work in any budget. We have compiled a list of tips to make your trade show a success - please contact us to receive our complimentary guide to exhibiting.

As I mentioned in the last post , there weren’t radically new new products at Exhibitor 2010 . But what was radically different was the positioning and messaging by the large general contractors, or GCs. If you know these companies, you know that they specialize in managing union laborers on the show floor. But at Exhibitor, you could have mistaken their presence for that of a high-end creative and management firm – which looks like a direction they’re trying to move in.

Maybe I was more aware of their re-positioning because of all the grousing (by display companies) about the GCs muscling in on the display business. True - it’s happening – and it’s not a good development. The GCs are offering discounted deals to companies at a time that companies really need to cut marketing budgets. The GCs can do this because in much of their business they are the exclusive provider of services, and they make significant profits in those areas.

That big companies will attempt to exert dominance in their market and in adjacent markets is an accepted reality. Think of Microsoft and Intel as very recent examples. Whether or not the business activities of the GCs are legal is a matter left to the FTC and others. But it is an unequivocally negative development for the trade show industry. The GCs may be dropping prices and “comping” services today, but make no mistake about it: they expect to make more profit in the long run by doing this. So if they’re doing it for free now but expect large profits in the future…well, you can do the math.

Obviously I can’t stand here and advise companies to spend more than they need to for their trade show. But most exhibitors have had the “you’ve got to be kidding” moment when they’re told what the GC charges to move a pallet 100 feet. So if you don’t like the price they charge to move a pallet, ask yourself if it would be good if that same gang designed and rented the booth and everything you needed at the show. And connected it up. And packed it up. In the long run, these developments could lead to significantly higher prices for all services. And when that happens, because of the exclusivity the GCs enjoy, there won’t be anything anyone can do about it.

Ironically, in the long run, the road to better pricing at the trade show might be by avoiding the best deals in the hall today.

Impact Displays offers a range of products and services to get you the best value no matter what road you’re on. We have compiled a list of tips to make your trade show a success - please contact us to receive our complimentary guide to exhibiting.

Last week in Las Vegas was Exhibitor 2010 – the trade show for companies that need trade show equipment (honest). From the attendee side, it’s a mix of vendors looking for new products to take to market as well as larger companies cozying up to manufacturers or service providers that sell direct. Overall, there was a pretty good buzz. Granted, the show is half the size it was in 2007 when the industry was going full bore. But, it was a lot better than 2009 – so it feels like the industry has turned the corner.

As far as new products, it was limited. The extrusion system vendors all had new tweaks and add-ons, but nothing radical. LED technology seemed to be everywhere. Computer controlled screen washers pulse an infinite array of colors, making fabric mosaics an ever changing panorama. From a video perspective, LED technology has leap-frogged projection and LCD and the “new, new thing” but the price points so far make this an expensive technology. Even if you don’t need LED hi-definition panels anytime soon, there’s still value in what I saw. Like any vendor that wants to strut, the company showing off this gear came prepared with great content. You’ve heard me bash video content in the past – I learned something this time around.

The company - Data Display AV Co - had produced a slick, short looping video that was an image montage. Eye catching and vivid, it was absent of audio – but the video would leave you slack-jawed. Why was it so good? Ok, it was super hi definition - the video looked liquid. But the coolest thing was that there wasn’t really a message – it combined many video elements – action, still, text, graphic – but the effect made you stop and watch. You didn’t have to pay attention to storyboarding or narrative. And there I was, standing in front of someone’s tradeshow booth. It would have been like shooting fish in a barrel. How do you benefit? Well, the message is…sometimes you don’t want a message. Sometimes you want a spectacle. You want to create a situation. Sometimes you have to avoid the message to get the attention.

It doesn’t work all the time. And it won’t do more than pull traffic. But think about incorporating some sort of spectacle to get attention at your next show.

Impact Displays specializes in creating spectacles for companies engaged in face to face marketing, exhibiting and trade shows and selling.

If you’re a typical exhibitor you need the basics to be organized and have a good show: booth space, trade show display, collateral and show services. Most exhibitors understand the first three well and are bewildered by the last one. Show services are important considerations, depending on the type of exhibit you have – the costs for services can be the single largest line item in your budget. Careful management and understanding of what you need can save you money and anxiety. Design your trade show display for success when it comes to services and you’ll get better bang for your buck.

Most trade shows are managed under contract with a show organizer. The organizer in turn decides who gets to do what under the roof of the venue or trade show hall. Services are broadly segmented into labor and everything but labor. Labor services can be performed by the General Contractor (“GC”) or an Exhibitor Appointed Contractor (“EAC”). Each of these entities complies with local labor and union rules in performing services at the show.

It’s important to work closely with the supervisor or union steward at the show – they can make your experience go much more smoothly. In particular, you need to be aware of what you, as an exhibitor, can and can’t do by yourself. If you have a pop up and retractable banner stand, you’re safe – you can set these up yourself. Some 10 x 10 modular displays (ie, tool-less) can be set up by the exhibitor without using GC or EAC labor. Larger displays will generally require GC or EAC labor (referred to as I&D). You can often supervise your booth assembly (if you know how), or the GC or EAC can provide a supervisor. Make sure you’ve booked your I&D to take advantage of “straight time” under the labor rules and can avoid the overtime/double-time charges. And make sure the display is really ready to be set up when you book the I&D – nothing worse than labor standing around and getting paid while you try to find your display.

A trickier task is managing the show services, and this is where you can spend a lot of money. Everything from power, video and internet access to carrying your display (called drayage) and collateral to your booth is charged for. Hanging a sign? Make sure you budget for it. Second-story? Plan for fork lift charges. Renting flooring or furniture? A guy wire for some lights? You guessed it.

None of which is unfair, of course. Some displays are construction projects and have budgets that reflect this. But as you plan your booth, think about ways to reduce unnecessary costs and avoid surprises. If you can build your display from lightweight materials (aluminum over steel or wood, for example), you’ll save a lot of money. Ditto if you can avoid a hanging sign by increasing the size and visibility of a tower mounted sign. Think long and hard about that second story. We’ve built them – and they’re really cool. But they can run the meter on costs. And get your carpet, furniture, monitors, A/V, etc offsite rather than at the show. You’ll need all of these things but if you wait until your booth is set up you will pay top dollar.

All of which is a simple way of advocating a thoughtful approach to design. There’s more than one way to solve the trade show marketing equation. With advance planning and a careful approach, you won’t spend more than you have to and you’ll get a great return.

Impact Displays offers a full range of trade show and face to face marketing solutions for sale and for rental. More information is available at www.impact-displays.com. We have compiled a list of tips to make your trade show a success - please contact us to receive our complimentary guide to exhibiting.