The words ‘digital’ and ‘interactive’ get thrown around a lot and are often lumped together as though synonymous with one another, but they have very different meanings in the trade show world.
Digital refers to the technological formats such as an electronic display, digital signage, LED video walls, touchscreens, or other computerized elements—all of which showcase your brand in a different light.
Interactive, on the other hand, refers to:
- How attendees interact with or respond to your brand.
- The level of active participation from attendees.
- How the exhibit responds to user actions.
This is where your brand comes to life and is firmly implanted in the minds of your ideal customers.
Ideally, you want attendees to be both mesmerized by the technology in your booth and actively engaged in some shape or form.
Our article explains how you can do both and turn passersby into customers.
How a booth's digital and interactive features function as storytelling assets
How often have you checked out a company’s website or ad and felt less than enthused by what you saw?
It’s not that the creative is BAD, necessarily—it’s just not very dynamic or exciting.
You’re not hooked in by anything in particular. You’re not being told a story. You’re not itching to contact them.
Essentially, you’re not going to remember that company in a hurry.
The same rule applies to the trade show floor.
Companies that don’t hook or tell a story are going to get lost in the weeds, their booths not even a passing thought when attendees recollect their experience.
That’s why thinking outside of the box and ‘going digital’ is one of the best investments a business can make.
When you integrate digital content into your booth, either on a screen or any kind of cool video surface, attendees will be attracted to the initial power of movement and brightness of an LED-lit surface.
Introducing motion into your on-screen graphic suddenly creates an attractor—something that captivates passersby. You can also spoon-feed bite-sized chunks to the viewer in quickfire succession, an advantage you don’t get with a printed graphic.
Less is more
If you think about a pop-up banner or brochure, it often requires you to communicate everything all at once.
Before the client even reads it, they take a cursory glance, see a paragraph's worth of information, and think, ‘I'm not reading all of that.’
But with a motion graphic on screen, you can condense the most important points into one, two, or three words at a time. As a result, your ideal customers are better placed to absorb a lot of information and will be more inclined to learn more.
When you have visuals on top of these words to reinforce the statement being made—for example, if you have a statement that says, ‘We rise to the occasion,’ with the word ‘Rise’ extending or moving upward—you have a very powerful storytelling asset at your disposal.
Let’s face it—as humans, we have short attention spans, so fast-moving and hard-hitting graphics are more likely to resonate with your target audience and pique their curiosity.
Which digital and interactive features can enhance your trade show booth?
We’re conscious of your time, so we won’t list everything, but in short—there are a lot of features you can pack into your booth that give it a serious ‘wow’ factor.
Kinetic video tiles are arguably the biggest headturner we see at trade shows. These are small, motorized LED or LCD panels arranged in a grid.
They can tilt, rotate, or shift in synchronization with video content or attendee movement. Pretty cool, right?
(And we’re not done there with kinetic tiles. Keep your eye out for a real-life example of how effective they are further down the page.)
Standard video walls are very impactful, too. They offer a certain level of clarity and vibrancy that attracts instant attention and encourages further engagement.
LED video walls for trade shows are must-have visual centerpieces for many exhibitors. They've gone from novelty to necessity.
And the demand for interactive video walls continues to rise. This market is predicted to grow at a calculated annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14% between 2025 and 2030, due to the need for immersive customer experiences.
Workstations featuring translucent video screens are commonplace at trade shows. If you went with this feature at your next trade show, you could include oversized text that appears in fade-in and fade-out transitions to attract attention.
This translucency also enhances the overall experience for trade show attendees.
How?
Well, for one, they don't have a big, solid, opaque wall blocking their view of everything behind it. They can see both the digital content and the people walking behind the screen.
If they can see interaction going on elsewhere in your booth, this will:
- Keep them intrigued.
- Keep them in your booth for longer.
- Increase your chances of engaging them in meaningful dialogue.
Concerns clients have when building an interactive booth
Creating a booth with all the bells and whistles is no easy feat. If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.
And whilst it’s possible for you to achieve this goal, there are certain obstacles that need to be overcome first.
Here are the main obstacles we’ve encountered as a strategic trade partner.
Content creation
This is the main concern clients have when it comes to creating a digital, interactive trade show booth.
When we present them with creative concepts and show them what their booth could look like, they’re immediately wowed by the potential of what they see happening on the screens and surfaces.
However, their next comment is usually, ‘Yeah, but we don't have any content to put on it,’ or ‘Our content is so dated,’ or ‘Our content is a mere PowerPoint presentation.’
They see the evaluation and assembly of content as overwhelming. Understandably, they often don't know where to begin.
In this scenario, we demonstrate to them how to package and segment content creation into manageable tasks, which alleviates their concerns.
Associated costs
A premium look and feel comes at a price. So does making sure everything works properly at your trade show.
Video walls, even in their standard form, are not inexpensive.
They also need to be monitored carefully. It isn’t always a case of ‘plug and play.’
The walls have to be connected and the screens have to be calibrated so that no square is out of sync with the others.
This is why you should also have a technical person on hand at the show.
How your interactive experiences can be customized
When you’re investing time and money into integrating digital and interactive features into your trade show booth, you want to know you’re getting something that’s:
1. True to your brand identity and values.
2. Bespoke.
After all, you can’t stand out with a similar vibe to everyone else.
That’s why kinetic tiles are a great choice for your booth. Content showcased on kinetic tiles is truly created from the ground up for each individual client. Not a second of footage in these tiles is anything other than bespoke.
Gamification is another effective way of customizing a trade show booth. This is the perfect solution if you want to:
- Increase engagement in your booth.
- Create truly memorable experiences.
- Build meaningful connections that transcend surface-level interactions.
Anyone who’s attended a trade show knows how exhausting it can be.
Business conversations take place throughout the day, but sometimes it’s nice to just unwind and let your hair down. (*The Trade Group will not be liable for any hurt feelings incurred as a result of some readers not having any hair.)
When people attend a trade show, they often want to be entertained.
They want to play some kind of game, as this helps break the ice and allows for enhanced interaction with exhibitors and other attendees.
Cornhole, a popular lawn game, is a great example of this. If you’re not familiar with the rules, players or teams take turns tossing small beanbags at a raised board with a hole in it, with the goal being to score points by landing bags on the board or in the hole.
Here’s how this game would play out at a trade show:
- Players use a tablet kiosk or their own device to start the game. Each player has their own board.
- The LED wall updates with the player's name and timer.
- Players race to make three bags as fast as they can. Custom electronics in the boards track made shots and update the LED screen.
- When the third shot is made, the timer stops, and the player is shown their time and rank.
- All players are included on the scrolling leaderboard.
If you opted for something like this, it can be easily customized for you.
The color scheme can be adjusted so that it’s compliant with your branding, and you can even add your logo to the digital content.
Miniature golf is another common game that you can integrate within your trade show booth and customise accordingly. You could have a miniature golf hole under a cylindrical tube with video tiles on the inside, and these tiles could feature motion graphics and a scoreboard.
If you went for this option, again, the color scheme can be adjusted to reflect your company branding, and you can use personalized templates.
These are just some examples of the options you have at your disposal when it comes to customized interactive experiences.
How to make interactive features accessible and inclusive
In an ideal world, you want everybody who visits your booth to feel like they’re able to take part.
You don’t want anyone to feel left out or unable to truly appreciate the essence of what you’ve created.
To avoid this and make your booth as accessible as possible, you could convey your messaging on a spherical projection—in the shape of a globe, for instance—which is more or less at eye level and easy for attendees to navigate.
There are other simple touches you can add, like touchscreens featuring physical products at different heights. Attendees can walk up and interact with the digital content on the wall behind those physical products, or if they just want to interact with the physical products, they can.
Some people who attend trade shows fall under the definition of ‘legally blind,’ whereby their vision is 20/200 or less in their better eye. They still have some form of sight, but they have specific accessibility requirements.
Bright, large-format video is of huge benefit to these attendees, as it gives them the best chance of deciphering your booth’s shapes, graphics, and associated messaging.
So, too, is audio narration that talks them through your business’s story and the visuals within your booth.
These features are well worth considering if you want to make your booth as accessible as possible.
How we work with clients to create immersive, engaging trade show booths
As a seasoned exhibit house, we’re flexible in how we can work with clients and the process we follow to make their vision a reality.
Sometimes we’ll have a particular technology in the front of our minds and this coincides with what the client is looking for when planning their next event.
For instance, we just rolled out a booth for Abnormal AI, a leading AI-native human behavior security platform.
When Abnormal reached out to us, they mentioned that their new marketing theme is based on squares. Our faces immediately lit up as this theme tied in perfectly with the kinetic effect we were looking to create.
Abnormal’s booth featured—you guessed it—kinetic video tiles. Each video tile was on a little motorized arm and could both move out and retract eight inches. It looked like the tiles were actually coming out at you.
This was rolled out at Black Hat USA.
In other instances, the process can be more organic.
A client we’ve worked with for years was looking to make a big splash. They wanted to mix things up a little and step outside their comfort zone.
We showed them a solution that was akin to what we produced for Abnormal AI and would make them the talk of the show. They saw it and immediately fell in love.
Another common scenario is that the client is looking to augment existing structure or hardware. In this scenario, we can work within the confines of the space we have.
If the client has a hard-line budget, we're probably not going to show them what we produced for Abnormal AI. We'll show them something smaller in scale that'll work closer to their number, if not within it.
We have a book of items that we'll pull from and assess what will provide the most bang for their buck.
What options are available to you?
The options are limitless. We’ve covered a few already, but here are some other features we’ve seen be successful at trade shows.
You could consider a small video wall made up of four glass screens touching together at the corners.
Another potential option could be a clear glass LED screen that shows video on one side and has your brand messaging on the other.
What you choose ultimately comes down to your budget, timeframes, and level of resources.
There are always new technologies being developed, as we know from our 39 years of experience in the field at the time of writing.
The key is to incorporate these technologies in a tasteful manner, rather than shoehorning them in for the sake of it, and in a way that makes sense from a financial standpoint.
We realize that, if it’s a three-day show, for example, you need the most bang for your buck, but we also have to toe the line.
If we were to work with you, we would explore these questions with you to determine which features were best suited to your booth:
- Are we focusing on physical size?
- Are we focusing on something that's a little more delicate and transparent?
- Is it meant to draw attention from a distance?
- Is it meant to be a one-on-one interaction piece?
These are all essential questions your strategic trade show partner should ask early on.
Bring your business to life with The Trade Group
If you’ve got a booth design concept and want to make it a living, breathing, storytelling asset, we’re ready to help you do this.
At The Trade Group, we’ve helped businesses like yours bring their products and services to life since 1986.
Whatever type of booth design you’re looking for, and whatever goal you’re looking to achieve, our expert team ensures unique and impactful brand experiences that connect you to your client.
Call us today at 800-343-2005 to get the ball rolling.
