Traffic-Magnet Trade Shows

A "Suddenly Omnipresent Image" Telephony magazine's description as founder Guglielmo Marconi's company made a bold re-entry into the modern telecommunications market.

I have managed trade shows and other events around the world -- North and South America, Europe, and Asia. From pop-ups to double-deckers. Airshows to geek fests. As many as 40-50 exhibits a year. Across multiple markets ... aviation, data processing, defense, electronics, energy, financial, healthcare, security, space, special forces, telecom, transportation, training & simulation. Planning, booth design, graphics, multimedia, demonstrations, media relations, advertising, promotions, conference speaker spots and speeches, executive customer meetings, booth team management, technical paper presentations, hospitality (including teaching the caters how to cook a special menu), shipping, setup and teardown, budget, and lead follow-up.

Not Just Another Face in the Crowd

As defense budgets declined in the late 90s, Marconi elected to sell its defense electronics business to British Aerospace and invest the $10 billion proceeds in the blazing-hot telecommunications market.

Detailed Event Planning The roomy Marconi booth provided multiple entry points, demonstration kiosks, and a multimedia presentation theater.

Marconi's first telecom acquisition in the US was Reltec, a fiber-focused company I had recently joined in Irving, Texas. They subsequently acquired Fore Systems and other firms.

Marconi's avowed aim was to quickly become one of the top 3 or 4 telecom network providers, competing with heavyweights Nortel, Lucent, Ericsson.

At the first major opportunity after the initial acquisitions, Marconi made its statement at the world's largest industry show, Supercomm in Atlanta.

We posted the graphic representation of founder Guglielmo Marconi's pensive face everywhere -- airport signage as delegates arrived at Hartsfield, placards on hotel shuttle buses, banners blowing in the breeze around the convention center, even the trolley which traversed the center aisle of the huge hall. And, of course, trade advertising, direct mail, the internet, and collateral.

The bright yellow materials graced by "The Face" successfully sliced through the considerable clutter and created a steady stream of prospective customers for "face time" with the Marconi executives and sales force.

Creative Booth Design One side of CAE-Link's Army Aviation booth featured a baseball theme showing a "shutout" comparison of the Boeing-Sikorsky team's helicopter simulation experience against the competition's distinct lack of programs.

Stereoscopic Visuals, Baseballs, and Popcorn

As the training partner on an industry-wide team pursuing the US Army's new helicopter, CAE-Link dominated the simulation experience factor. We had produced all 150 of the customer's previous simulators across 7 rotary wing aircraft types.

Those numbers lent themselves to a baseball scoreboard theme -- 7 innings of shutting out the competition. So we transformed part of the booth at IITSEC, the training industry's premiere event, into a view of a ballpark, complete with concession stand, popcorn, a mannikin representing the other team (on the outside looking in), even pilot-language graffiti such as "Watch Your 6" spray-painted on the fence.

Had an interesting conversation with a company lawyer who didn't understand the value of giving away baseballs at the concession stand. "Is the customer going to award us a contract because we give him a baseball?" "Not directly," I responded, "but when someone else in the exhibit hall asks about the special baseball, he'll hear about our booth and message, generating more booth traffic ... and the conversations with our business development team will enhance the opportunity to win the contract." (P.S. Our team won the project.)

Rapidly Reconfigurable The other side of the booth used a unique design for demonstrating the "stereoscopic" view of CAE's new fiber optic helmet -- two large monitors positoned in the eyepieces as part of an oversized view of the helmet, both monitors displaying the type of computer-generated image a pilot would see in the simulator.

The flip side of our IITSEC booth represented parent company CAE's new fiber optic helmet-mounted display system for training visualization. To highlight the "stereoscopic" effect of the display, we enlarged the image to accommodate two monitors. A computer-generated visual scene was depicted on both monitors.

The stereoscopic visuals panel was part of a rapidly reconfigurable modular exhibit my team and I designed. Four panels fit together to form a cube -- the panels supported electronics displays such as this one, entry doors, or static graphics. We could mix and match panels, depending on the conference audience. We could even changed parts of the exhibit overnight to highlight breaking news.