The Best of CES and How to Win

Our team was on-site with our clients as they conquered CES 2020 with ease and excellence – not to mention a lot of success too!

Standing out at a trade show takes strategy and creativity, and we want to share with you some of our favorite things we experienced. We hope they inspire your next brand experience event, whether that’s next month or CES 2021.

Think outside the box

This event, more than others, takes creativity to new heights.

We loved seeing Ford install a car on a wall.

With our help, Z-Wave created a 3D true-to-life home.

Phillips put a bed on the ceiling.

And Copilot brought a real airplane cockpit and flight attendants into their experience.

What was unique to CES is that big-name brands took over restaurants. It was fun to see companies think outside the exhibit to differentiate themselves throughout Las Vegas. Dell did an excellent job at their SUGARCANE Raw Bar Grill restaurant takeover. The environment was transformed with their on-brand blue light and named the restaurant the Dell Experience.

Go big or go home

At CES, you must go big. When we say big, we don’t necessarily mean big in square-footage. We mean go big with your presence and campaign. Marketing is all about a variety of touchpoints working together, so at CES, make sure to create a cross-channel campaign.

For example, PR, this is a very important element for CES and many trade shows. Our clients received coverage in Forbes, NBC, CNBC, Mashable, and the list goes on. Also, a social media campaign (both paid and organic) is a must, an email sequence to build intrigue, and a follow-up campaign to continue the momentum. But the most important element is a thoughtful and commanding exhibit presence.

Make sure your entire engagement campaign is working together focused on your key messages. Combining cross-channel marketing will help you go big and win.

Warm it up

The all-white minimalist look is still trending, but the latest and greatest twist is to warm it up and soften the experience with thoughtful materials, furnishings, and lighting. Brands that took the minimalist approach such as Moen, Ring, b8Ta, and Asurion strategically created warmth in their environment yet maintained a minimalist feel. We like this touch, and it's easy to integrate into exhibits with natural woods and greenery, which both draw people into the space.

Elevate with new technology

OLEDs are almost always worth the investment in your brand experience. OLEDs have incredible versatility. Not only can they be used to show brand content, but they can be architectural walls like Bridgestone implemented. Or they can be captivating ceilings, and entrances like LG installed. These experiences create real stopping power on the show floor. The installation alone can draw in massive crowds.

Keep it simple (really simple)

Some of our favorite booths kept messages extremely simple, which helped attendees understand their key message with one look. Excellent exhibits included Simple Human, Toto, Snoo, and Willow Pump. Simplifying a messaging platform can be hard. And often, in our experience, it’s best to ask for help.

Sometimes as a brand or event manager, you might be too close to the project, and you might want to say everything. If you ask your experiential agency, they’ll be able to help elevate your message and simplify it. We do this all the time with clients.

Get matchy-matchy

Some of our favorite exhibits boasted fun team member gear. We loved seeing the Safe-Tec team wear their biking helmets, another team wore matching white lab jumpsuits, and another group wore sequence suit jackets – those were quite memorable. What we like about brand gear is that when the team heads to lunch, you see their branding as they’re walking around – it’s free advertising and another marketing touchpoint.

Select your location carefully

In the Central Hall, LG took the cake. They chose to install a massive OLED across the entrance, and everyone who walked in watched took photos and zoned out while watching the captivating movement coming from their OLED products. LG’s location, paired with the OLEDs, helped them be the most memorable.

BMW and Google also rocked. When driving into the Las Vegas Convention Center, initially, you felt like you were in a BMW dealership with how many cars they had parked. Closer to the entrance, Google posted themselves right outside the North Hall with a seriously large gumball machine and slide – very fun, clever, and on-brand.

Speaking of location, we already helped our clients select their CES 2021 exhibit spaces. If you’re going to the show next year, we’d love to connect. Our clients have found the event to be hugely successful, and we’d love to help you be successful too.

Reach out to us if you’d like to chat about your next brand experience event!

Increase Your Lead Generation

Leads, it’s what 95% of exhibitors want and it’s our privilege to help our clients increase their lead generation through smart technology.

To get the most qualified prospects, it requires a strategic plan as well as the technology to make it happen.

Eighty-one percent of trade show attendees are individuals who have authority at their organization to make purchases; therefore, most attendees are key decision makers. If your organization wants more leads and you have a trade show program, we highly encourage you to consider sales enablement and lead generation.

To help attendees through the sales funnel and provide them with the relevant content they need, we have a technology integration called Capture and Sales Enablement. The program provides sales teams on the show floor with a fully customizable app that enables them to:

• Capture leads

• Upload them to CRM

• Instantly share compelling content

• Close more leads

The app allows sales teams to create, manage, and track interactive sales content to help potential customers through the sales journey with the right content at the right time.

Sales teams on the show floor are equipped to generate and organize leads in one intuitive platform by the simple act of scanning a badge or business card on their mobile device. Then they can immediately be added to your CRM or marketing automation for further nurturing.

The tool is efficient, effective, and easy to learn and use, even for non-technical users.

If you haven’t thought about a lead generation tool for your trade show program, we’d love to further discuss with you. Countless clients of ours have raving reviews of how Capture and Sales Enablement has helped them achieve their trade show goals and increase their revenue.

Technology Should Advance Brand Experiences

Technology is everywhere. But often, it lacks strategic integrations.

Strong technology solutions should foster three things for your business. It should educate, equip, and inspire your audience with the right content. It should lead your end user to start a conversation with an individual at your company. And it should have a strategic role within your sales program.

Educate, Equip, & Inspire

We all know technology is amazing. It’s a tool that our team integrates into almost every brand experience. Technology should educate, equip, and inspire your audience with the relevant information they need to move along in their customer journey. We’ve helped clients use dozens and dozens of technology integrations to communicate their message in a way that makes sense for the environment and the individual. Both the environment and end user are extremely important considerations to think through when choosing which technology to implement. Each solution is valuable but there’s always one that is better for the brand experience. Two great examples of educating, equipping, and inspiring are General Mill’s iPad Survey with Live Streaming Results and MegaFood’s Digital Product Kiosk.

Lead to Conversations

Technology should almost always lead the end user to begin or continue a conversation with a representative from your company. Whether we implement augmented reality, virtual reality, RFID, flip disk walls, gamification, or iPads and screens they should always be part of the program to facilitate conversations. Technology should never be siloed but it should be paired with human interactions. At the end of the day, business is about building relationships and helping people, and technology should be a tool to do both. Two examples of excellent technology that led to qualified conversations are Agosto’s Flip Disc Technology and Kobelco’s Gamification Matching Game.

Integrate with Sales

Sales, it’s what most companies want. Technology should funnel through to your company’s sales objectives as a tool and methodology to support growth. We help our clients integrate with our technology solutions to drive lead generation and sales enablement. We recently implemented our lead generation and sales enablement tool to help a client increase their qualified lead generation goal by 150%.

An example of a strong technology and sales integration is 3M’s Retail Pop-Up.

Technology helps brand experiences to be more educational, conversational, and integrated into larger business objectives. As you evaluate your technology integrations, be sure it advances your brand experiences.

For more technology inspiration, head to our YouTube channel to see a variety of integrations for brand experiences.

Technology Trend Must-Knows

Technology is ever-changing, ever-emerging and often for clients, ever-overwhelming. At nParallel, we make technology integrations for our clients seamless.

We love when our customers allow us to think outside the box for them and generate technology concepts that impress their customer.

If you haven’t start thinking about technology integration, here are some ideas to get your technology juices flowing.

·       Mobile Apps provide opportunities to connect with show attendees throughout your event. These tailored, event-based apps helps companies communicate with customers, even before they arrive at the booth.

·       Virtual Reality is one that nParallel has tapped into frequently for clients. When companies have large, over-sized equipment that they would prefer to not ship onto the show floor, we’ve created on-site technology opportunities for our client’s customers to experience products, virtually and instantaneously without having the actual products on the show floor.

·       Gesture Technology has been a favorite of ours. This technology is exactly what it sounds like: customers who visit show floor exhibit can interact with products and experiences by using hand gestures to discover and learn.

·       Projection Mapping is the process of digitizing a 3-dimensional object and displaying its image on a non-flat or non-white surface to educate depth, context or detailed information. We have so much to talk about on this topic that we'll create a separate blog post just on projection mapping.

·       Upgraded Exhibit Designs use technology more and more to communicate the company’s message in a stronger way. We’ve been helping our clients with large format LED walls and screens as architectural and branding elements to provide dynamic movement and visual impact.

What technology has been your favorite that you've seen this year?