A New Twist on an old Marketing Venue

A New Twist on an old Marketing Venue

This is a guest post written by Brian Patterson, consultant at Exhibit Edge, a trade show consultation and exhibit company serving the Maryland, Virginia, DC areas and beyond. Read on to find out how augmented reality helped Exhibit Edge's clients to attract more audience to their booth than ever before.

Since the beginning of the human race, customers and dealers have gathered in commonplaces to buy and sell their wares. In the most modern form of these gatherings, trade shows, you can now witness spectacles where elaborate product launches are the norm, zany inventions make the news, and buyers and customers still connect to make deals. I’ve been working in the trade show industry for many years now, but I recently worked with a new tool that I think could change the overall trade show experience more than anything I can recall.

The product we worked with is called Junaio. I have no affiliation or connection to them, I just recently used their product and thought it was a great topic for this blog. I’m into AR, and this is one of the more compelling business use cases I can remember. Before I go any further, check out the promo video below of the Junaio products:



Changes to the Trade Show Floor
If you’ve ever experienced a trade show floor, you know how exciting, crazy, and informational they can be. Generally the doors burst open and you wander around aimlessly, stopping by booths here-and-there on a whim. With Junaio, however, this experience becomes interactive, streamlined, and organized without losing that same invigorating feeling that comes with the excitement of the floor.

Junaio provides visitors to the trade show floor with a map, interactive directions, and embeddable content that allows event organizers and exhibitors to really provide some context and organization to the floor. Finding specific booths, categories of booths, and general information with just a click is easy. And, for exhibitors, instead of printing large amounts of collateral, you can now ‘go green’ and allow users to scan your code in to download all of your digital media.

Changes to Product Demonstration
Product demonstrations can also be greatly enhanced thanks to the downloadable app. Users can navigate to a booth using Junaio to guide them, and then watch a product literally come to life through the browser. In the demo you saw some Lego marketing managers showing how they built a virtual product demonstration that can be viewed on a monitor in their exhibit or via a booth visitor’s phone.

Over the years we’ve seen numerous different ways to demonstrate a product, from live demo’s at the center of the floor to outdoor demo’s where a booth will literally call exhibitors out of the hall…. But using augmented reality to demo a product on a trade show floor is the most effective method we’ve seen for catching people’s attention. Based on our tracking, we found that the client we worked with who used this virtual demo received 2.5x’s the foot traffic that their exhibit normally receives. So, although it may take some time and investment to implement AR in an effective way, a strong ROI can certainly be realized by the sheer amount of people that are brought into the exhibit by their curiosity.

Final Thoughts
I’m very interested to see other companies jump into the AR + trade show space, as that will push everyone to innovate further. As that innovation occurs, everyone benefits from better exhibits and more organized events.
At Exhibit Edge, we pride ourseleves in giving unparalleled service offerings in the trade show exhibit industry, from banner stands to rental exhibits. Augmented reality is the biggest change I’ve ever seen to how a trade show is run, a paradigm shift if you will, and I’m glad we have a front row ticket to watch it evolve and grow.