B-to-B Events

The North American International Auto Show, in preview week right now in Detroit, was chock-full of hot cars and sweet interactives, and the digital star of the show was the Toyota Vision wall. The wall is made up of three 82-inch LCD panels, equipped with multi-touch technology and loaded with tons of content and features about the new Prius. Each of the three screens focuses on one area of content, combining to tell the whole ownership story of the Toyota culture and the lifecycle of the vehicle. The software that runs the experience is based on Microsoft Surface, but is custom-designed.

Ask anyone who’s ever waited endlessly to get into an event and they’ll agree—a long check-in line is a short distance to frustration, second only to forgetting your ticket. It’s a feeling often shared by the event organizers themselves as they flip through pages of printouts, checking off names, and inevitably missing a few. But now, thanks to mobile ticketing services that take advantage of smartphones, bar codes and other technologies, the hassles of paper tickets are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Even airlines and public transportation systems are jumping on board.

At the Ft. Lauderdale Home Show Dec. 3 to 5, DISH Network set out to leverage its all-new 200-square-foot booth to attract new customers and upgrade the services of existing ones. To do that, it unrolled three distinct experiences, each to cater to a specific product line, resulting in a 150-percent increase in leads over the previous year.

In 2009, Cisco Systems set out to save costs by taking its weeklong annual sales meeting, the Global Sales Experience (GSX), out of the real world and into a virtual one for the first time in its 20-year history. That experience taught the tech giant several valuable lessons about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to educating and motivating a driven and competitive sales force in a non-physical space.
(Check out last year’s story here)

IT professionals and decision-makers go to a lot of developer conferences and the offerings are often the same from show to show. They spend a few days on the show floor enduring demos that are very heavy on specs and frequently far too light on interactivity or engagement, and go home with a lot more information than inspiration. Important for their businesses? For sure. Thrilling and cool? Not so much.