“If you’re not putting on a show, you’re just paying for a spot on the carpet.” That’s Don Jeter, cmo of Torq, a company that recently hosted a 20-foot-tall inflatable skeleton and a monster truck in its booth at RSAC, strolling onto the show floor with more than 100 preset meetings. Because with the right full-surround strategy and a partner who can stand up the big messaging, brands like Torq aren’t just showing up. They’re staging what Jeter calls a “cognitive attack.”
As corporate trade show marketers and fabricators embrace an experiential-first mindset, exhibits are evolving from larger-than-life collateral to activations. Why tell, when you can show. Take these examples from Fab 50 honoree portfolios this year: A fur-covered booth that feels like “somewhere between a fever dream and a hug,” a giant mailbox with a working conveyor belt, and a kinetic threshold of 3D LED string light columns that shifts as you move through it.
There’s an irony at the heart of this year’s program: the most talked-about technology of our time—yes, artificial intelligence—is pushing exhibit creative further from the screen and deeper into the physical world. For the builders on this list, AI isn’t a threat to the craft. It’s liberation from everything that isn’t the craft. The hours once absorbed by renderings, revisions, logistics and client decks are shrinking. The great unlocking, it turns out, looks a lot like a fabricator and a client with more room to dream.
More than a decade ago, we started the Fab 50 to help corporate event marketers make sense of a growing partner landscape. Today, the list showcases new capabilities that are helping exhibit programs shine as the centerpieces of robust campaigns. Introducing the legacy shops, young shops and evolving shops that simply have a passion for what’s real.
Presenting, the Fab 50.
