BRAND: KIA
AGENCY: EWI Worldwide
CAMPAIGN: Close Encounters of the KIA Kind

How to bring your brand message to life at a trade show? Let us count the ways. There’s signage and graphics, high-tech experiences and theatre presentations, press events and cocktail parties, to name a few. But trade shows can also be a forum to release a brand’s more creative side. Like Lenovo did this year at CES when it hired Hollywood stuntmen to ride through Las Vegas on top of taxis and limos. Or Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, which turned rubber duckies and conga lines into business-generating engagement tools.

If you want to have a meaningful engagement with attendees in your booth, the first thing you have to do, after you get them there, is to encourage them to stick around. After all, your booth is an ideal touch point for cementing face-to-face relationships and providing hands-on information about your product or service. But you’re competing with hundreds of other exhibitors for the attendees’ time and attention.

In this regular series, EM brings you tips and tricks from pros and experts who’ve been eating social media marketing for breakfast. So eat up, and check us out on Twitter @eventmarketer and Facebook.com/eventmarketer for more.

To build buzz and drive viewership for its new show, “VEEP,” which stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, HBO took motorcades to three big markets in full vice-presidential style. Each motorcade consisted of two police motorcycles and a black SUV with hood flags flying acting as escort to a branded, wrapped tour bus that visited The Grove shopping mall in Los Angeles, Planet Hollywood in Times Square, NYU Student Center and Bryant Park in New York City and Georgetown in Washington D.C. on April 17.