This holiday season, Microsoft gave passengers at several U.S. airports the gift of free photos with Santa Claus. From Nov. 23 to Dec. 21, the brand set up its Holiday Photos on the Fly booth at 26 airports where it snapped holiday photos of consumers and then enhanced them on-site using Windows Live photo features, including Photo Fusion and Photo Mail.

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.

To bring its Good Hands Roadside Assistance service to life, Allstate handed sports blogger Spencer Hall of edsbs.com (Every Day Should be Saturday) the keys to a branded SUV in which he is traveling to football games across the country through Jan. 10. 

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)