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We are continuing our series on exhibit planning. This is a great series as I get to share ideas as they are happening in real time. We noticed that our exhibit location on the floor was between other exhibitors in a linear 10 x 10. The floor plan had changed. We thought we had an end booth. We also set up the exhibit in-house in a measured 10 x 10 space and realized the need to shoot video at an angle because of less distance between the camera and the subject. This meant that we needed to put the video camera on a tripod in the very front corner and have the interview seating in the opposite back corner. This brought up a lot of questions and concerns.
How would our neighbors react to the lights and camera shooting live in the booth space?
- How would we block out our neighbors exhibit so it did not get in the shot. And…number
- We really, really needed an end of aisle exhibit like we thought we originally booked.
To answer the first question we would not expect our neighbors to be concerned with the tripod and camera on the front corner even if it was over the limit, at a 4 or 5 foot height. Many front counters have monitors and other items that stick up past the siderail. These smaller items do not tend to seriously block visibility of your neighbors’ exhibit (which is the reason for the rule) and everybody does it, so it is generally accepted.
To answer the second concern we decided it would be good to create full height side extensions onto the exhibit. In a previous video I talked about international rules that were established by the IEEE organization. The rules for linear exhibit say that you can have full height side walls that measure up to 50 percent of the booth spaces depth. So since we are in a 10’ deep booth space we can have 8’ tall side walls that are 5’ deep on both sides of the exhibit. We all agreed that this was an important modification. We asked the Design Department to do a mockup of this change to show their concept of how the side walls would look.
The third concern about needing an end aisle booth location was twofold. When I first booked our space last year we wanted to be in the 1,600 aisle where there was a lot of traffic. I always say it is good to check out a show ahead of time. This show proved that well as some of the booth location rules I talked about in earlier episodes did not apply to this shows’ floorplan. The larger exhibits tended to be more on the left side of the exhibit hall and with only four show hours per day attendees concentrated their time towards that side of the hall.
The second part of our number 3 concern had to do with the backwall graphic. When you see the Exhibitor Lounge videos you notice that I always acknowledge our sponsor, Exhibit Edge, and their logo is on the lower audience right side of the exhibit. If we could change to an end aisle location it needed to be on the left side so we did not block to Exhibit Edge logo with the interview chairs.
So we really wanted to move to an end aisle location, we wanted to stay in the high traffic 1,600 aisle and we wanted an audience left end space. We contacted the Sales Department and told them our needs and after a few weeks we were able to secure a space that just became available as another exhibitor decided to upgrade to a larger space. We got the space we needed and the ExhibitorLive sales department really worked with us to help. A good analogy that I can give you is if you have an airplane seat that you don’t like keep checking online to see if another seat becomes available.
So this was a great week. We got a new booth space, we figured out some booth flow requirements and we moved forward with the look of the exhibit adding new sidewalls.
Hey, as always, please respond with your questions or comments and let others know about EXHIBITOR LOUNGE.COM. We will see you next week. Until then, I am your host Michael Gray telling you to RELAX in the Exhibitor Lounge.