Thanx Event Booth 2021

After the year that was 2020, 2021 was a crucial return to events. For customer engagement platform, Thanx, I was tasked with creating an intriguing, exciting and attention-grabbing event booth to reintroduce us back to that world.

On top of that, we had a number of team members out for a full quarter, so I was shouldering a lot of what would have otherwise been handled by them: shipping, registration, sponsor relations, logistics, etc. This, on top of creative development and execution, was a TON of work — but all came together in the end for an awesome, and effective, event presence.

Lessons Learned

Always under promise and over deliver. While I was ready to tackle my usual responsibilities in design & creative vendor management for our booth, I sincerely under estimated the amount of work that goes into every other aspect of participating successfully at an industry event. As mentioned above, my team members who would normally handle everything else were both out for 3 months, at the same time. If I were to do this project again, I would aim to get everything done 4+ weeks in advance to better account for all of the last minute, misc. event to-do’s.

Success

In the 2021 event season, our booth was the “most successful booth setup Thanx has ever had,” in the words of one of our enterprise sales leads. Across all of our trade shows utilizing this setup, we hit our set targets for number of conversations, as well as hitting our goals for number of qualified leads generated. We were also well under budget – generating the same, or more, interest than our competitors with booths that cost 5-20x more than ours.

DELIVERABLES

Branding
Art Direction
Environmental

TEAM

Thanx Marketing & Leadership Teams
Heather Crank [Animation]
Harmonic Media [Printing]

Our Concept: The Digital Flywheel

One of our key marketing concepts at Thanx is The Digital Flywheel. In summary, brick-and-mortar retails should 1. collect customer data 2. activate it to create better, personalized marketing which in turn 3. drives Return on Investment (ROI) and grows Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) over time, all of which reinforces and improves the flywheel.

We decided to lead with this concept for our booths because it was a good balance between too abstract and too literal (i.e., solely product focused). It’s also fairly easy to understand, and therefore a straightforward framing device for how Thanx works.

The Pitch

Despite being a small team (read: me, myself, and I as our sole brand designer), we still have to sell ideas in house. I put together a thorough pitch deck to convey the creative direction for how we’d bring the flywheel to life visually and physically. The deck included all of the necessary details so that our CEO could confidently make an informed decision on the spot.

Use the left and right arrows to scroll through some of the slides:

3D Booth Mockup

It’s no secret that creative work is often more successful when the people deciding “yes” or “no” can more easily envision what you have in mind, as clearly as possible. I mocked up our full event booth to help even the least conceptually-savvy decision makers. This was created in Adobe Aero, done to scale.

Thanx Digital Flywheel Booth 2021 3D mockup

A 3D Holographic LED Fan… say that 10 times fast

A key part of this whole concept was bringing the flywheel to life, not just in an exciting way visually, but physically too, if possible. I came up with the idea of utilizing a 3D Holographic LED Fan.

The fan has 4 blades, each with a strip of LED lights all the way across. Because the fan spins so fast, the blades seem to disappear, leaving only the LEDs which can display whatever animation you upload.

This gave the entire concept an amazingly tactile experience and helped drive the whole thing home.

Use the slider to see the fan in the “off” and “on” position.

Know your limitations: hire experts

I do a LOT as a sole Brand Designer at Thanx, but sometimes you have to know when to call it; and for me, animation is one of those things. Great animation is an art form. So I was excited to sell the idea of us hiring a professional to get the job done.

I ended up being connected to the amazingly talented Heather Crank who took my static key frames to create our final animated video. Better yet, since I knew this would be an investment, I sold the idea by pointing out that we could repurpose stills from the animation for other key assets. We did just that, creating collateral like pop up banners and a table cloth.

Matchbooks

Such a small swag item, and yet, highly effective. In our events post-mortem, one of our AEs said that the matchbooks were a perfect piece of swag: small and easy to transport, on-brand, and best of all, a subtle nod to the old days of the hospitality industry, something many prospects noticed & loved. All of these things were the exact reason I pitched matchbooks to begin with; always awesome when your idea as a designer resonates as intended.