Anyone who has been on the tradeshow circuit has either seen them, or worse, been them.
They are the people whose booths—for whatever reason—fail to get delivered. Almost every tradeshow of any size seems to have at least one booth consisting of the conference-hall supplied curtains with a company nametag on them and nothing else.
Except, that is, for some extremely bored- and irritated-looking exhibit hall representatives.
Jordan Ayan, CEO of e-mail service provider SubscriberMail recently found himself in just such a situation when FedEx failed to deliver his booth to an American Marketing Association conference in Orlando.
“How many times have you gone to a conference and there’s always some guy sitting there with just their booth number and their name?” he said. “I always go, ‘poor person.’ But this time, it was us.”
Scrambling for a solution, Ayan called a buddy of his in the tradeshow industry. Ayan’s friend said he could get an emergency booth delivered but it would have no graphics. The friend then suggested Ayan run some sort of a contest to generate leads.
And here, apparently, is where inspiration struck. Ayan and the rest of SubscriberMail’s representatives decided that since FedEx lost the booth, the contest should involve FedEx.
Ayan and his colleagues went to every local FedEx store they could find and grabbed as many FedEx boxes as they could get to build a makeshift booth out of them
“We told them we had a lot of shipping to do,” Ayan said.
They then went to Kinko’s and created a large sign to hang in the booth that said: “Guess when FedEx will deliver our booth and win a box of Omaha Steaks (delivered by UPS!).”
To complete the FedEx-inspired gag, they acquired a volleyball, put a handprint on it with mud and called it “Wilson.” The name refers to the beach volleyball with a bloody handprint that Tom Hanks talks to in the movie Cast Away, where Hanks plays a FedEx employee stranded on an island with a bunch of FedEx boxes after a company plane he was on crashes.
Turns out FedEx did SubscriberMail a favor. The “booth” was a stunning success, according to Ayan.
“The show opened and we were inundated with people,” he said. “We had more people come to our booth than we’ve ever had at any show we’ve ever done.”
Out of just over 800 attendees, more than 280 people entered the contest, according to Ayan. He said he hasn’t closed any business resulting from leads yet, but he believes they are as solid as tradeshow leads get.
“Normally at a show like that, we’d never get 280 leads at the booth,” he said. “But the best part about it was these two-hundred some-odd people who signed up kept coming back to the booth for three days because they wanted to know if the booth arrived and did they win the contest? So we had these recurring opportunities to talk to people throughout the show.”
As for the real booth, FedEx delivered it on the last day. Good thing. Ayan said the fiasco has also seriously aided prospects’ recall.
“We get calls from people going ‘you’re the guys who had the booth that didn’t get delivered,’” he said. “If we would have just sat there without a booth they wouldn’t have remembered us.”
He added: “If I could make that my permanent booth, I would, but I think my competitors would catch on.”
