If you’re considering producing a looping video for your trade show booth, lobby or other high-traffic location, here are some general guidelines you might find useful:
Create the video with no beginning or ending – Your audience will walk up and start watching the video at any time, so only a small percentage will actually arrive at the beginning point of the loop. You’ll achieve better results without a distinct opening or conclusion.
Deliver a key message every 20 seconds or so – Your audience will only devote a short amount of time to your video loop, so the video should deliver an important message to the audience frequently. This ensures that viewers receive one or two messages before they move on.
Don’t use narration, bullet text is better – Your audience is much more likely to read a concise line of text or two than to listen to any part of a narrated presentation in a trade show environment. A narration would have to compete with fluctuating trade show noise levels, conversations and event announcements. It isn’t realistic at all to think that a looping video with narration will receive any attention. In addition, booth workers are likely to grow tired of the constantly repeating narration and lower the volume.
Use strong, dynamic visuals and avoid a PowerPoint-like format – Your audience has suffered through enough badly produced PowerPoint presentations to be likely to run screaming from any display that resembles the last presentation they had to sit through.
Use enough visual diversity to stay fresh – Don’t rely on one background for the entire presentation. The video should show your audience things and take them places they don’t usually get to see. Changing the look during the loop also creates the illusion of more content than actually exists.
The design of the graphics should complement the booth design – Make the video look as if it actually belongs on the booth rather than an afterthought. The color scheme used as the background for text displays could use the booth colors. The fonts used for the text could match the fonts used in other parts of the booth.
Messages should focus on the audience’s interests – The video should deliver concise points about things that actually matter to the audience. The points should be brief, easy to understand and make clear what benefit you’re offering to the audience at a glance. Instead of saying something like, “Our new system will enable drillers to minimize downtime by eliminating setup time,” you could simply say, “REDUCE DOWNTIME.” We all know that downtime costs money and a claim like that will stop traffic.
Use sound effects before music – the repetition of looping music becomes annoying to the folks working the booth much more quickly than sound effects. Booth workers will be less likely to sneak over and turn down the volume on your display if you use whooshes, zips, zings and pops to reinforce movement within the video.
EXTENDING THE VALUE OF TRADE SHOW VIDEO DISPLAYS
A looping trade show video display can be an effective tool to stop audiences and capture attention at trade shows. But what can you do with that slick, fast-paced looping video once the trade show is over? More than you may think.
SECONDARY APPLICATIONS FOR TRADE SHOW LOOPS:
Lobby Display – The video can loop alone or in combination with other productions to create a professional lobby display that reinforces key messages to visitors.
PowerPoint Presentations – A blank screen is always a missed opportunity. Before a presentation begins, a trade show display can be set to loop as the first slide in a PowerPoint based presentation. As audience members arrive and take their seats, the loop reinforces a positive company image. The loop can also play at the end of the presentation or during the Q&A session to further reinforce the company image.
Company Web Site – A looping video can add depth to a company web site and can stimulate site visitor interest in the aspects of the company promoted by the loop (note there is a looping video on our home page).
Social Media – Adding the trade show loop to social media costs nothing and increases the company’s presence online.
When we create a trade show video display we always deliver the project in the format required for the venue, along with other formats suitable for PowerPoint, web site placement, social media applications, and smartphones. If you have a trade show display created internally or by another vendor that you’d like to repurpose for one or more of these other applications just give us a call and we’ll be happy to reformat it for you without charge.
