10 Innovative Trade Show Booth Ideas

At MinExpo 2016 in Las Vegas, GES and Converse Marketing designed a 52,000-square-foot exhibit for construction and mining equipment manufacturer Caterpillar. The display featured 14 mining machines, 42 video-messaging areas, 20 tabletop multi-touch surfaces, two operator simulators, two VR experiences, and more.

Freddie Georges Production Group designed Netflix’s debut at Comic-Con in San Diego in July. The 20- by 30-foot booth featured a tunnel comprising 68 monitors that broadcast preview trailers of the service’s shows. It also had an interactive social media element that shared posts from influencers.

For the 23rd edition of gaming expo E3 in Los Angeles in June, Event Eleven designed a mid-century modern home for software company Take-Two Interactive—all on the trade show floor. The 8,000-square-foot space featured a pool, an exterior deck, a service kitchen, and a game room. Bedrooms, a living room, a lounge, and a dining room served as meeting spaces.

At the C.T.I.A. Super Mobility show in September 2016 in Las Vegas, Pinnacle Exhibits designed an all-white showroom for Mobilitie, a wireless solutions provider for stadiums and other mega-venues. The showroom featured scale models of several famous venues with lifelike details of the venue structure, people, screens, and lights.

Facebook launched its new social media and virtual-reality product Spaces at its F8 Developers Conference in April in San Jose, California. Freddie Georges Production Group designed a social media and VR environment that involved brand ambassadors engaging with attendees in pairs. Glass walls created separate spaces for each pair to test the product.

Sparks partnered with Pentax Medical to create the “Colonoscopy Challenge” at Digestive Disease Week 2017 in Chicago. The interactive game used LCD touch screens that took attendees on a journey through the colon. Pentax donated money to the Colon Cancer Alliance for each time the game was played.

For exterior-building product company Ply Gem, MG created a booth that was designed to showcase the company’s products in action in an exterior house display, while telling the brand story in an interior space. The booth, which was featured at the International Builders’ Show in Orlando in January, offered displays that identified which products were used on each wall and told solution stories focused on design, durability, comfort, and remodeling.

At the construction-industry trade show ConExpo in Las Vegas in March, MG designed a large space for Topcon with several points for attendee engagement. Stations included product demo areas, an upper-deck V.I.P. area, a cage where company representatives demonstrated the latest in Topcon drone technology, and a theater shaped like a bulldozer that screened a video about the company’s bulldozer control system.

As part of the 100th year anniversary of the Lions Club, Hargrove designed eight signage-heavy exhibits for the community service organization’s centennial exhibit at its international convention, which took place in July in Chicago. The eight “exhibits within an exhibit,” which highlighted different content areas of importance to the organization, were staged in an open floor plan accessible from all sides, inviting attendees to view each area in any order they chose. Exhibits included an interactive touchpad station that provided information about the organization’s LCI Forward project for its second century.

At Vision Expo East, which took place in April in New York, Creatacor designed a 20- by 60-foot booth for Silhouette eyewear that included a variety of displays for the brand’s four lines. For the Neubau line, which uses natural material for the frames, Creatcor designed a living moss wall as a backdrop for the eyewear display boxes.