Exhibit and event marketers are getting progressively creative with the ways they integrate LED walls into their exhibits.
At their best, LED walls are vibrant, dynamic, and immersive brand experiences. On the other hand, our 3D Exhibits team has seen a few exhibitors whose use of an LED wall was less than effective.
How do you ensure that your LED backwall provides the highest return on objectives possible? Using the example of the Refinitiv exhibit at Sibos in London (designed and fabricated by our 3D Exhibits team), we've come up with a list of best practices to maximize the impact an LED wall can have in your trade show exhibit.
Here are our 6 tips to maximize the impact of LED in your exhibit space:
1. Create an impression. Your LED wall is your opportunity to immerse attendees in the non-tangible qualities of your brand. Your content should non-verbally communicate key brand or product attributes—not bombard attendees with granular details.
As a relatively new brand, Refinitiv is working hard to establish its presence in the financial services market. Appropriately, it developed LED wall content that used animated images to convey brand attributes including; dynamic, innovative, and fast-moving.
2. Keep the messaging simple. Approach your video wall content as a lifestyle graphic with motion. Color, texture, and movement are great—as is anything that can be understood intuitively. Copy, however, should be kept to a minimum. No one will stop to read more than single-line statements. Also, unless you have a theater area in your booth, don't expect people to listen to detailed audio. Sounds and music, yes—product descriptions, no. A rule of thumb: if it needs a verbal explanation to make sense, it isn't a good thing to include on your video wall.
Refinitiv was right on target here too; comprising its LED wall content mostly of fast-moving animations and limiting copy to a handful of select single-line statements.
3. Retain consistency with your other communications and brand. The look, feel, and tone of your LED wall content should match what's going on in the rest of your booth. Refinitiv achieved this through its selection of a curated color palette for its LED content. Every image reflected Refinitiv's blue corporate identity—or was carefully designed to complement it.
4. Keep the rest of the exhibit clean and simple. It's best if you let your LED wall be the visual focal point of your exhibit. Minimize other things in your exhibit that compete with your LED wall for attendees' attention (i.e. other graphics, shapes, components, or images). Too many focal points, items, or messages result in an exhibit that is cluttered and overwhelming.
Here too, Refinitiv demonstrated the ideal. Its use of simple, clean, and minimal furniture and exhibitry supports—rather than competes with—its LED wall.
5. Design and place your other properties to maximize visibility. This one is simple. If you want people to notice your LED wall, don't block it from view. Refinitiv achieved this by selecting low-profile furniture and building its workstations to fit as narrow of a footprint as possible.
6. Keep in mind that you can split the screen. One of the best things about LED walls is that you can program the wall as a whole—or use different segments for different purposes. Refinitiv multi-purposed its LED wall by dual purposing a section of its LED wall for presentation support. The exhibitor created a small theater on the left side of the exhibit next to the LED wall. Then, whenever Refinitiv ran a live presentation, the input for this portion of the wall was changed from the brand video to the slides and content that supported the presenter.
How do you maximize the impact of your LED walls?
