Cruise ship or conference? I was certainly confused at times. Now, our booth location had a great view of the main stage in the exhibit hall which was apparently designated as the fitness stage. There were yoga exercises in the morning (and people were participating in their suits) and there was also lunchtime/break time entertainment which consisted of a bunch of dancing to music that you would normally associate with Hot Hot Hot on Carnival Caribbean cruise. The dancing and participants were priceless – especially this was considered a business conference. Did I mention there were people doing some maneuvers with some hula hoops that I didn’t think were quite humanly possible? Cruise ship or conference? I am not sure.
Insurance specialist or publishing expert? Now, I have to say by the end of the day, I was just a little punchy (we had to be there at 7 a.m.!! Yuck!) , so when Mr. AAA insurance guy comes up to our table and is a publishing expert, because he self-published his own book. I did not exactly hold back on the eye rolls. Mr. Moron proceeded to tell us because my company published our own books we were technically vanity press and I really enjoyed telling him I actually sold my first company on this model. After he figured out how busy I was he proceeded to try to sell insurance. Ok everybody … now if you insult someone it is a pretty bad sales technique, right? What a moronic maneuver.
Tape is not going to fix your booth. Two doors down from our booth was a “Melt Your Jewelry into Gold” booth and this non-lovely marketing disaster of a booth came equipped with a sign that looked like it was homemade (shame on that marketing person) that was attached by a metal clip to some sort of a stand. It was horrific. So, of course in the spirit of iPhone video fun we taped it and later the very nice booth attendee came over to ask us for some tape. Tape or a giant band aid was not going to fix that train wreck of a trad eshow booth. The moral of the story? If you cannot afford a decent market presence just buy expo/conference passes. Even funnier, was after she left another marketer came by and said the only thing that may help fix that problem would be melting the actual sign. That could have been a fire hazard though.
