Challenge
Elanco is a leading global pharmaceutical company that specializes in producing medicine and vaccinations for animals. Elanco collaborated with Hamilton for the Veterinary Meeting & Expo (VMX) 2024 to deliver an engaging experience for attendees that showcased their innovations in a memorable and educational way. The experience needed to be welcoming and encourage audience engagement through product-specific themed activations.
Approach
Hamilton began by developing an understanding of how attendees would interact with Elanco’s exhibit. The exhibit design for Elanco at VMX 2024 needed to be reconfigurable for future shows while also utilizing components from previous Elanco exhibits. The attendee journey in Elanco’s exhibit began at the reception counter, where they were welcomed and encouraged to start their exploration through the space. The exhibit featured five learning stations positioned along the perimeter, and attendees were routed through the stations in a counterclockwise direction. The activations offered a unique, digital, and tactile opportunity for attendees to interact with Elanco’s products in a fun way while receiving valuable education about their offerings. Some examples of these engagements include a matching game that allowed attendees to match elements on a screen and a “Tick Tock” speed challenge game, which was a modern play on “Whack a Mole” where attendees interacted with a lift-and-drop panel that triggered content on a digital screen.
Another activation, the “I Save Puppies” engagement, invited attendees to get their picture taken and add a pledge to the wall. An attendee's participation in each activation earned them points, which were then converted into a donation to a local charity made on behalf of Elanco. Elanco’s agency created the functionality of the exhibit engagements, and then Hamilton brought the concepts to life. The theater, situated in a central location on the opposite side of the “I Save Puppies” activation, provided Elanco with a space to present their various products and offerings. Attendees were encouraged to explore the space, learn about Elanco’s offerings, and visit their CAT Café hospitality area. A unique feature of Elanco’s booth is the diagonal carpet, which served as a runway guiding visitors to the puppy playground. For VMX 2024, Elanco sponsored the puppy playground, which was located behind Elanco’s booth.
Results
Elanco’s experience at VMX 2024 was a huge success, and Hamilton was able to track their success with beacon technology. Hamilton placed seven beacons in different engagement areas throughout Elanco’s exhibit that tracked the pings from phones searching for Wi-Fi and their distance from the beacon. The beacons collected data and aided in reporting average dwell time, conversion rate, exposure rate, average number of zones visited, and average number of visits. This year, attendees’ dwell time in Elanco’s exhibit was increased by almost double from 2023, and the conversion rate was 20% higher than the average from previous shows. Once a visitor engaged with the exhibit, they spent an average of 10 minutes 54 seconds in one or more of the activation stations.
