Lydia Owen • 2 min read

 

When we start working with a new client, we’re often asked ideally when they should be starting to plan their congress presence.
As a rule of thumb, we normally say six months in advance of an exhibition but obviously that depends on the scale of the booth, the nature and complexity of any potential delegate engagement activities, and also where the congress is taking place. As soon as you get outside of the UK, you do need to factor in longer lead times for Customs, temporary imports and transportation.
When we start planning, we work backwards from the hard unmoveable dates. Typically, these are the date the onsite build starts and also the date the congress and venue need to have received 3D visuals and technical drawings of your booth early on in the proceedings.
We factor in enough time to take a brief from you, to find out what your overarching objectives are, and to start liaison with the congress (e.g. reviewing their technical manuals, the floorplan etc). We then start working out what we can do and what features we can design to help you stand out from your competitors in the hall.
The process of getting stand visuals agreed upon can also be relatively time consuming; there is usually some toing and froing on that front between us and you as we develop the booth concept and finesse the layout of your stand, keeping the delegate journey in mind.
Time for content creation is also factored in — and that includes print, digital and interactive. We like to allow a bit more time here if we’re working as part of a multi-agency team and it’s not our studio that is producing your content. It’s worth noting that some clients have longer and more onerous internal approval processes than others — particularly in pharma — so we factor that into our planning too, in terms of ensuring we can go to print on time, pre-install and test any digital content, and also start the pre-build of any custom built elements in the workshop.
It also gives us enough time to sub-contract to other suppliers like barista services or book out any high-end tech kit. There are points in the year — particularly around March and September — where the exhibition season is at its height and there can sometimes be a shortage of stock kit e.g. curved AV panels for video walls. So, at OSP, we like to get in early to ensure we can have the best products on our stands!
So, although we can usually turn things around fairly quickly, in my view six months is probably the sweet spot when it comes to planning your presence at an expo.