To their credit, the exhibit-marketing team at S&C Electric Co., a Chicago-based provider of products and services for electric-power systems (i.e., electrical grids managed by massive utility companies, small municipal outfits, and everything in between), were hip to the power of "why" on the trade show floor. "Regarding our booth messaging and promotional elements over the past few years, we have been very focused on communicating results and benefits, not functions and features," says Jessica Simon, S&C's manager of marketing support and events. Rather than touting the operating capacity of a new fuse, for example, booth signage broadcast that S&C products help save utility providers millions in maintenance costs annually. Staffers were also trained to highlight big-picture benefits when walking attendees through product demos.

Nevertheless, marketers felt their strategies were about as reliable as the wiring in a garage-sale toaster. "At the end of the day, signage and marketing promotions are content items that don't always have the real estate to convey a complete story," says Alexandra Charleston, S&C's manager of strategic communications. "And because we display physical equipment, it's natural for customers to fixate on 'what' and 'how,' making it active work for our team members to pull the conversation toward the higher-level 'why' discussion. Ultimately, what we lacked was a master narrative with the ability to unpackage big ideas."

The obvious alternatives were to produce a slick video or schedule a slate of staged presentations, both of which S&C hoped to eschew. "There are so many monitors and screens at a show that it's almost impossible to stand out and grab attention," Charleston says. "As for presentations, customers are bound to the schedule, making the experience centered on the seller and not the buyer." Wanting to veer from the status quo, S&C marketers compiled a list of outside creative agencies that could bring new ideas to the table and issued a request for proposal to each. To avoid stifling ingenuity, the RFP contained few provisions about the activation apart from it needing to attract attention on a trade show floor and fit within a 20-by-20-foot space in S&C's 50-by-60-foot Dtech booth.

Next Now Inc. (dba Next/Now Agency), an experiential-marketing agency specializing in high-tech activations, sidestepped these unwritten dealbreakers and proposed an immersive engagement that checked all of S&C's boxes: a mixed-reality product demo combining digital and real-world elements. Next/Now pitched an experience in which attendees would congregate in front of a massive green screen and be livestreamed into product demos playing out on an LED wall in front of them. In essence, participants would see themselves plopped into digital environments where they shared the screen with S&C products actively solving utility providers' problems.

This was the sole concept Next/Now pitched, and it was a winner. "Handling our products in a demo is great for learning how to operate them, but it leaves the 'why' to the imagination," Charleston says. "And being told that a product can recover automatically in severe weather is a lot different than seeing it in action. The mixed-reality demo was an innovative, attention-grabbing way for our customers to see how these three products function in the real world."

As production started to wrap, Next/Now turned its attention to building a tablet-based app that would allow presenters to control the demo, adjust the pacing of each scene, and pause it when necessary. Even when a scene was frozen, however, environmental details would remain animated. For example, should the blizzard or hurricane scenario be halted to answer an attendee's question, the snow and rain would continue unabated to keep attendees immersed in the environment.

When the digital and physical components were finished, S&C staged the completed demo in Superior Exhibits & Design's warehouse to set the angles of the cameras that would capture attendees in real time, rig various lighting components, and test the software. After working out the kinks, it was time to head to Dtech in San Antonio to see if S&C's savvy storytelling would fizzle like a short circuit or generate the desired results (i.e., to engage 75 attendees in the demo, increase first-day booth traffic by 5 percent, and boost lead conversion by no less than 10 percent).

After staffers scanned their badges, groups of up to approximately 10 attendees at a time congregated atop a gray oval on the green-screen floor – an area marking the optimum range of the pint-size yet powerful Marshall CV502 and CV343 video cameras mounted to the top of the LED wall. Once the attendees were in position, the S&C presenter began the seven-minute demo by pushing the appropriate button on an app-enabled tablet. The LED wall then transformed into a futuristic, "Minority Report"-esque representation of a smart grid, complete with pulses of light and glowing lines showing the distribution of electrical power. As the dazzling display unfolded, the presenter relayed the importance of considering S&C's products in the context of the entire electric grid and how the company's offerings can help utility providers deliver reliable power, reduce costs, and keep customers happy.

The screen then cut to a suburban neighborhood in the middle of a blizzard. Snow-blanketed trees and icy streets set a scene in which the glowing windows of dozens of homes indicated occupants were cozy and protected from the bitter cold. Attendees impressed by the hyperrealistically animated environment were then astonished when near-life-size versions of themselves appeared on-screen as if they were standing in someone's front yard amid the winter storm. Then, a tree branch fell onto a power line, creating a temporary power outage in several homes. Soon after, an entire tree lost its battle with the elements (accompanied by a crash emitted from discreet speakers mounted to both sides of the green-screen wall), resulting in a permanent outage affecting even more residences.

However, the presenter explained, the power grid in this scenario employed IntelliRupter PulseCloser Fault Interrupters (whose glowing silhouettes then appeared on the utility poles), which segment power lines into smaller sections and isolate the faulted area so fewer customers are impacted by an electrical outage.

Once S&C's technology kicked in and several homes' lights came back on, the hurricane scenario appeared on the screen. The sounds of pouring rain and howling winds emanated from the speakers, and attendees saw themselves on a street surrounded by multistory buildings. Thankfully, the only vehicle on the road was a utility truck making the rounds to support the grid. After the truck passed, a frond from a nearby palm tree made contact with a power line. The presenter then explained a fuse on this line would have blown because of this temporary issue, resulting in an unnecessary outage and the need for the utility crew to replace it. But S&C's TripSaver II Cutout-Mounted Recloser can test the line to determine if a fault is temporary and automatically restore power if it is, thereby eliminating the expense of sending a repair team to solve every problem.

The demo concluded with a scene of a cabin in a remote wooded area enhanced by chirping birds and playful squirrels that scampered around attendees' on-screen images. As the seasons progressed in front of them, participants saw how any number of temporary incidents, e.g., a lightning strike or an errant tree branch, can cause a service disruption in such a far-flung locale. These edge-of-the-grid risk factors can be lessened, the presenter explained, by the VacuFuse Self-Resetting Interrupter, which replaces single-use fuses above overhead distribution transformers and automatically restores power after a temporary fault.

However, the unique activation proved so alluring that 476 participants enjoyed some screen time by the end of the event. And since the first day of Dtech draws the most traffic in the exhibit hall, marketers wanted to increase opening-day footfalls by 5 percent compared to 2019, but ultimately bested that goal by 7 percentage points.

But perhaps the best indicator of S&C's success in the "why" department was the spike in the company's lead-conversion rate. Marketers desired a 10-percent bump compared to Dtech 2019. When the numbers were crunched, though, S&C upped its lead-conversion rate by 18 percent.

In addition to quantifiable data, marketers left the show with glowing testimonials. "Many attendees said the demo was one of the clearest, easiest ways they've seen to explain the importance of equipment like S&C's, and some asked whether they could use the activation in conversations with their regulators," Charleston says. "Not only were we able to influence our customers, but our customers wanted to influence their own stakeholders." So it seems S&C's demo generated another special effect that was anything but an illusion: a balance sheet as verdant as the green screen itself. E