Trade Show Display Tips That Will Have Attendees Swarming Your Booth

Trade show displays are one of the harder marketing materials to design for. Attendees are usually gazing though the crowds of umpteen trade show booths, just waiting for something to catch their eyes. This "something" needs to be you and the display in your booth.

Think about the last trade show you attended - how did you decide which booth to stop at? How many booths caught your attention? Probably not very many. Follow these guidelines and tips so that people will be swarming your booth at the next trade show.

Do not rely on your display to sell your product or service

Your display - your poster printing pieces, your brochures, etc. should all be there to help your salespeople sell your product, not the other way around. Do not rely on your display to sell your products. Design your posters, flyers and other marketing handouts to function as sales leads material - these items should not give specifics and details about product features - these items should outline benefits that can be quickly communicated to get attendees to stay in your booth and ask questions. That is where the real selling begins.

Do not just stand there - do something interesting!

Most of the salespeople at trade show booths are just standing there, looking bored, trying to hand out brochures or flyers. Yawn. What a bore! This type of trade show behavior will not get many leads. If you do something interesting, whether that's demonstrating your product in action or playing some kind of game with attendees, more and more people will gather around your booth to find out about the interesting event. In turn, while people are in your booth, they will pick up a few brochures and other marketing materials. Draw people in with something of interest and then make your sale.

Keep it short

This ties in with the first guideline - not to rely on your display materials too much. You should think of your display as you would if you were designing a billboard. You only have a few seconds to draw people in - no one is going to stop at every single booth to check things out. People are in stroll mode and they are looking for a reason to stop, but they need a compelling reason to do so. If you have a poster that states "Stop here to find out about the newest vacuum cleaner that will clean so fast you'll cut your vacuuming time in half" most people will have walked on before reading half of that sentence. On the other hand, a poster that reads "Slash your vacuuming time in half" says the same thing in less than half the words and also shows people a benefit of stopping in that booth. So keep it short and hit them with a benefit.

Be unique

Your booth display probably has a lot of the same things that your competitors' displays have. Companies in the same industry tend to think alike - real estate companies think like other real estate companies. Car rental companies think like other car rental companies. Here is an idea to help you stand out in your industry: draw two columns on a piece of paper. Name the left column "My Display" and the right column "Their Displays." Now, list everything you're planning on putting in your display (charts, graphics, posters, brochures) in the left column and list everything you think your competitors will have in their displays in the right column.

Then, cross off everything that is on both lists. These are the things you cannot use.

If there is nothing left on your list, it means it is time to start thinking creatively. What can you do to be different? Do not be disappointed if there is nothing left - that just means you have started the thinking process and you already know what you do not want to do. Brainstorm with co-workers and try to come up with some new and creative ideas that will draw people to your booth instead of your competitors.

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How To Drive A 64 Led Matrix Display Using 16 Control Lines

Driving an individual LED is a simple task and all you do is attach the LED through a current limiting resistor to a control line. When the control line goes high the LED lights up and when the control line goes low the LED is off. The problem is that if you try and drive an 8 by 8 matrix in this way you need 64 individual control lines and this would require a lot of circuitry.

The way round it is to cheat and make use of a property of your eye called persistence of vision.

Persistence of Vision

Your eye actually remembers what it has seen for a very short time i.e. The image in your eye persists for a short while. Television designers made use of this fact many years ago (and still do today) since the image created on a TV set consists of a single electron gun (actually three since there is one gun for each color).

Note: LCD TVs work in a different way.

The electron gun scans over the entire TV screen at an extremely high rate. It works by using electric fields to alter the direction of the stream of electrons (these electric fields are extremely high voltage which is why it's important never to open up a TV). The stream of electrons is deflected so that each row is scanned one line at a time. At each pixel the gun is turned on make the screen phosphor light up.

As long as the entire screen is refreshed before your eye forgets the image it looks to you like the screen has a constant steady picture. If the refresh rate was reduced then you would begin to see the image flickering.

The rate at which the screen needs to refresh is 50Hz i.e. 20ms and this is the rate needed if you do multiplexing.

Multiplexing

To use persistence of vision in electronic designs you make use of a technique called multiplexing and it simply means sharing. Instead of driving each LED individually you can share a control line between several LEDs.

You only need to turn on a control line for a short time as long as you remember to repeat the output before the 20ms time limit.

Controlling the 8 by 8 LED matrix

An led dot matrix display is simply an array of LEDs arranged in a square grid. Each column is connected to one side of the led and each row is connected to the other.

The matrix is arranged specifically for multiplexing and you can actually get away with 8 column drivers and 8 row drivers so instead of 64 control lines you now only need 16 control lines i.e. A saving of 75%.

Note: This discussion is for the common cathode LED matrix i.e. Where the cathode (-ve) of each column of LEDs is connected together. The type of matrix determines whether you drive a row high or low to turn on an LED.

To turn on an individual LED in the matrix requires that you drive a row with a high voltage and allow current to flow through the cathode. You usually allow current to flow by attaching a transistor to a column connection and it's turned on and off using a control signal.

When you turn on the column transistor driving any of the eight rows will light up one of the 8 row LEDs. To control the next column you turn off the 1st column transistor and turn on the next column transistor (out of the 8 available). Using the same row drivers you can now control this next set of 8 LEDs.

If you repeat this process ensuring that all columns and rows are driven over the period of 20ms then it will look as though the display is not flickering at all i.e. It will appear that the LEDs are continuously driven.

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