VAULT 49

10 E 23rd Street, Fifth Floor
New York, NY 10010, USA

Brief
Trade exhibitions are notoriously hostile and competitive environments as brands vie to achieve the most foot traffic and PR for their latest products.

Yahoo! approached Vault49 with an awesome challenge: to conceive, design, fabricate, and install their event presence at Internet Week: New York, across a 6,000 sq ft venue allocation, across several stand locations.

Yahoo! had done their part in committing to be the lead sponsor of the event, and it was down to Vault49 to maximize their exposure. Oh, and we had four weeks from briefing to installation.

Solution
Our challenge was to overcome the brand noise from other heavy-hitting exhibitors such as Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, and AOL, yet with a limited budget and short timeframe. For this event in particular we had to be clever as well as bold and find a more intelligent use of the client's money.

We conducted several walk-throughs and digitally mapped the venue to help understand the exhibition environment and how Internet Week visitors would experience the Yahoo! space.

Our solution was to design content that we knew would interest event visitors, and which would also allow them to experience and explore Yahoo product launches in carefully guided stages, driving foot traffic to the stands.

We worked closely with Yahoo! and their partners to provide a broad range of interactive content for a giant multi-lcd display (where visitors could interact directly with others at the venue through flickr photos), branded casings for augmented reality solutions, and more.

The result is that Yahoo! fully dominated the event, achieved substantial PR, and were thrilled with our solution and the resultant foot traffic. Both Yahoo! and Vault49 received commendation from Internet Week for our imaginative use of the venue.