Trade show animation

With 13 in total, this trade show animation set brought the Sage brand message to life by bringing light, movement and energy to a relatively small exhibition space.

Background

Sage offers cloud HR solutions for medium sized businesses, whether they operate in just one country or multiple locations all over the world. The Sage HR and Sage People packages allow companies to focus on employee engagement, impact the productivity of HR teams and deliver improved and meaningful workforce experiences, from any device, worldwide.

Challenge

Attending the CIPD Festival of Work is in Sage’s promotion calendar every year. This time, the project faced a number of very specific challenges:

1. for this year, the Sage exhibition space would be reduced from the previous edition’s 12m x 6m plot to a smaller 6m x 6m footprint
2. the new Sage brand, recently launched and still in its infancy, would need to be applied to every element of the stand and the animations, with the Sage brand team in San Francisco required to approve every stage
3. with a relatively small stand, a 2.6 mm pitch¹ LED tile screen would carry the majority of the visual brand message
4. the screen would be one of the main pulls to attract delegates to the stand and to entice them to book a software demo, with 13 different animations required
5. the 13 animations² should be treated as a visually consistent body of work, but ensuring each was distinct enough, so that delegates didn’t get the feeling they had already seen the animated content
6. time wasn’t on our side, with just 2 weeks to deliver all 13 animations in time for the exhibition

Solution

Before reaching the animation stage, we storyboarded all content to obtain initial approval from our client. To ensure legibility and maximise the impact of the trade show animation, the screen resolution was also an early consideration in our planning, being conscious of how the digital content would be viewed from different distances and angles.

Starting with a template as a base for each trade show animation, we altered the template slightly to add variety and keep interest levels high. The set of animations follows a running order set by our client to be played in a predetermined sequence, which could then be changed depending on specific requirements, such as time of day.

Some of the animations were intended as vehicles to create generic brand awareness, whereas others were tailored to a specific message, for example calls to action to book a software demo while visiting the stand.

A series of Sage HR and Sage People customer testimonials, with segments filmed at their offices, or a selection of Sage software Trustpilot reviews are a strong way to demonstrate the benefits of our client’s software solutions.

Scheduled to play at the end of each day of the CIPD Festival of Work, one of the animations helps bring the Sage brand message to life even after delegates have left the Festival, held at the Olympia London Exhibition Centre.

As part of the overall Sage at the Festival of Work experience we had created,

fully branded rickshaws would ferry delegates back to their train or Underground station,

where earlier in the day we had strategically positioned them to also take visitors to the exhibition centre.

(1) – 2.6 pitch: ideally viewed 2.6 metres away from the screen

(2) – Here we have included a compilation of all 13 animations for illustrative purposes