Display technology is becoming more and more prominent at events, with nearly every customer engagement having a large HD monitor, touch screens or vivid custom-built displays. Despite all these flashy content delivery methods, there has been an overwhelming amount of videos shown at trade shows and events on these technology platforms. We know video obviously has value in some venues? But is it truly an effective tool for the events? We think NOT.

Video clearly has its place as a rah-rah tool at corporate events, but it fails to deliver in qualifying a lead’s interest or tracking user engagement. Video is scripted and that’s great if you have someone’s attention, but NOT if you need to be ‘interactive’ and really captivate a prospect. No one likes to be statically pitched to and event teams want to tailor the presentation to whom they are speaking, so they can drive a conversation forward or sideways, based on the customers needs. Videos don’t let you to that.

More importantly, if you’re showing videos on a touch screen you’re failing to capitalise on the innate interactivity benefits that touch screens are known for. Interaction is the key to any good event; that’s why people go to face-to-face meetings. It’s not to watch looping videos that they could have seen online in their office sitting in front of their computers, it’s to participate in hands-on interactive experiences.

Interactivity has proven to increase knowledge retention by up to 75 percent, so it’s no wonder that companies are turning to engaging marketing solutions to tell their product/solutions stories better.

Here are three interactive event-marketing tools proven to create engagement:

• Interactive 3D Product Models (which look and behave exactly like the actual products), allow prospects to interact with products from every angle, explore options and features (open drawers, change components, demonstrate processes, etc.) and control their own personalised experience based on individual preferences

• Mobile Apps are putting engaging content directly into the hands of your prospects creating intimate experiences that can spill out of your booth onto the trade show aisles, for captivating interactions anywhere at the event

• Augmented Reality for smartphones, tablets, and increasingly, for Google Glass, is reshaping the sales processes at events/meetings by providing vivid representations of what a product could look like, by virtually overlaying it in a real world environment (e.g. a medical device shown within a hospital setting).

So if you’re looking to drive foot traffic into your booth, track customer engagement, tailor content to your customers’ interest, video is a no-no for events.