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At trade shows, attention is costly.
Everywhere you look, someone’s trying to stand out with a bigger banner, a louder pitch or a booth giveaway people barely remember. That’s the problem we wanted to solve with our client, Kanbar Digital, who was headed to Natural Products Expo West.
At Fortino Studios, we’ve learned that most booths struggle because the brand is asking people to care before it has created any immediate value. So instead of building another agency booth that talked about what we do, we built one that did it.
The result was 80+ on-site videos, 100+ direct booth leads, 600+ brand and partner connections, and a pipeline with the potential to generate $972,000 annually.
It reinforced a broader brand lesson: If you want better outcomes at live events, stop thinking about how to get attention and start thinking about how to become useful.
The challenge: Most trade show booths are forgettable
Kanbar Digital had already seen this play out. In 2025, the team showed up to Expo West with a more traditional booth setup and got the kind of results a lot of businesses quietly accept after events:
13 sign-ups
2 closed clients
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