The Ultimate Conference Experience–Sheep-A-Nator 3000

The National Agri-Marketing Association (NAMA) annual convention was hosted in Kansas City this year, and featured, as always, marketers specializing in agribusiness from all over the United States. Sullivan Higdon & Sink, a local agency with a track record of creative genius and with whom we work on a regular basis, wanted to do something unique and make a big splash at the event. Their strategy was to get people to focus on their clever tagline, “We Hate Sheep” — which really means they love trailblazers and scorn those who choose only to be followers. Our team at the T2 Experience Lab began collaborating with the SHS team on a grand experiential piece that we hoped would put to shame the conventional trade show “booth.”

After doing some due diligence and scoping out the event space in the Hyatt, our vision was to set up an interactive installation right in the lobby, so we set about working together to design something that would be impossible for convention goers to resist getting a closer look at.

The SHS creative team and our Experience Lab team devised the Sheep-A-Nator 3000, which literally gave conference attendees the ability to launch their own sheep. It was priceless and a perfect visualization of what SHS is all about – hating the sheep-like mentality that is so prevalent in society today. We projected a scene onto the wall of clueless sheep grazing in a pasture. In front of the projection, and irresistible to passersby, was a bright yellow foot pedal that just begged to be stomped on. If a sheep was so unfortunate as to be on the platform at the same time the pedal was pushed, the sheep was summarily launched over the fence to join its bunch of loser friends. The crowd’s initial curiosity about what was going on in the SHS booth and the excitement about pressing the pedal soon turned into an experience centered around the excitement and the competitive element of the crowd, vying to see how many followers could be launched into the distance!

We built the pedal using an Arduino board that was tied to the computer system by a simple USB input. The sheep were displayed in a Flash application that we programmed, which was directly communicating with the pedal itself.

All in all, it was an exciting project for our team at The Experience Lab to collaborate on with SHS. And, as anticipated, they had a large number of people flocking to their booth to engage in the process of “hating sheep” with them. Most importantly, they did what a lot of smart marketers are doing these days and looked beyond the brochure, beyond the static website or the PowerPoint presentation. What they allows us to collaborate with them on and create was an even more powerful marketing tool – it was a memory. And an experience. And one that the marketers who had the chance to participate in are sure to not only remember, but talk about for a long time to come.

Which would you rather create?

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