Unlock the Truth of Digital Farming
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Unlock the Truth of Digital Farming 〰️
The truth is out there (in Orlando).
A conspiracy theory on digital farming takes hold in Florida. But like, in a fun way?
Trade show booth experiences can be so fun to work on. You want to get attention and promote the brand, of course. But it’s also only up for a few days, so it’s a perfect opportunity to try something new. So why NOT play in the murky grey areas between brand awareness, family fun and Ancient Aliens conspiracy theories?
Mysterious clues about the ancient(?) origins of digital farming technology.
FieldView is a digital farming app that helps farmers in all kinds of ways. To manage planting, to spot potential issues, to basically have every bit of data they need to set them up for successful yields. And every year, the FieldView team gets a booth at Commodity Classic (the largest agricultural trade show in the US of A) within a much larger Bayer Crop Science section of this ginormous event.
This means their booth is totally surrounded by many other physically huge displays and objects (think giant, actual tractors). How can a you take a small footprint and give it big impact? Well we thought one way was… to be as weird as possible. The second way was to create a mystery to solve.
Setting up the booth experiences the day before the event was really fun. You don’t always get to see the scale and how things really feel in the space. It was nice to be able to make certain corrections and decisions in real time to ensure visibility and traffic flow. And to make sure the pens were in the goblets.
From handing out Quest Cards that walked attendees through the code-cracking mysterious experience, to having little easter eggs throughout that you could enjoy even if you didn’t participate in the activity, our Unlock the Truth booth was a fun and strange, very Orlando-appropriate experience. It balanced brand awareness and actual facts and information with mystique, humor, vintage marble goblets, and DIY creations made of concrete and resin.
The physical booth experience was sketched and designed based on floorpans and elevations to ensure the correct scale, with many sourced and custom-created elements.
The Quest Card introduced attendees to the 3 different stations within the booth: The Seeing Stone, The Oracle and The Tower. Each station provided a mini-mystery to solve, all using a different medium. All the stations were really separate experiences on their own, but were joined together through the quest card, the graphic look and feel I developed, and of course, Chris Prestemon’s smart and otherworldly copy.
The Quest Card
Attendees were handed these “Quest Cards” to begin their journey and find clues to win a prize. Also, I thrifted some cool vintage goblets to hold the pens. They are now in my kitchen. You can borrow them if you want.
The Seeing Stone
The Seeing Stone was created by first, attaining a museum pedestal. After I had the measurements of the pedestal, I designed a schematic for a pyramid that I was able to split the production of between myself and my friend Jons Simons. He created molds based on my measurements and poured concrete to create this 40-pound beauty, while I created the message-inside-a-green-resin pyramid. It’s never great to have a typo, but it’s especially bad when you have one and it’s inside a resin pyramid. That happened, but it’s ok I made a new pyramid. The green resin portion was illuminated from below by an inset LED light in the concrete base.
The Oracle
Using public domain footage from a 1982 Baltimore news broadcast (which was definitely NOT about aliens), we created a silent, looping video with custom graphics for “Farm News 23” as well as a “closed captioned” script that played at The Oracle station’s custom-built stand. The broadcast has several sections where the broadcast is interrupted by the secret message: Dig Deeper into the Data.
The Tower
The Tower, a 3-sided sign physical sign, had branded imagery mixed with mysterious glyphs and an eye-level QR code to scan to reveal a short, interactive 3D experience that revealed the secret message: The Truth Adds Up.
It was great to get to attend the trade show and watch folks interact with these experiences in person, especially seeing how many chose to actually participate in our little. mystery. Balancing something that required interaction with something that wasn’t too frustrating to complete helped to keep people in the booth for longer periods of time, which of course is the point. The longer they are there, the more they read, the more the message soaks in, and the better chance a representative of FieldView gets a chance to talk to folks. I also learned that people really really love taking pens.
Some attendees received special cards in their registration bags that teased a prize to collect at the booth. It was cool to see how many people were enticed just by this postcard. We decided to make it vague on purpose to create intrigue and tease the mystery without giving anything away. I also created a completely made-up “Rune” alphabet that revealed a secret message. It looked unobtrusive enough to just be a random design element, and I’m pretty sure even the client didn’t notice it was on the card.
Out of almost anything I’ve ever worked on, this project felt like we were really getting away with something. It’s not often you present something that’s very “out there” to a client that isn’t very “out there” and they just go for it. Every piece created, from the background stone pattern, to the rune alphabet, to the totally bonkers copy, to the 3D alien tower in a corn field, to the fake news, to the glowing green pyramid, this was one of the strangest and coolest and most hilarious experiences I’ve ever had at work.
Credits
Client
Climate FieldView
Agency
Paradowski Creative
Design Lead
Terri Mitchell
Copy Lead
Chris Prestemon
Creative Team Support
Tony McAley
Vicki Vincent
Marissa Scully
Cameron Samimi
Jeffrey Rawizza
Concrete Guy
Jon Simons