For show organisers & venues

The split-flap's ancestral format is the airport departures board. A conference agenda is a departures board: rooms, times, and things that leave whether you are aboard or not. This is the one vertical where the format and the job are the same object.

This is what the event-floor pack puts on the wall, the evidence behind each board, and why the money here belongs to the organiser rather than the exhibitor.

Watch the floor reel Book 15 minutes

The room

Three jobs, one screen.

Whose board is this? Not an exhibitor's — theirs is the ten feet around their booth. This is the organiser's board, and an organiser's product is a floor that works and exhibitors who come back next year.

Run the clock. Happening now, starting soon, up next, doors close in twenty minutes, and tonight's handoff to tomorrow. All of it on the venue's wall clock, so a show in another timezone flips on its own time rather than a server's.
Make exhibitors visible. Booth spotlights and sponsor tiers. This is the job that decides whether the people who paid for the floor feel they got something.
Point people at things. Wayfinding, amenities, the info desk answers, the social wall, the closing-time warning.

One design call worth naming: the pack puts Wi-Fi first among the housekeeping boards on the assumption it is the most-asked question at any info desk. That is an assumption from experience, not a finding — we could not source it, and we are not going to dress it up as data.

The evidence

Four levers worth a board each.

This vertical turned out to be the best-evidenced of the set, largely because the exhibition industry measures itself: the Center for Exhibition Industry Research publishes the numbers an organiser already runs their business on. Sources at the foot of the page.

62% / 44%Exhibitor retention overall, and for first-timers

Rebooking is the show's revenue, and first-timers are where it leaks

Average exhibitor retention across trade shows runs about 62% — and only 44% of first-time exhibitors come back for a second edition. That gap is the single most expensive number in an organiser's business, because every exhibitor who does not rebook has to be replaced by a sale. A booth spotlight on a wall the whole floor walks past is one of the cheapest things an organiser can hand a first-time exhibitor that feels like value received.

Booth spotlightSponsors
28%Share of event revenue that comes from sponsors

A board is inventory, not a cost

Sponsorship contributes roughly 28% of an event's overall revenue, and the constraint on selling more of it is usually inventory: there are only so many lanyards, tote bags and banner positions. A rotating board is sellable glass — tiered sponsor boards that can be repriced per show, resold next year, and changed without reprinting anything. It is the only vertical in this product line where the screen can pay for itself out of a revenue line rather than a savings estimate.

Sponsors
53%Of venue visitors report navigation problems

People who cannot find the room do not attend the session

More than half of venue visitors report navigation problems at large events, while 92% say they rely on directional signage to get around a convention and 90% consider wayfinding important to their experience. Session attendance is the number a programme committee is judged on, and a share of every empty seat is someone who was in the building and in the wrong hall.

WayfindingNow / Soon / NextAgenda
$112–186Benchmark cost per B2B trade-show lead

What one more booth visit is worth to the person who paid for the floor

Cost per lead at B2B shows benchmarks around $112–186, against average exhibitor spend near $24,000 a show. An organiser cannot promise leads — but they can put an exhibitor in front of the whole floor for a rotation, and against those numbers a handful of extra conversations is not a rounding error. This is lever one restated in the exhibitor's own arithmetic, which is the language a rebooking conversation happens in.

Booth spotlight

What this page does not claim. That the board increases booth traffic by a measurable percentage. Attendees overwhelmingly pre-plan — around 90% arrive with a list, and 64% searched to build it — so a screen on the floor is redirecting and reminding, not discovering. The honest claim is that it makes exhibitors visible and the floor legible, and that both of those show up in retention rather than in a traffic count.

The part nobody else has

The format and the job are the same object.

Every other pack in this line borrows the split-flap for its charm. This one uses it for what it was invented to do.

An airport departures board

  • Where it goes, when it leaves
  • Which gate
  • Boarding / final call / departed
  • Leaves whether you are aboard or not
  • Reads at fifty feet, in a crowd

A conference agenda

  • What it is, when it starts
  • Which hall
  • Now / starting soon / up next
  • Starts whether you are seated or not
  • Read at fifty feet, in a crowd

So the clock boards are not decoration. Now, starting soon and up next run off the venue's own wall time, which matters the moment a show travels: the board flips on the hall's time, not the server's. In the evening it hands off to tomorrow, and near closing it warns that doors shut.

Three of the actual boards, rendered from the live reel. The clock boards are not among them because the fictional show's day had already ended when this page was built — which is the pack behaving correctly rather than a gap.

The fine print that matters

What it refuses to do.

No registration system, no badge scans, no attendee list. Everything is organiser-entered. There is no integration to fail on move-in morning, and no attendee data passing through a screen.
The venue's clock, never the server's. A show in another timezone runs on the hall's wall time. This sounds obvious and is the single most common way an event display embarrasses itself.
Nothing perishable that lies. Sessions expire as they end, the agenda rolls to tomorrow in the evening, and a sponsor tier that has not been sold does not air a placeholder.
No claim on leads. The board does not capture, score or count anything. An organiser selling it as a lead source would be overselling it, and the exhibitor would find out by lunchtime on day two.

Sources

Where the numbers come from.

Retention and lead figures are industry aggregates across show sizes and sectors; a regional expo is not the same animal as a national one. The wayfinding percentages come from venue-experience research published by vendors in that space — the direction is consistent across sources, the precision is not something we would defend to a decimal.

Try it on your own floor

The one-session test.

Put the floor reel on a screen by registration for one morning — a smart TV's browser or an inexpensive streaming stick is plenty (the screens guide walks through it). It costs nothing to try. Watch what happens ten minutes before a session starts. If you like what you see, book fifteen minutes and we'll build it for your show — your agenda, your halls, your sponsors.

Watch the floor reel Book 15 minutes See plans & pricing Every other room

The reel airs a fictional regional tech expo with sample content. Every board in it says so.