A day in Novi Sad behind my own stand at the Western Balkan & EU women in business summit — print, a looping studio reel, and a coupon people drew on their own phones.
- When
- Where
- Novi Sad, Serbia
A day in Novi Sad, at OsnaŽene — the Western Balkan & EU Women in Business Summit. Founders from across the region and the EU in one hall, and for the first time I wasn't in the audience. I had a stand.
That's a different job, and I under-estimated how different until I was standing at it.
A stand gets three seconds
At a conference you have someone's attention for forty minutes because they chose to sit down. At a stand you have it for the length of a walk past. Whatever is on the table has to say what the studio does before anyone decides whether to stop.
So the table did the work the website usually does. Business cards, flyers, and a studio presentation looping on screen — the reel running on its own so the table still spoke while I was mid-conversation with someone else.
Print is unfashionable and it is the correct answer here. A card is the only piece of a brand that ends up in someone's pocket. If mine can't survive being handed to a stranger in a loud room, it doesn't work anywhere.
The handout was a coupon, not a flyer
The thing I actually designed for this event was a digital coupon.
A flyer goes in the tote bag with eleven other flyers and gets binned at home. So instead, people drew a coupon on their own phone at the stand: a website analysis on the house, money off a project, or name your own price. Their code, their screen, saveable and shareable.
That one change flips the whole interaction. A flyer is me handing you something. A coupon is you opening your phone in front of me — and now we're both looking at the same screen, which is a conversation instead of a transaction.
It also means the handout doesn't expire when the day does. It's sitting in a camera roll with a code attached to it.
Being on the other side of the table
I still went to the talks, and they were worth the time. But the part I'll keep is that the direction of the conversations reversed.
At an event you attend, you approach people. At an event you exhibit at, people arrive already holding a problem — a site that never got finished, a logo they've stopped liking, a business that outgrew the branding it started with. You skip the small talk entirely and land in the middle of the real thing.
A room full of women running their own businesses is also a room where nobody needs the value of design explained to them. They've all paid for the cheap version of something at least once.
I've spent every other event learning. This was the first one I went to be found.
Both are worth doing. Only one of them sends you home with names.
