Leaderboard entry
Name and company to get on the board, contact details to be told if you're beaten. It reads as part of the game rather than a form, and it gives people a reason to come back on day two.
Capturing Leads With a Game
This covers the bit between somebody enjoying themselves on your stand and you having anything to show for it afterwards.
Where the data step goes
A game creates a moment where somebody is stood still, in a good mood, and has nothing to do for thirty seconds. That is the moment. Put the data step anywhere else and it feels like a toll.
In practice there are three places it can sit, and they behave differently. Before the game it works like a ticket, which filters out the merely curious but shortens your queue and therefore your pull. During the game, while they are waiting or playing, is the easiest on everybody and the one we would usually suggest. After the game it converts worst, because the reason to stay has just ended.
Four mechanics that record something
Each collects a different quality of lead, and none of them needs an app.
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The business-card code
On a safe game, ask for the last four digits of a phone number as the code they try. It gathers cards and contacts while people play and nobody experiences it as data collection.
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Printed codes on a mailer
Send codes out before the show and invite people to come and try them. It gives your pre-show email a reason to exist and tells you exactly who acted on it.
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Photo delivery
A booth that sends the picture to a phone needs an address to send it to. The exchange is obvious and fair, which is why it converts.
The safe game is the clearest example
Crack the Code is a clear acrylic safe on a lit plinth with a four-digit keypad. You put a prize inside and people guess their way in. Because you control how the codes are handed out, the mechanic and the data step are the same action rather than two things stacked on each other.
You can run it three ways. A set of predetermined codes with one winner among them gives you a controlled outcome and a queue that lasts all day. Codes printed on a pre-show mailer tie the stand back to the campaign. Asking for the last four digits of a phone number off a business card turns the play itself into the capture. All three come off the same £395 unit that takes 2ft by 2ft of floor.
The same thinking applies to the Gold Bar Challenge and The Vault, which use a similar guess-and-open shape.
Quality over count
A stand that records four hundred email addresses and twelve real conversations has had a worse show than one with sixty of each, though only one of those numbers looks good in the debrief. The mechanics above are ordered roughly by how much friction they add, and friction is not automatically bad - it is what separates somebody who wants your product from somebody who wants a keyring.
If the brief is genuinely awareness rather than pipeline, ignore most of this and read the footfall guide instead, which is about volume.
Handling what you collect
Two practical points rather than legal advice, which we are not qualified to give. Tell people plainly what you are going to do with what they hand over, at the point they hand it over, because a sentence on the entry card is easier than an argument later. And decide before the show who is typing the cards up and when, because a shoebox of business cards that nobody processes until the following month is the most common way a good show turns into nothing.
Your own compliance team will have a view on consent wording and retention, and they should get sight of the entry card before it goes to print.