HAPTICA® live ’16, Bonn

Benefit for haptic advertising An impressive new location, a high-quality and diversified exhibitor mix, interested visitors from marketing departments, agencies and the promotional products trade, constructive discussions, creative concepts, interesting facts, “sexy” and “tangibly different” lectures and elated winners at the Promotional Gift Award – the fourth edition of the HAPTICA® live ’16 on March 16 at the WCCB in Bonn, Germany, once again proved to be a real benefit for haptic advertising. After three years in Cologne, “The Experience of Haptic Advertising”, which is organised by the Germany-based publishing company, WA Media, relocated to the newly founded World Conference Center in Bonn this year so that it could do justice to the growing demands of the exhibitors and visitors. The new location went down very well: Particularly the location’s light-flooded foyer with its 2,000 m² glass roof surface that has no supports proved extremely popular. In addition to many renowned companies and organisations from the former capital of Germany, numerous interested firms from the Rhine-Main, Rhineland and Ruhr regions, in some cases even from Berlin, North and South Germany, attended the event. In total, 1,494 visitors were recorded (previous year: 1,299 visitors), which corresponds to a 15% increase compared to 2015. 142 exhibitors (previous year: 110 exhibitors), including numerous brands that are well-known in the retail sector, covered the entire spectrum of haptic advertising – from writing instruments, windscreen sponges and snow globes, to pasta plates, power banks and popcorn, through to washable bags made of paper, individualisable muesli mixtures and notebooks with coloured cut edges. Not only the products offered by the exhibitors were convincing, the further items on the agenda of the HAPTICA® live ‘16 also met with great approval. The lecture programme proved to be a real crowd-puller again. Philip Siefer impressed over 200 listeners with his cool and cheeky, yet always tasteful comments on the haptic upgrade of vegan condoms to “sexy products”. But also the lectures of the other speakers – Melanie von Seht (Bonn-Information) and Sebastian Pretzsch (D2B), Elke Deckert (Pernod Ricard) and Frank Sahler (1.FC Köln – Cologne Football Club) – on city marketing, brand presentation at the point of sale and football merchandising proved extremely popular. The visitors were able to find out the communicative potential that haptic advertising media can enfold in the Best Practice special show. Two Brazilian campaigns were among the highlights of the exhibited examples: dolls that get sunburnt, which were distributed by Nivea to children on Brazilian beaches as an edutainment product and the barbecue bible by Tramontina, each page of which doubles up as an accessory for the barbecue – i.e. as firelighters, a knife sharpener, cutting board… Whereas the visitors were served coffee specialities and interesting facts about haptic advertising in the Facts and Coffee-to-go-Lounge, they were able to examine this year’s 49 award winners in the Promotional Gift Award 2016 exhibition. The event, which scored highly with both exhibitors and visitors alike, was brought to a close by the prize-ceremony for the winners of the award and an evening get-together. The next edition of the HAPTICA® live is scheduled to take place at the WCCB again on March 22, 2017.