Best in Show at VMX 2025

The Veterinary Meeting & Expo (VMX) is truly the Super Bowl of veterinary conferences. It’s where new products, new marketing campaigns, and new booths typically debut for the coming year. We get really jazzed about marketing that’s really good – engaging, educational, and memorable – so we gathered some of the best-in-show marketing that we saw at VMX. 

Full disclosure: Some of the companies referenced are our clients, and some are not. But we don’t care – great marketing is great marketing. Also, we were only able to cover about 80% of the trade show floor at VMX, so we may have missed some noteworthy marketing. This is definitely not a full list, but we hope it provides some marketing inspiration. 

So, without further ado…

Large LED screens are often a focus point within a trade show booth. It’s where companies display engaging videos, presentations, or just high-impact graphics. Antech, IDEXX, and Weave all displayed new booths with LED screen “tiles” that, put together, formed a large video screen for presentations or graphics. 

What’s neat about these LED tiles is that they appeared to blend in with the exhibit wall, rather than attach to the wall. The result is a sleek and modern look that’s also very useful for all kinds of media displays.

Speaking of interesting displays, some exhibitors also displayed graphics on sheer material that hung from ceiling to floor (or close to it). This is another great way to grab attention and interest while communicating key messages. 

And a discussion of interesting displays would not be complete without mentioning the Kong booth, which replaced the traditional center hanging sign with a giant-sized kong, recognizable from all across the trade show floor. Gutsy and brilliant!

An interesting booth display is just the starting point for great trade show marketing. Next comes an engaging “draw” that will keep the booth full throughout the show. What seemed to work best at VMX was education followed by a premium giveaway. Veterinarians and their staff members love free stuff, which good marketers will exchange for the opportunity to educate on industry insights, company news, new products, etc. 

For example, Purina gave away a branded shoulder fanny-pack bag to everyone who sat through a video in the theater area of their booth. Patterson Veterinary gave away a fun “buddy bottle” (a Stanely-cup-like water bottle with a removable bottom that created a water bowl for pets) in exchange for five product demonstrations throughout their booth. (Visitors received a stamp card to track their demos and then turned in the completed card for the buddy bottle.) Both Antech and Banfield offered stuffed animals to attendees who watched a series of videos (Banfield) or sat through a live presentation in the booth theater (Antech). Those booths were always full. In fact, the Purina booth had a line that extended well past their booth area – for the entire show.

Short, engaging, and educational in-booth presentations (think Ted Talks) are a trending strategy in trade show marketing. They are almost always a big success, as long as they include the following:

Professional engagers and presenters. Please don’t make the mistake of asking your sales team to draw crowds and an in-house SME to deliver the presentation. It won’t work nearly as well as hiring professional crowd gatherers to fill the booth and a professional presenter to deliver a compelling and engaging presentation. Believe me – hiring the pros makes all the difference between a successful trade show and a flop.

A place to sit down. Chairs, couches, pods – they all draw attendees with tired feet.

Brief education on industry issues or solutions (not just product commercials). 

An in-booth presentation + freebie reward isn’t the only way to draw a crowd. The sky is the limit on creative booth activities to draw crowds and communicate key messages. Here are a few other stand-out creative booth activities at VMX worth mentioning. 

• The Covetrus paint-by-number wall activity (in line with the VMX theme of HeART) and genius bar (for private product demos). 
• The ScribbleVet Snap game. This genius activity combined gamification with AI expertise to set this AI scribe company apart, and their booth was always packed. Their in-house gurus wrote, from scratch, an AI activity that created a computer-generated image of the attendee’s pet, along with fun phrases identifying these pets’ unique attributes. When attendees snapped and shared their pet with other attendees, they earned points toward premium prizes like iPads. 
• VMX art installations throughout the hall – from caricatures and draw/paint stations to voting for the best new product based on colorful candy cylinders. (Whichever cylinders were most empty indicated the winning products.) These were nice touches to make the exhibit hall a bigger draw throughout the conference. 

What other marketing campaigns inspired or entertained you at VMX?