An AI photo booth at the Generative AI Summit is a hard sell. The room was full of people who build this technology for a living, and they were never going to be impressed by the bare fact that a computer had made a picture.
Client: IQPC
Event: 2nd Annual Generative AI Summit
Sponsor: Snorkel AI
Venue: Tottenham Hotspur Stadium
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date: May 2024
The challenge: a room that does this for a living
IQPC's second annual Generative AI Summit ran over two days at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, pulling together leaders in AI, data, technology and innovation. The program was about moving generative AI out of pilot projects and into production across the enterprise. Snapmatic, trading as Primatix in the UK, was brought in for the evening reception, sponsored by Snorkel AI.
Most events want an AI photo booth because the technology is new to their audience. Here it was the audience's day job. Novelty was off the table, so the experience had to stand on the quality of the output and on how closely it fit the sponsor.
The solution: an underwater theme built for Snorkel AI
We built a custom underwater theme for the reception instead of picking one from our existing library. Snorkel AI's name did the work. Guests placed their own likeness into an underwater scene and generated the image while they mingled, and the sponsor got their brand turned into somewhere a guest could stand, which is a more useful thing to hand a sponsor than a logo in the corner of a frame.
What happened at the reception
The booth turned into a conversation about how it worked. This crowd asked which model was behind it and what was running the inference, and those questions opened out into the wider technical and infrastructure side of deploying generative AI. At a summit about putting the technology to work, an activation people wanted to take apart was the right kind of activation.
Why it worked
The custom theme is the reason. An off-the-shelf style would have been read for exactly what it was by this room within a second of appearing on screen. Building the theme around Snorkel AI gave the sponsor something specific to own for the evening, and gave guests a reason to look closely at the image rather than glance at it and move on. This was not IQPC's first booking with us, which is the part we care about most.
Conclusion
Custom themes are most of what we do now. Roshen's permanent steampunk photo mirror in Bucharest and the "inner hero" theme we built for Nteractive at a Barcelona tech conference came out of the same process, and we put the range on show at InfoComm in Las Vegas the following month. A theme built for your brand beats a filter applied to your guests, and for an audience that already knows how the technology works it is the only version worth running.
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