10 Minutes With… Debra E. Smith, Conferences and Events Manager at Elanco Animal Health -

For VMX 2025, the premier veterinary conference, Elanco wanted to reinforce its position as a global innovator in animal health with a multi-exhibit experience that showcased new products and connected with veterinary professionals in personalized, memorable ways.

Designed for education and engagement, the 50×60-foot corporate exhibit featured product-focused zones with hands-on engagements and custom workstations, along with a central theater. The Credelio Cat Cafe created a sensory experience by incorporating the vanilla theme of Credelio, offering vanilla-flavored snacks and diffusing a vanilla scent throughout.

The 30×70-foot Zen Garden, supporting the launch of the “Reach for Zen” campaign for Zenrelia, immersed attendees in tranquility, incorporating organic materials, soft lighting, and acoustically treated visuals. Yoga sessions and a sandpit added to the zen vibe. One of the most engaging spaces turned out to be Bella’s Best Life, a Barbie-inspired pink space featuring a French bulldog Bella, who is “vaxed and relaxed” and full of glam.

The corporate exhibit achieved an average dwell time of 12 minutes and a repeat visitor rate of 7.59—nearly double the previous year. Engagement soared, with 34.1 percent of attendees becoming active participants. The Zen Garden attracted more than 5,300 visitors, with 81 percent also visiting the corporate exhibit, according to Hamilton, the event marketing agency that designed and produced the exhibit.

Toby, the (giant) Tapeworm? Staff in capes? It was all part of the story. EM caught up with Debra Smith, manager-conferences and live events, Elanco Animal Health, to talk edutainment, challenges, and the evolving AI frontier.

Debra Smith, Manager-Conference and Live Events, Elanco Animal Health

Event Marketer: Your trade show presence was anchored in personalized experiences. What did that actually look like?

Debra Smith: We have two target groups of attendees: veterinarians are highly focused on education and takeaways they can use in their practice, and technicians and nurses, who like a fun experience with games and prizes. We want to ensure that we can provide those highly engaging, relevant experiences in the same space.

It’s critical for us to quickly identify who is entering our space to deliver an experience that meets their needs, so our staff ask qualifying questions and direct them along the right path. Veterinarians often have targeted questions and don’t want to talk to a sales rep so we connect them with another veterinarian in our booth so they can have a doctor-to-doctor conversation.

With learning critical for veterinarians, how do you make it unique and fun?

We focus on delivering a balance of education and entertainment in a unique environment, more of a hands-on, big-kid museum.

In our Innovation Lab, “Toby the Tapeworm” drew in the audience to explore the specimens under the microscopes and in jars that they might have been able to see in practice. To showcase the active ingredients in Quatro, we created a comic book game featuring the ingredients as superheroes to tell a story of how they work within a dog. For Zenrelia, which helps with itching, skin grafts were projected onto a model dog for a different way to see it.

We were surprised to see so much interaction and meaningful conversations in the Zen garden, more so than in other spaces, because it was a less salesy environment. Vets can be shy, and they want to take it in at their own pace. In the Zen garden, they could make flower crowns and floral art activities, and while they were doing things with their hands, we were asking them questions about their practices and building a relationship.

How are you measuring success?

We use beacon data to measure traffic and dwell time. It wasn’t done in the past, so we’re still trying to come up with a good benchmark and the progress we’re seeing is very encouraging. QR codes at interactive stations track engagement. The leads go into Salesforce and are scored based on engagement to prioritize the follow-up for our sales team.

What is your biggest challenge?

Budget. Like many people, we’re tasked with doing more with less. Our industry is changing, and people want more personalized, curated experiences, which are more expensive. Our budgets are cut, yet the costs continue to go up.

Also, showing the value of events to leadership and stakeholders continues to be a challenge. We have to show them that we can get our sales team in front of thousands of people in a day, make it easy to see the ROI and the value.

What is one trend you are tracking?

We need to get on board with AI. While we’re already using it in a variety of ways, there’s an opportunity to go deeper. As a team of one, I’m looking to AI to streamline administrative tasks and offload routine work, freeing me to focus more on the strategic thinking that drives our goals forward. We are also looking into vendors, like Zenith, that provide more insight into our demographic and on-site engagement in a non-invasive way, and exploring other ways it can help us deliver unique and data-driven experiences.

There are good and bad ways that AI will affect our industry. For example, while working on a creative graphics project for one of our brands, we discovered that the agency had used an AI-generated image with a license prohibiting any third-party use. That means that my contractors can’t produce a graphic with that image. Those kinds of things will continue to evolve. I’m excited to continue learning and experimenting with AI to harness its full potential.

You manage a portfolio of over 60 events, including 43 trade shows. What do you love about it?

I love all of it. I come from a veterinary background—my mom, dad, stepdad, and uncle are all veterinarians—so working for a veterinary company, I bring a unique perspective as a vet kid, years of experience in event planning, and a learning mindset. It’s stressful, busy; it’s a lot. It’s my dream job.

Photos: Courtesy of Hamilton and Debra Smith

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