Rearchitecting a Trade Show -

The AIA trade show shot from a wide angle

The experiential zone strategy for AIA’s show floor followed the same path as an architectural project from start to end — inspire, innovate, design, build, and prosper.

When Robin Preston, DES, CEM, and the events and sales teams set out to reengineer the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Conference on Architecture & Design’s trade show, they wanted it to mesh with two other key event elements — its architecture tours and education program. “We wanted to make sure that all of the experiences were cohesive and people could create their own journey,” Preston, AIA’s managing director of events, shared during the PCMA Convening Leaders 2025 panel session, “How to Redesign Your Trade Show & Elevate Attendee Engagement.”

Joining Preston was David Sherman, vice president and executive creative director at Freeman, AIA’s partner on the redesign of the trade show, which debuted at AIA’s 2024 flagship event in June at Washington, D.C.’s Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

Preston said that when she and her colleagues saw the experiential zone approach the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) took when they visited their show in 2023 — also a collaboration with Freeman — they knew they wanted to go in the same direction.

Robin Preston, DES, CEM, managing director of events, American Institute of Architects

An experiential zone strategy for AIA, Sherman said, involved creating elements, destinations, and engagement that the conference’s audience would find valuable. “We really wanted to increase [their] engagement, we really wanted to nurture more interaction between [them and] exhibitors and sponsors, and we wanted to create this sense of festivalization,” he said. The goal was “to make it more fun, active, and fluid, and to allow for a level of personalization” so that you could really “explore, discover, and assemble the experience that was relevant for you.”

To this end, Preston and the events and sales teams worked internally with other departments and several AIA staff members who have architectural backgrounds to map out “the journey of an architectural project,” which became the framework for the experiential zones. Architects “inspire, innovate, design, and build,” she said, “and ‘prosper’ was the business piece for us. Then we said, ‘Okay what do each of these mean and what were the goals for each area? How can we bring in our exhibitors? We wanted to put more purpose behind it.”

Preston and the team — Emile Davis, CEM, managing director of business development; Kristina Daniele, CEM, director, exhibit operations; and Lauren Liles, CMP, DES, senior director, event operations & experience — worked with Freeman to help those five pillars shape the experiential zones. “We knew that we needed an activation in each zone to drive people and keep them there,” Preston said.

Located in the Attract/Engage area were theaters for around 150 people and learning lounges for 55 participants. The content for the continuing education theaters was developed through AIA’s call for proposals process and through “industry thought leader” opportunities, while the 13 learning lounges were sponsorship opportunities presented by AIA’s exhibitors, responsible for providing education (not a sales pitch), Preston said. The Learn/Solutions area offered live demonstrations and workshops, and attendees networked around tables set up in the Connect/Extend space.

Preston told Convene the guiding mantra for the trade-show journey was “Go. Be. Stay.”

“Go” was about driving people to the show floor, “be” was making their experience resonate, and “stay” meant “being more intentional about creating non-educational reasons for people to stay on the show floor,” she said, although “we do a lot of education on the show floor as well. But not everybody coming to the trade show is necessarily coming for the learning credits, and so we wanted to give them other reasons to stay and hopefully then wander around the show floor and find something new with our exhibitors.”

Some of the approaches AIA took to ensure the trade show’s success included:

Expo-hall-only passes — These were offered toward the end of the event marketing campaign, Preston said. “That’s where we do the geofencing and get that drive-in audience.” The price was set to be attractive for them to visit the trade show on the two days it was open during the four-day conference. “We wanted to make sure that we knew that that audience wasn’t particularly interested in coming to just obtain credit for licensure — because architects need a certain number of CEs annually — and so we needed to create activities and interest to drive that audience to the show floor. And it also helps us to grow the show floor. We can say that we have an expanded audience.”

Expanding the audience — Attracting the extended audience of owners, engineering and construction professionals, in addition to architects (AECO), to the show floor is important to AIA’s exhibitors, Preston said. “Architects collaborate across the AECO industry to translate their vision into reality. While not all architects are the direct buyers, they’re very influential in the buying process. Expanding the audience provides our exhibitors and sponsors the opportunity to reach the full AECO community. It helps us grow our show, it helps us grow our audience, but then it also helps our exhibitors from a business standpoint.”

What’s my archetype personality profiler — Participants answered fun questions on touch-screen monitors, Preston told Convene, like, “‘What’s your favorite pet? What’s your favorite type of dessert?’ Then we were able to take that and map the outcome to different types of architecture.” The initiative, a collaboration with Freeman, included a social-media component for people to post a digital badge with their archetype and they also could pick up a physical button to wear during the conference as a conversation starter.

Unopposed time — “Traditionally, we would have architecture tours taking place all four days, taking people outside of the building,” Preston said. “We decided Thursday is going to be expo day so there’s not going to be any tours and there was no programming off the show floor. So we kicked off with a keynote, then the show floor.” In the end, none of these efforts were lost on AIA’s participants. “The cool thing about working at AIA,” Preston said during the session, “is that all the stuff that we as show organizers and planners and business event professionals do and worry about — all the little details — architects and designers pay attention to it. And they appreciate it.”

Tour Operator

The popular architectural tour program at AIA’s conference follows the same call for proposals process as its education sessions. A lot of the tours are led by architects who have worked on projects locally in the host destination “and they want to show off those projects,” said AIA’s Robin Preston. “Some of them are hardhat tours. That’s the one unique thing that you have to come to in person to be able to experience. We have a lot of ‘starchitects’ — famous architects in our community. These tours give our members an opportunity to have firsthand interactions with them. You’re actually talking to the people who started the project — from beginning to end. You get to ask them questions about the [challenges] that they ran into.”

The conference also offers sketch tours, “because architects love to sketch,” Preston said. “It’s usually a walking tour where we take them somewhere architecturally significant and they all have sketchbooks on them. It’s really cool.”