Why brand games fail at events and how to fix the brief

A brand game at a trade show sounds like a great idea. Visitors stop at your stand, play something, enjoy themselves, and walk away with a positive feeling about your brand. In practice, what we see at Livewall is different: long queues for a game nobody understands, a leaderboard that breaks halfway through day one, and stand staff who can't explain the game themselves.

The problem is rarely the tech or the design. It's the brief. More specifically, it's what the brief leaves out.

These are the most common mistakes, and how to avoid them.

Mistake 1: the goal is 'engagement'

'We want engagement on our stand.' Almost everyone says this. But engagement is not a goal, it's an outcome. The question you need to answer is: engagement in service of what?

Do you want to build brand awareness with a new audience? Reward existing customers? Transfer product knowledge? Collect first-party data? Each of those goals requires a different mechanic, a different flow, and different success criteria.

A branded game designed to collect data works very differently from one built to support a product launch. If you don't make that distinction in the brief, you get a compromise that achieves neither.

Mistake 2: ignoring the event context

A trade show stand has different conditions than a store, an app, or a social campaign. Visitors are standing. They're tired. They've already seen ten other stands. They may have twenty seconds before they walk on.

We regularly receive briefs asking for 'an immersive five-to-ten-minute game experience'. At a trade show, that's five to ten minutes most visitors simply don't have. The sweet spot is ninety seconds to three minutes. Fast to understand, fast to play, fast to share.

For Mitsuba Spice Rush we built a game that fits exactly that context: immediately understandable without explanation, high tempo, a clear final score. Visitors could complete a full round in ninety seconds. That worked.

Mistake 3: no real connection to the brand

A game on your stand that could just as easily belong to your competitor is not a brand game. It's just a game.

The mechanic, the aesthetic, the theme, the reward structure: all of it needs to lead back to what the brand wants to say. That sounds obvious, but we see it go wrong constantly. A spin-the-wheel mechanic, an archery game, a memory card flip: all perfectly decent formats, but completely interchangeable when they aren't saturated with brand identity.

Ask yourself in the brief: if you removed the logo from the game, would you still know which brand it belongs to? If the answer is no, there's work to do.

In the Doritos Minecraft activation, the branded game development was so woven into the Doritos universe that the game simply wouldn't have made sense without the brand. That's the bar to aim for.

Mistake 4: the technical reality is not accounted for

Event venues are difficult environments. Wifi is unreliable. Stands get set up at the last minute. Tablets get knocked over. There's no IT support on-site to fix things.

A brief that says nothing about the technical environment puts us at a disadvantage from the start. We don't know whether to build for tablets, laptops, or a large screen. We don't know if there's internet access. We don't know how many simultaneous players to expect.

A good brief includes: the number of stands, available hardware, internet connectivity (or the lack of it), and who is responsible for technical support during the event. Without that, we always build for the worst case. That's safer, but it limits the possibilities.

Mistake 5: success is only defined after the event

After the event: 'How many people played?' That's a fair question, but it should have been the first question in the brief.

When you know what you want to measure, you can build the game so that data is actually available. Number of players, average play time, conversion to a follow-up action (newsletter sign-up, QR scan, lead form), sharing behaviour: all of these have to be deliberately designed in. They don't appear automatically.

At Livewall, this is always our first question: what does success look like for you? Only then can we build the right gamified activation that makes that measurement possible.

What a good brief actually contains

These are the five questions we ask first on every event game:

1. What is the concrete goal? Not 'engagement', but: lead generation, product trial, brand experience for segment X, data capture.
2. Who is the visitor? Not your general target audience, but the specific person standing at that trade show or event. What do they already know? How much time do they have?
3. What is the physical context? Stand size, available hardware, internet access, staffing, expected play time per visitor.
4. How is the brand anchored in the mechanic? Not as a logo on a splash screen, but in what you do and what you feel while playing.
5. What are we measuring and how? Which data are we collecting, how is it stored, and what do we do with it after the event?

With answers to those five questions, Livewall can build a game that actually performs. Without them, we build something that looks good but doesn't do much.

The brief is not a formality. It's the most important design decision you make.