Mercedes-Benz NPSMM 2019
Mercedes-Benz USA’s National Parts & Service Managers Meeting, produced by Cadence since 2004. By 2019 it had grown from a single breakout room into a general session, expo, and workshop theaters for 1,200+ dealer attendees at Mandalay Bay, with one team behind all of it.
- Client
- Mercedes-Benz
- Lead agency
- Cadence
- Event
- Mercedes-Benz USA National Parts & Service Managers Meeting (NPSMM) 2019
- Venue
- Mandalay Bay Convention Center
- Location
- Las Vegas, NV
- Year
- 2019
- Industry
- Automotive
The challenge
NPSMM started as a small breakout room next to the general session, supporting the main content. But the audience is dealership technicians and fixed-ops managers. They learn by seeing, touching, and trying, not by sitting through slides, and we could see they weren’t engaging in a room built around presentations. Hour-long breakout rotations had the same problem.
By 2019 the meeting brought 1,200+ dealer attendees together with about 100 exhibitors, from outside vendors and suppliers to Mercedes-Benz’s own departments, in about 200,000 square feet at Mandalay Bay.
Our solution
We proposed a different format: a full expo, with the content moved onto the show floor. The hour-long breakouts became 20-minute workshops in sound-isolating theaters built into the expo, with smaller groups and tighter content. The general session moved into the expo hall too, since it was only needed for the opening and the final wrap-up.
At the end of the opening session, 12 blended projectors filled the largest single piece of fabric you can buy, and a kabuki drop revealed the show floor behind it. The floor had live demos on real equipment and vehicles (more cars than Mercedes-Benz’s own auto show booth, plus working lifts and tire mounting and balancing), technology demos, one-on-one dealer reviews with internal departments, and an executive lounge where dealers could meet and network with the C-suite.
We designed the communication pillars, the meeting theme, the graphics, and the content, then carried that consistency through the video production, presenter presentations, and every graphic in the expo. As the show’s general contractor, we ran the booth-ordering website, designed every backwall, supplied booth fabrication and rentals, and managed drayage, shipping, and installation for every exhibitor.
Results
Twenty-minute workshops in smaller groups meant tighter content, better retention, and more interaction than the old one-hour rotations.
One team handled strategy, graphic design, content, production, audio-visual gear, show floor management, and booth fabrication and rentals, so the message stayed consistent from the opening video to the last backwall. The 2019 build covered about 200,000 sq ft, with 30+ trucks, 100+ crew, roughly 400 sticks of truss, and 125,000 sq ft of carpet. Cadence has produced NPSMM continuously since 2004.
Gallery
