Most brand activations have one logo to place. This one had three, in a stated order.
Citi presents. In partnership with Mastercard. Featuring the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team.
That sentence is the entire design brief, and it is the thing that makes corporate work genuinely different from consumer work. A fashion house hands you a wordmark. A sponsor hierarchy hands you a sequence, and the sequence is contractual. Nobody is going to be relaxed about which mark sits where. Here is the full breakdown of our new brand activation for three brand collaboration.
Three brands on one card
Here is where a normal photo booth strip stops working.
A classic strip is tall and narrow. Three or four frames stacked, with a footer at the bottom for branding. That footer is a sliver, and it is fine for one logo and a line of type. Put a three tier credit into it at a party, in low light, on a photo strip somebody is holding at arm's length, and nobody can read any of it. You end up with three brands sharing a strip of type too small to serve any of them.
So the solution is not a typical 3 pose strip. It is a square, four up.
Three black and white frames fill three of the quadrants. The fourth quadrant is not a photograph. It is a solid panel carrying the full lockup: CITI PRESENTS, The Curated Table in script, in partnership with Mastercard, the McLaren and Mastercard marks beneath.
A quarter of the strip, given to the brands, at the same size as a photograph of your own face.
That is not a compromise and it is worth being clear about why. The usual instinct with branding on a photo strip like this is to minimize it, on the theory that guests want the photo rather than the advert. The instinct is right for consumer work. It is wrong here, because at a sponsor activation the photo strip has two jobs and two audiences: the guest who takes it home, and the three marketing teams who have to show their leadership what the budget bought.
Give branding a footer and you serve neither well. Give it a full quadrant and both get something legible. The guest still gets three photographs, which is what they came for. The sponsors get a mark at readable size on an object that leaves the building in somebody's hand.
The more brands you have to credit, the more the layout is the work.
The arcs
The panels are black, with a set of fine cream designed arcs sweeping across them, repeated on the lower front, the flank, and the bench.
They are not a logo and they are not decoration. They are the speedmark taken apart and used as a surface, which lets the booth read as part of the event's identity without putting another mark on a machine that already carries one.
What we built
Underneath it is our Classic booth, customized for the brand. The curtain is black velvet on grommet rings. The floor plate is a black and white checkerboard. The prints land in a brushed steel tray in the lower panel, one big photo strip for this one. If you want this level of attention and care in your event, get in touch with us.
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What a corporate activation actually needs
Worth saying plainly, since this is the version of our work corporate marketers ask about most.
A consumer activation is trying to get strangers to engage. A corporate hospitality event is not. Everybody in the room already accepted an invitation, already has a drink, and is already favorably disposed. Attention is not the scarce thing.
What is scarce is evidence. Three teams signed off on this event and three teams have to account for it afterward, and an evening of good conversation does not photograph well on a slide.
A booth is useful there for an unglamorous reason: it is countable and it is physical. It produces a known number of sessions and a known number of photo stirp, every one of them carrying the lockup at a size a person can actually read, every one of them leaving the venue in a pocket rather than staying in a folder.
It is also unattended. That matters more at corporate events than people expect. A photographer with a step and repeat is a staffed station, which means it runs at the speed of one person and stops when they break. A booth runs at the same rate from the first guest to the last.
Where this sits
This belongs with our corporate and sponsor work such as the Station Casinos 50th anniversary across seven properties, Galore Medical in Miami, and Red Bull in New York.
On co-branding specifically, the closest thing we have done is MCM x DJ Khaled, which paired a house with a person. This is a different shape: three corporate entities in a declared hierarchy, which is a harder credit to lay out and a more common one in sponsorship.
And on the finish, it sits alongside our work for Coach and Versace, both of which also ran in rooms where the booth had to look specified rather than hired.
Common questions
Can a photo booth carry more than one brand? Yes! We can work with you to create the best strip design with you in our brand activations.
Do you build a new booth for every activation? No, and you usually should not want us to. A few times a year we design a booth from the ground up for a brand. For a short run, finishing a booth that already works is faster, more reliable and a better use of the budget.
How long does a corporate activation booth stay? As long as the event does. An evening, a day, a conference week. If a brand or a venue wants one to stay indefinitely, that becomes a Venue Placement instead, which is a different arrangement.
Does it need staff? No. Guests run it themselves, which is why it keeps the same throughput all night rather than moving at the speed of one photographer.
Want one for your activation?
We run brand activations nationwide, designed to your identity and built for the room they are going into. We also install booths long term through our Venue Placement program, with maintenance handled by us.
If your activation has more than one brand to credit, bring us the hierarchy early. We are happy to work with you to bring the best experience for both guests and the brand.
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