Building a booth that reads global and lands local.
ChinaJoy is the largest games and digital entertainment expo in China, and the halls are built for spectacle.
Studios arrive with animatronics, cosplay stages and wall-to-wall LED. An ad-tech company walking into that
environment has a specific problem: the audience is there for games, and the product is infrastructure.
InMobi needed a stand that did three jobs simultaneously — signal the scale of a global company, feel native
rather than imported to a Chinese audience, and hold attention against neighbours designed to overwhelm.
The previous year's stand was a flat LED box in brand magenta. Visible, competent, and almost
indistinguishable from every other martech stand in the hall.
Three directions. Leadership wanted a bit of each.
Leadership asked for a bit of each. The concept that closed the process took the hospitality of A, the plan discipline of B, and the cultural frame of C.
One sheet, sent to the vendor.
The document that left our hands. Nine metres wide by six deep and five tall, drawn as a
single sheet — front elevation, floor plan, side perspective and a feature list — so the
fabricator could quote and build from one page rather than a folder.
The structure. A pagoda silhouette over a full LED screen build. A Chinese-inspired
wooden ceiling and gold accents against brand blue. Glass walls for open visibility, and a
5m roof line to claim height on the floor.
The plan. InMobi Café at the centre as the dwell anchor, a private meeting room on one
flank and a lounge on the other. Stat columns carrying proof at the perimeter — 12.8B
impressions, 2.6× CTR uplift, 98% viewability.
The content. AI-driven advertising and creative personalisation as the LED themes,
interactive content and data storytelling at the columns, and smart lighting tying the
whole structure together
Key Illustration
China's visual culture leans hard on narrative illustration — scroll painting, public murals, and a games market where illustrated key art does most of the selling. Audiences there read a picture that tells a story faster than they read a claim.
So the key visual was built as a world rather than a graphic. A side-scrolling platformer, stacked into levels, set in a night-time Chinese cityscape with lanterns, blossom, fireworks and a panda living inside the scene rather than applied on top of it. Each level carries a piece of the ad tech story: characters at work on growth and monetisation, with DSP and SSP standing as road signs instead of jargon.
The Booth
A Wood pagoda — tiled eaves, lattice screens and gate posts abstracted into brand colour — frames the whole stand, so the cultural reference sits in the architecture rather than in applied ornament. Inside it, the key visual keeps going: illustration bands run across the LED walls and painted panels, aligned to real heights so artwork and structure share the same datum. Then the space is furnished like somewhere you'd actually stay — rattan tables, tan banquettes, planting, blossom, mocktails named after products. A courtyard house you can sit down in, not a display case you walk past.
Main Booth
LED Story board