Striking with design precision at ESMO 2025
Designed to cut through at one of the world’s busiest oncology congresses, our striking ESMO 2025 booth delivered exceptional engagement and impact.
Find out how we turned clarity and creativity into results.
The Challenge
At many medical congresses, product often trumps company brand, with exhibition booths stuffed with competing product messages to confusing effect. At ESMO 2025, Merck wanted our help to avoid this common pitfall.
One of the largest oncology congresses in the world, ESMO attracts up to 40,000 attendees a year. A global, multidisciplinary community of healthcare professionals, researchers, industry leaders, patient advocates, and media, all focused on advancing cancer research, treatment and patient care – and all targeted by 200 distinct exhibitors including the main global players in oncology.
Merck’s strong commercial offering and stellar pipeline was worth shouting about. But just how could it compete against stands with a larger footprint? Entice attendees over and above other booths? Cut through the noise of a packed congress? And, compel visitors to give up their precious time to know more about Merck?
The Solution
From product-led to purpose-led
Rather than letting the drugs take the lead (and have product brands jostling for space on a single stand), we encouraged Merck to anchor their product stories beneath a single overarching message about Merck’s approach to cancer.
At ESMO, the highly specialised but time-poor oncology professionals move rapidly between late-breaking sessions, poster halls, and satellite symposia, often under significant cognitive load. In this setting, success isn’t driven by volume of messaging – but by clarity, relevance, and credibility.
With attendees not having the bandwidth to take in multiple brand narratives, an ‘agnostic’ booth anchored by a single clear message allows visitors to immediately understand why a company matters, the scientific problem its addressing and whether its clinical interests align with their own.
A single guiding concept
So, we elected to pursue a single guiding concept. One clear thought to dictate architecture, tone of voice and reflect our client’s bold commercial choices and science. All whilst embracing their playful branding, font and bright colourful palette. Without wanting to create more words, we pushed them to elevate one of their existing lines – the one we felt gave us the best strategic and creative platform:
This would then help us do two things in parallel. As a creative concept, it would inform a visual language to guide the physical design of the stand, the look and feel of our screen content and ensure the successful integration of both. And also, if not more importantly, it would guide the development and organisation of new and existing content both thematically and strategically.
A striking visual and architectural language
But what would the visual language we needed, look like? We created ‘strikes’, a visual device and building block for the physical stand design and all graphic and animated elements. Colour was also critical. Digging into Merck’s palette, we pulled out an underused ‘shocking pink’ as our principal colour for the commercial side and an enthralling electric teal for medical.
Architecturally, strikes underfoot, hung from above and onscreen all worked together to direct attention towards a ‘core’, our hospitality area. Commercial and medical areas each featured an immersive billboard – a giant curved LED wall, split in two with a central aperture. Onscreen, strikes periodically targetted this break in screen wall to create a sense of a ‘core’ being ‘struck’. Giant animated circular bridges periodically swept across the screens to unite the space further. On the corner of the primary commercial approach, an enticing colouring wall also shaped of strikes signposted the core.
Immersive content, engineered at scale
Integral to the physical space, the large, curved screen walls displayed synchronous four-minute loops, with differentiation on each side. It took months of development and co-ordination with multiple product brand and medical teams to painstakingly construct the two loops for this bespoke screen set up. Brand new animation, recut and re-sized video elements, parallel production processes: it was a mammoth task to distil both the commercial offering of Merck and its entire pipeline into two extraordinary visual experiences – and work out how to run them in tandem.
The stand ‘takeover’ moments – when the enormous screens, embedded lighting and audio truly sang together – occurred at the start of every loop. Wherever you were standing, stunning, synchronous flurries of strikes immersed our audience to the principal message: We are Merck… We are… Striking cancer at its core.
Our Merck oncology film then followed, playing on all screens, to add further definition to our messaging. We abridged an existing longer narrative and created, extended and embellished footage using AI to clarify this foundational therapy area story, on both sides of the booth. We then closed out each loop differently. On commercial, we worked intensively with brand teams to re-package and augment their video content to fit our giant screens, loops and overall narrative. Whilst on medical, we rebuilt and re-sized existing molecular footage and visualised their entire upcoming pipeline using bespoke animation.
The furniture was no less bold. Curves and gentle angles positioned to aid conversation and compliment the architecture, with all seating and tables interlocking easily across the stand. With the colourful, modular furniture and LED screens designed with reusability in mind, this was a huge leap forwards in Merck’s drive for sustainability.
I want to take a moment to express my heartfelt appreciation for the incredible work each of you put into making ESMO the best event we have ever had at Merck Oncology as per leadership feedback. Your dedication, creativity, and teamwork truly shone through every aspect of the event, and I am so proud of what we accomplished together.
– Alena Lobodina, Global Marketing Lead, Merck
The Value Created
In the end, we didn’t just build a booth. We built a declaration. A stand that didn’t just communicate a singular message – Striking cancer at is core – but lived it through our ‘striking’ design, vibrant colour and use of animation as architecture.
The booth delivered exceptional engagement throughout the congress, with a marked increase in engaged visitors compared to 2024 and an impressive conversion of footfall into meaningful interactions. Once drawn in, delegates spent sustained time on the booth, allowing deep immersion in key messages and driving strong recall. The space was consistently busy, generating palpable buzz on the show floor and attracting enthusiastic, unsolicited praise from attendees and external stakeholders alike.
Through our live, immersive manifestation of Merck’s commitment, we successfully cut through the noise of ESMO and smashed every expectation set:
- 8,800 unique stand visitors
- 95% conversion of walkway passers-by to unique booth visitors
- 250% badge scan increase on ESMO 2024