The wristband that put your name in lights
Smart wristbands turned G42's flagship event into 2,400 personal moments: tap a screen, see your own name, take the photo.
The brief
Supercharged is G42’s flagship annual event: thousands of employees, partners and global tech leaders in one hall at ADNEC for a single day. Working with the agency Supercollider, the ask came in three parts. A simple way for guests to register. Very fast entry on the day. And some magic on the side: not ordinary wristbands, but smart wristbands that let guests activate things inside the event, personalised to each of them.
Underneath those three asks was one goal. Registration and entry had to be frictionless, but what the client really wanted was for guests to feel that moments inside the event had been made for them.
The idea
Screens dotted around the venue. Tap your wristband at one and your name appears, big, in G42’s event branding, with the hashtag underneath. A personal photo opportunity in a room of 2,400 people.
The idea came out of a collaboration between GuestLab and Supercollider, and it was deliberately simple. The reward is recognition. Someone thought of you.
What guests did
Guests registered on a custom-branded site, chose how to carry their ticket (Apple Wallet, Google Wallet, the web page or a PDF), and on arrival showed the QR code to a brand ambassador. One scan of the ticket, one scan of a wristband to bind it to the guest, and they were in. Under ten seconds each, no queues at the door.
Inside, nobody needed telling what to do. As soon as a few people tapped a screen and started taking photos, crowds formed around the activation points and stayed there all day. The screens became meeting points: guests took photos of each other in front of their names and shared them in team chats and group messages.
At the exit there was a wristband drop-off. Almost nobody used it. Guests kept them.
The build
Registration, e-ticketing, entry and the activations all ran on GuestPass, our sister platform, hosted entirely on servers in Abu Dhabi to meet the client’s data residency requirement. Entry ran on brand ambassadors’ phones, no fixed scanning gates. The wristbands were fully custom printed. Around the venue, screens paired with activation scanners handled the name moments.
The platform had to be designed, fully branded, security-reviewed and live on UAE servers within three weeks so that registration could open four weeks before the event. GuestLab’s own design and copy teams produced the registration site straight from G42’s brand guidelines, which took a whole round of client-side coordination out of the timeline. Registration opened, took 500 sign-ups on the first morning, and ran until capacity closed it a few days before the event.
What happened
Over 2,400 guests came through the system and into the hall. Entry ran at under ten seconds a guest. Queues formed voluntarily at every activation screen through the day, and guests chose to take their wristbands home rather than hand them back. Both G42 and Supercollider thanked the team after the event, and guests who had emailed the support desk in the run-up sent their own thank-you messages too.
