The Game Show Effect

The Game Show Effect

The remarkable way that game shows transform an event.

I, personally, am a little surprised every time a client is blown away by the effect of a game show on their event. Not that game shows aren’t amazing—it’s just that I’ve seen maybe hundreds of game shows at live events, and they’re consistently, predictably amazing. I suppose I’m a bit used to it.

Our client came up to me at the last show and said with awe and wonder,

“I cannot believe what a difference the game show made—it was like every time we introduced a round the energy in the room just shifted. All of a sudden they were all up and awake and looking at the screen and their keypads and whispering….”

I smiled and nodded knowingly and in agreement—because that kind of experience is what happens every single time we bring a game show into a live event.

The Barnyard Bowl: An AllPlay Case Study.


The aforementioned comment was made by an executive at Kemps—a nation-wide producer of all kinds of dairy products. Live Spark—our sister company—had designed the one-day event to have a game show running throughout the day.

They took our AllPlay software, and customized the screens, logos, timers, etc., to give it a totally unique and custom look for Kemps—but the base premise of the software remained the same: everyone in the audience had their own keypad to answer the questions in the game show.



They were broken into teams—It’s Local, It’s Fresh and It’s the Cows (put together, all three teams form the Kemps slogan)—by the colors on their randomly-distributed keypads.


When a question and answer options were displayed on the screen, everyone input their answer on their keypads, and the percentage of correct answers was then added to the team score. This was displayed as an empty glass filling with one of Kemps’ major products: milk.


Each team had from the time the custom cow-timer at the bottom of screen started until she reached the barn to lock in their answers.


We played 4 complete rounds of three questions each. The first two rounds, the percentage of people that answered a question correctly on the team was added to the team score.
In round 3, points doubled.
In round 4, they tripled—so that even a team who was behind had a chance to catch up till the very end.

The game show ran throughout the day, and incorporated questions from the previous presentations.

The effect of the Barnyard Bowl was immediately and consistently visible. Each time a round was announced, the audience would sit up in their chairs; bodies leaning forward, reaching for their keypads and murmuring amongst themselves. It was like pressing a “refresh” button for the room, recharging everyone’s batteries after occasionally-dry presentations. After a question, the right answer would be revealed—inspiring cheers and discussion. Then, when the scoreboard came up and the glasses started to “fill” with the percentage of right answers, teams would cheer. Then one glass would stop and the others would go on, causing the cheers to get louder. Then the other glass would stop, revealing the top-scoring team for that question, and the room would erupt in cheering and clapping.

Rounds were played sometimes before and sometimes after lunch and/or breaks, reinforcing information and preparing the audience for content to come. But the greatest thing was walking out to a break after playing a round and hearing the halls a-buzz with game show talk. Audience members were talking about their teams, the questions they had just answered, and the content within the game show (and related presentation content). This means that the presentation material wasn’t just left in the room and consequently forgotten—in addition to energizing the audience and being a heck of a lot of fun, the game show was also reinforcing information and improving content retention.

At the end of the day, after the last round and as people were leaving, comments were flowing:

“That was a lot of fun!”
“I loved the game show!”
“I hope we do that next year, too.”
“We should do that in our normal meetings.”
“I’m glad we had a game!”

The thing is--we hear this each and *every* time we use a game show in a large event like this--whether it's a simple Jeopardy!-style Gameshow Pro game, or a customized AllPlay game.

The client came up to me after the event,

“The game show was a huge hit!”

And that speaks for itself.