NFPA Expo Campaign
Client: NFPA
Role: Art Director, Designer
Agency: Forge Worldwide
Scope: Experiential, Display, OOH
Year: 2022
The 2022 NFPA Conference & Expo at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center needed a cohesive visual presence that could stretch across an enormous range of formats, from large-scale OOH billboards and digital bus signage outside the venue to video marquees, digital signage, and online display ads running across the web. The "Safety Everywhere Starts Here" campaign held it all together, using bold typography, a commanding red-and-white palette, and direct messaging to create a unified brand presence that worked at every scale and in every environment.
The outdoor portion of the campaign put NFPA in the streets of Boston ahead of the event. A digital billboard drove broad awareness with a simple, confident message: The world's fire & life safety starts here.
Simultaneously, a series of digital bus stop displays brought the campaign down to street level, targeting safety professionals and commuters in the blocks surrounding the venue. Each placement carried its own headline, creating a sense of progression as attendees moved through the city toward the convention center.
The convention center’s exterior video marquees put the campaign on full display before attendees ever stepped inside. A towering digital pylon outside the convention center ran full-bleed imagery of safety professionals alongside bold NFPA branding, visible from across the surrounding blocks day and night. Additional signage wrapped the building's facade, turning the venue itself into a statement–marking the conference as a significant moment for the fire and life safety community.
Inside the convention center, the campaign extended across every surface attendees encountered. A massive LED ribbon display running above the registration area carried the campaign messaging at scale, setting the tone from the moment people walked in.
Floor graphics, information desk signage, wayfinding displays, and freestanding banners kept the branding consistent throughout the concourse. On the main stage, the campaign backdrop reinforced the event's theme—"Improving Safety Everywhere"—giving every keynote moment a unified, polished visual context that held up on screen and in the room.
The NFPA expo booth anchored the exhibition floor with a, experiential presence that was impossible to walk past. A large-scale overhead banner carrying the "It's a Big World. Let's Protect It Together." headline commanded attention from across the hall, while full-bleed wall graphics, a large-format portrait of a safety professional, and bold campaign messaging drew attendees in closer. Structural elements including a red brick column graphic and a suspended canopy reinforced the booth's architectural footprint, and an integrated display screen kept content active within the space. The visual system carried the same campaign language as every other touchpoint, creating a seamless experience from the streets of Boston to the center of the expo floor.
To drive registration ahead of the event, a suite of display ads ran across the web in multiple sizes and orientations. The creative carried the same visual language as the broader campaign—bold typography, high-contrast imagery of safety professionals, and a direct call to action—adapted to work at banner scale without losing impact. The ads ran in contextually relevant placements, reaching fire and life safety professionals where they already spent time online and driving them to register for the event.
