Transforming interactive exhibits with Craft CMS at MWC Barcelona 2025

How do you manage to stand out at one of the world’s biggest tech shows? That’s the question webdna’s Content Manager Gemma asked during her presentation at this year’s Dot All, the annual Craft CMS conference. In the talk, Transforming interactive exhibits with Craft CMS at MWC Barcelona 2025, Gemma discussed how we built and exhibited a demo version of Vodafone’s PLAYER.Connect for the event in partnership with Sport Science Agency (SSA).

Like the main product, the demo was powered by Craft CMS but adapted in a way to suit the fast-paced environment of a global conference floor. Rather than simply being a static display, this resulted in a unique experience that cut through the noise and left a lasting impression.

At the heart of the presentation was a simple but powerful idea: if you want to connect with people, you need to make them feel something. Technology, no matter how advanced, becomes forgettable if it’s presented in a way that lacks story, emotion, or physicality. The exhibit was designed as an immersive experience that put participants at the centre of their own performance journey. Instead of focusing solely on what Vodafone’s PLAYER.Connect does, it focused on how it feels to use it and what it means to the athletes and professionals who rely on it. 

Delegates at Dot All were taken behind the scenes as Gemma explained how we used Craft CMS to develop a custom-built front-end interface which was optimised for tablet. This meant the Vodafone team could easily collect and input participant data at each stage of the demo with information displaying on a Dashboard using Sprig. 

This made it visually straightforward to track individual scores in real time, with no need to refresh or reload. From this admin view, users also had complete control over how results were handled. They could choose when to present the participant’s performance on the main leaderboard, trigger the big screen visual display, or optionally send a personalised results summary via email, all with just a few taps.

All this, Gemma explained, helped make the experience more meaningful and relevant but to take the experience a step further, participants also received individualised feedback via email. This included insights into why each metric was important to performance and how their results compared with elite rugby players, and against the wider pool of participants. This email also included digital mementos which, thanks to Javascript, could be shared to their social media platforms, extending the reach of the experience way beyond the demo itself. 

In closing, Gemma explored why, if at all, all of this should matter to the wider Craft community. This project perfectly showcases how Craft CMS can power far more than just websites. In a time when budgets are being invested in experiential marketing, it presents us with the perfect opportunity to show decision makers exactly what Craft CMS can do. And that’s something we as a community should shout about a little bit more. 

We always tell our customers that with Craft CMS we never have to say no and this project is a great example of that. Thanks to rapid prototyping, we knew the system would do what we needed. So we could focus our energy on how it translated to the big screen to create that all important impact.