Inside the 3D Cow Motion Game: A Custom Booth Experience for Zoetis at CattleCon23
When Zoetis needed a booth experience for CattleCon23 that would stop cattle producers in their tracks, they didn’t want another screen full of product slides. They wanted something their audience — ranchers, cow-calf producers, and veterinarians — would actually want to play.
So we built the 3D Cow Motion Game, a full-body, motion-tracked booth activation designed around the one relationship every attendee in that room understood instinctively: the bond between a cow and her calf.
Zoetis’s cattle brand has spent years building its identity around a single idea: the ancient, symbiotic bond between producers and their herds. It’s the emotional core behind campaigns like “Born of the Bond,” which lean into the sleepless nights, the hard work, and the deep connection producers have with their animals — rather than just talking about vaccines and health products.
Our challenge was to take that brand story off the screen and put it into someone’s hands, literally. CattleCon, hosted by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, is exactly the audience this message is built for — it’s the same room where Zoetis veterinarians talk about calving season, colostrum timing, and getting calves off to a healthy start. A game about reuniting a cow with her calf isn’t a generic arcade reskin dropped into a booth; it’s a physical, playable version of the same bond the brand has spent years talking about.
The mechanic is simple to learn and satisfying to master, which is exactly what a trade show floor demands — attendees rarely have more than 60-90 seconds of attention to give.
Here’s how it works:
It’s essentially a full-body herding simulator, and the physicality is the point. Instead of tapping a touchscreen, players are moving their arms, reacting quickly, and — often — laughing while they do it. That combination of movement and objective mirrors the kind of motion-capture game experiences we build for brands that want their booth to be seen and heard from across a crowded trade show floor, not just walked past.
Trade show booths live or die by two things: whether people stop, and whether people remember who they stopped for. A camera-tracked, hands-on game does both. It’s inherently visual — other attendees can see someone playing from a distance, which pulls in the next player before the current one has even finished. And because the “win condition” is literally reuniting a mother and calf, the game reinforces Zoetis’s brand message without anyone needing to read a single product spec sheet.
This is the same principle behind most of the conference and trade show games we design: the mechanic itself should carry the brand story, so the marketing message lands even with attendees who never stop to talk to a booth rep.
The 3D Cow Motion Game is one example of a broader approach we take as a brand activation agency: start with what the brand already stands for, then find a game mechanic that makes that idea physical and fun. It’s a strategy we apply across our full library of branded games for marketing, whether the goal is booth traffic at a livestock convention, lead capture on a trade show floor, or simple brand recall days after the event ends.
If you’re planning a booth for an industry event and want an activation that does more than hand out swag, take a look at the 3D Cow Motion Game product page or get in touch — we can help you find (or build) the mechanic that fits your brand’s story.