working ideas
When it comes to showcasing its wares, Rodenstock GmbH has no problem making a spectacle of itself. So for a dealer event/road show dubbed “Larger Than Life” held Sept. 22 to Oct. 23, the German eyewear manufacturer morphed a giant pair of its glasses into a presentation screen. The 2,200-pound glasses were fabricated by Munich-based The Event Co. and comprised an aluminum frame covered in hard foam and painted black. A closer look revealed the frames housed two projection foils in place of lenses. In addition to the glasses being a true-to-scale model of an actual pair of Rodenstock eyeglasses, the faux frames served as a theater space, where a total of 4,100 dealers over the course of the tour sat and watched videos playing simultaneously on both “lenses.” In one fell swoop, the gigantic glasses reinforced the event’s larger than life theme, offered an oversized product display, and provided a gee-whiz alternative to boring projection screens and passé plasmas.	Skyline Exhibits Inc. knows that there’s no better — or obvious — way to show appreciation than via standing ovation. So the St. Paul, MN-based exhibit company arranged to literally cheer on its customers on the opening day of its annual dealer and distributor event. With 60 Skyline employees taking their position on bleachers just inside the expo hall of the company’s corporate headquarters, the doors flung open and more than 500 attendees flooded in to the sound of excited whoops and hollers. Now that’s an effective welcome wagon.
To go beyond on-paper demographics and obtain real-world insights into the daily lives of its target market, Unilever, a Trumbull, CT-based consumer-goods manufacturer and producer of the Dove brand of personal-care products, got up close and personal with the techno-savvy, multitasking, twenty-something women it seeks to attract. To tap into the secret lives of this uber-coveted niche and experience firsthand how this particular market segment interfaces with technology each day, Unilever teamed up with New York-based event production firm Paint the Town Red to create an all-day immersion activity that placed 30 members of Dove’s branding and marketing team squarely in the round-toe pumps of its end users. Paint the Town Red and Unilever developed five personas that embodied the 20-something women it hoped to reach. Each character — Kimberly, Elizabeth, Vanessa, Katie, and Jessica — was assigned a task to complete in Manhattan, all centered around throwing a fictitious surprise birthday party for a sixth character, Sara. The six Unilever teams each met up with actors portraying the defined personas. For example, each team met Kimberly after her workout to view a show she had downloaded to her iPod and then come up with gift ideas for Sara. Each on-the-go task involved meeting another character to, for example, shop for an outfit, photograph it, and e-mail the photo via cell phone; stop in a coffee shop to get online and search Web sites for a date for the party as well as job information; and film a video which was uploaded to YouTube and later shared with all of the teams. In other words, a typical day in the life of a highly wired, highly mobile 20-something girl on the go. So instead of simply reading stats about their target, Dove’s team experienced a slice of life — and gained valuable insight that will help tailor the company’s marketing efforts.
Open source meeting design, in which attendees create the conference agenda on site and on the fly, is a hot topic these days. So it’s no wonder that Meeting Professionals International (MPI) sought to build the strategy into its annual World Education Conference, held in Las Vegas in August. To ease its audience into the concept, MPI allotted a block of time each day for what it called Café Conversations — open-sourced roundtable sessions about topics determined on-site by attendees. Each café had a pre-assigned focus, such as international meetings, the future of the meetings industry, or managing generational differences in the workplace. Outside each café, which were meeting rooms set in banquet rounds, was a large whiteboard with a grid numbered to match the tables inside. Attendees could add a question or topic to the agenda by writing it on one of the whiteboard grid lines. For example, an attendee could write a question about negotiating hotel contracts with European-based chains on the International Café board. Attendees could then scan the white boards to find a topic of interest to them and join the appropriate table inside the café. The Café Conversations quickly became a popular and talked-about element at the event. Many attendees cited the table dialogue as the most valuable takeaway from their MPI experience, as they drew on the freeform brainstorming with their peers, gathering advice and experiences, and collectively developing solutions to their pressing challenges.

How do you become the sponsor of an entire season? Try a little bribery, which is exactly what Rochester, NY-based Wet Planet Beverages, makers of Jolt Energy Drinks, did in Barrow, AK. The Alaskan town has 1,992 straight hours of sunlight during the summer, the longest stretch of daylight in the country, which makes it the perfect place to pitch an energy drink. So to build buzz for its product and to position itself as The Official Drink of the Summer Solstice, the company air-lifted 307 cases of its Jolt beverage to the northernmost town in the United States. The drink drop took place during the town’s annual softball tournament, in which nearly all the residents participated. In return, the town’s mayor declared the city be renamed Jolt, AK, for the day. The event generated coverage in Promo Magazine, MSNBC.com, and more.

Cable-television providers can choose from hundreds of channels when deciding what to offer their customers. The Independent Film Channel, well aware of its competition, wanted to whet cable subscribers’ appetites for IFC’s indie films and series, hoping the subscribers would in turn request the channel from their respective cable-television providers. So to demonstrate the channel’s appeal and increase its scope, the company paired up with sponsors Emusic.com Inc., Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc.’s Scion brand, and Tourism Australia to create the “IFC Free Film Festival,” a road show that brought independent movies to public parks in 10 strategic market locations across the United States. Each three-night festival featured the family-friendly films, “Raising Arizona” on Tuesday, “The Princess Bride” on Wednesday, and “Napolean Dynamite” on Thursday. IFC hoped to draw at least 500 people to each screening. To promote the event, IFC enlisted the help of employees and interns to start an online blog campaign. IFC also sent street teams armed with invitations (designed to resemble giant movie tickets) to the cities including Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco the week leading up to the arrival of the festival. The road-show team transformed local parks into open-air movie theaters boasting a 40-by-20-foot screen, with tents set up nearby for the sponsors to engage moviegoers with entertainment quizzes, free music-card giveaways, and other branded swag before the films started each evening. Over the course of the 10-week tour, Emusic handed out approximately 25,000 music cards and Scion gave away more than 50,000 promotional items to the average of 1,000 to 1,500 people who filled the parks each night to catch the flicks — three times IFC’s original attendance goal. After the film festival concluded, IFC experienced an 8-percent increase in national distribution over the previous year. An increase in distribution means an increase in viewership, proving that sometimes, a little show and tell can go a long way.

Thanks to mobile phones, omnipresent Wi-Fi, and Web 2.0, it is nearly impossible to keep the cat in the bag when it comes to product launches, regardless of the industry. That impossibility is magnified during a multi-day, multi-venue road show when word about a new product can reach the end of the tour long before the actual event does, effectively killing the surprise — and eliminating the main reason for attending product-launch events in the first place. To avoid any potential “meh, already saw that on YouTube,” reactions from consumers to the launch of its newest 1 Series, M3, and X6 models, BMW Group Canada shifted into high gear and teamed up with The Taylor Group Inc. to compress a 20-site road show into nine days, hoping the experience wouldn’t reach the last destination of the tour before the vehicles did. In order to maintain the frantic pace of its tour — dubbed Evolution Unleashed — BMW and The Taylor Group created a 20-by-50-by-10-foot-high pavilion that could be set up and torn down in the same day by the dealers at 20 BMW retail locations across Canada. In addition to the easy-to-assemble pavilion, BMW outfitted each retailer with guidebooks containing reference materials and pointers on how to host the event. Each individual retailer was in charge of the guest list, and mailed invitations to its local and regional customer base. When it came to the small details, such as catering, entertainment, décor, and event activities, BMW took its hands off the wheel and put the retailers in the driver’s seat. The road-show-in-overdrive approach paid off, as the event drew a total of 7,000 BMW owners and prospects to the retail locations to experience the launch firsthand.

To raise the profile of its new gourmet blend of 100-percent Arabica beans and get the brew into caffeine-deprived consumers’ hands, Maxwell House decided to hit the streets with a sampling event. Piggy-backing on its “brew some good” slogan, Maxwell House provided toll-booth workers in eight metro areas throughout the country with coupons and samples of the coffee beans to hand out to commuters as they paid the tolls. Maxwell House also made a donation to America’s Second Harvest for each toll paid and gave subway patrons in five boroughs of New York City a free roundtrip metro card. At the end of the campaign, the company handed out 2,156,600 samples and received 41,748,912 media impressions. Those results and the campaign’s cause-marketing component helped Maxwell House land back on coffee drinkers’ radars, while doing a little good to the last drop.