Sandpaper Solution

Who carries sandpaper in their exhibit-supply kit? I do. While it may sound a bit anal, my sandpaper got me out of a rough situation at the 2002 Intelligent Transportation Society of America’s 12th Annual Meeting and Exposition (ITSA) in Long Beach, CA.

My company, TransCore, provides technology-based products and services for the transportation industry. It was launching a new homeland security-related product at ITSA, which was our first big show after 9/11.

Our marketing team had developed a security-related theme featuring a Trojan Horse image with the tagline, “Lesson one in security is to always know what you’re transporting.” To tie in to the campaign, we also created mystery giveaways: cardboard coffee-mug boxes printed with a design that made them look like wooden freight containers. The sides of the boxes featured the tagline, which looked as if it had been stenciled on. Inside, the boxes each held one giveaway, such as golf gloves, a flashlight, or a glue stick.

The day before I left for ITSA, our creative team decided we needed one large, highly visible element to attract more attention to the booth and tie the giveaway to the exhibit design. So at the last possible moment, they asked our exhibit house to build a 48-by-72-inch wooden replica of our cardboard giveaway boxes featuring the same stenciled tagline.

Our marketing department has a reputation for being letter perfect. We proof, double proof, and triple proof everything. But since we were short on time, I assumed my exhibit house would duplicate the text found on our cardboard boxes, which I’d proofed earlier.

At the show, booth installation went smoothly, and the creative team was right. Even before the show opened, the gigantic crate drew lots of attention to the exhibit and our mystery giveaway. But the longer I looked at the crate, the more uneasy I felt. Something just didn’t seem right.

It wasn’t until two hours before the show opened, when our senior executives came to examine the exhibit, that I finally realized the word “security,” which appeared on all four sides of the wooden crate, had the “I” and “R” reversed — spelling “secuirty.”

With visions of being fired on the spot, I approached our senior executives and explained our new campaign and booth design. Of course, they went straight for the big wooden crate. But to my utter relief, they didn’t notice the typo. In fact, a couple of them sat down on the crate and sang its praises.

As soon as they were out of sight, I pulled out my exhibit-supply box and found a black Sharpie and my trusty sandpaper, which I’d stuck in there years back “just in case.” I sanded off the offensive “I” and “R” and drew them back on in the proper order.

The show opened just a few minutes after the ink dried, and our booth was such a hit that it was featured on the “NBC Nightly News” with Tom Brokaw in a story about the homeland-security industry. Thanks to a little sandpaper, neither Brokaw nor the rest of the world ever knew about our typo.

— Susan Shuttleworth, corporate marketing communications manager, TransCore, Dallas