MTT-S: The Industry's Marketing Opportunity
We at Reactel view the MTT-S show as the high point of our marketing season. We use this industry leading show as the lever to launch new products, introduce new product catalogs, and meet with our customers in a non-traditional business setting.
Since nearly the entire RF & Microwave industry exhibits, attends, or in some way follows the activity at the show, we feel that this is the perfect venue to showcase our company and its products. To that end, we tailor an advertising campaign that is show specific and will drive visitors to, and create a buzz around, our booth.
As an example, I will illustrate the program we came up with for the Atlanta in 2008, and demonstrate how a multi-layered media approach made Atlanta a huge success for Reactel. Using helpful input from our team of media advisors, we were able to tie the following seemingly disparate items together: a viral video from the internet, a collapsible travel cup, our website and our usual full page advertisement in Microwave Journal.
As it often happens, a link to a video came across my desktop in an email from a colleague. While I generally ignore such invitations, the note from my friend made me think that I would have some genuine interest in the contents of the video. The video was of a hidden camera exposé that a local Atlanta TV station did on the cleanliness of glasses found in hotel rooms. As I travel frequently, and have used said glasses many times, I found this to be interesting. As the report revealed, these glasses are far from clean, even in the best of hotels, and several biological experts ran tests to show a variety of dirty things were living on and in these supposedly clean glasses. Needless to say, this was disturbing to me given my frequent use of these very same glasses during my travels. What made this all the more interesting was that the focus was on some of the very same hotels where show attendees and exhibitors would be staying during their time in Atlanta later that year. Hmmmm...….
An idea came about that perhaps we could use this video as a part of our show marketing campaign. From that point, it was quickly determined that we should give away collapsible travel cups in our booth and center our ad in the Journal around the “dirty secret” that the hotels were keeping form us. Further, our ad directed readers to a portion of our website where they could view the video, and suggest that the stop by our booth to pick up their own cup so they could avoid using the dirty glasses in their hotel room. And finally, we ran the video in our booth on a continuous loop in front of a large poster of the “Dirty Secrets” ad that appeared in the Journal.
All in all, it was a very successful campaign made of seemingly unrelated parts, proving once again, that a great idea has no bounds. As the next show approaches, try some creativity beyond the usual painted, connectorized, metal box and performance charts. Don’t be afraid to incorporate multiple advertising mediums and inject some humor. We could all use the laugh and you may surprise yourself with the positive results.