Congratulations to Strand Marketing and client San-tron for the foam crab hats campaign. These fun hats with the San-Tron logo were worn all over the show floor and at many after hour gatherings. Strand encouraged attendees to help with his clients branding by running a photo contest for the most creative display of the head gear. Needless to say, these hats showed up everywhere and contestants proudly showed off their fun side with pictures on San-tron’s Facebook wall. Strand did a masterful job of combining a traditional tchotchke give-away with social media to heighten his client’s visibility.
Judy Warner is the Director of Sales and Marketing from Techline Technology and has been attracting a lot of attention for her plain speak blogs on the MWJ website. With blog titles such as “The “hole” truth about Drilling PCBs”, Judy helped drive traffic to her company’s booth. Her follow-up blog about the show “Everything I needed to know I learned at IMS2011” also attracted a lot of attention across the industry. Keep up the good work Judy.
The team at Sonnet held mini-courses on design and electromagnetic simulation throughout the entire show. Sonnet’s courses were informative, technical and not excessively marketing-pitch, which helped them attract very respectable attendance. The company provides this service every year and the quality of their talks have helped draw busy attendees to their booth. The new release of their free, Sonnet lite software also helped drive traffic.
CST also provided on-site tutorials that were well attended. And if you preferred stimulation over simulation, the company had a professional masseuse in their booth to help relieve aching backs. This is a marketing campaign that definitely rubs us the right way.
RFMD held a press conference/reception with the VP of their Multi-market product group, Bob Van Buskirk. The gathering let reporters and market analyst hear about the company direction directly from a senior official, while enjoying a cool beer and hot apps. Nice treat for the end of a long day.
Rogers Corp. invited its customers to ride up the escalator to their on-site party with food, drinks, games and give-aways. The virtual rollercoaster and karaoke were big hits. People gathered at the party before heading off to diner to see who won the various prizes and worked off the appetizers playing the games and miggling.
TRU Corp. held their customer appreciation party in the Fells Point section of town at Max’s, a classic Irish bar. The beer was cold and the music was hot, thanks to Eddie and the TRU Tones, a band comprised of employees from several different microwave companies. The crowd included many of TRU’s long standing customers most of whom seemed well acquainted with each other. There were also some fresh faces. Showing appreciation for your customers support is always good business.
Jim Assurian of Reactel continues to draw a crowd to his booth with his annual raffle. Jim begins his campaign several months before IMS with print ads in Microwave Journal promoting the products he will be showing at IMS and a "delicious" give-away, often an memorable dinning experience, which this year featured the local signature dish - Crab cakes from G&M Restaurant. Reactel then followed up with a special MTT-S page on their web site featuring an animated video discussing the IMS show, their promotion and the advantages of their products and services. The entire campaign and video was a lot of fun to watch and still incorporated the company message.
Click here to view Way to go Jim.
Agilent is a dominant force every year with its very own “Avenue”, a great concept that extends the company’s presence beyond their own booth to include the dozen or so companies they partner with. Agilent also prepares for the show with considerable pre-show activity including a dedicated website discussing the products that will be on display, a full-fledged pre-show media briefing and customer outreach programs. Agilent also sponsored the MicroApps program, which put their logo on the signage over the speaker podium and all related MicroApps promotions. And if that’s not enough, the company took its customers out to Camden Yard for a Ballgame.
AWR also prepared a website detailing their IMS2011 activity including demos, private dialogs with R&D, spotlight presentations and their 7th annual appreciation party “AWR Games 2011” at the Hard Rock Café. This is a great networking event… and quite a draw. Given the number of people (they stopped counting after 650) that attend this party every year, AWR has certainly done a great job at making their name known throughout the industry. Proof is on their Facebook page. But to win over engineers, the company backs its big social event with technology on the show floor. Leading up to IMS, AWR sponsors design contests with its software products, which they promote along with customer testimonials in order to win over new designers.
Speaking of design contest, NXP had some marketing success with their first ever design contest and award ceremony. They put out the challenge to universities worldwide to come up with unique designs using their extremely rugged ISM transistors. The winner was “A 2-kW Amplifier for a Portable 449 MHz Spaced Antenna Wind Profiler Radar” by Brad Lindseth of University of Colorado.
Spinner takes the award for most apropos give-away – a hand-held battery-operated fan. What adds even more to the cleverness of the gizmo is that the word “Spinner” illuminates letter by letter as the tiny blades spin around. Not only is the fan amusing, it probably proved useful for many show attendees and exhibitors since the weather in Baltimore was so steamy that week.
The IMS committee got into the social media game big this year with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Microwave Journal worked with the committee to get a Twitter Feed on site that highlighted all the IMS2011 Twittering on a monitor place in the registration area. People could see in real time the Twittering about the show as it was displayed on the monitor. Roger’s and San-Tron announced contests via Twittering also among the many other companies that were using it this year.