After weeks of painstaking planning and preparation, the Passage Events team descended on the annual Experiential Marketing Summit at the McCormick Place Conference Center in Chicago.
The $100,000 Golden Opportunity Sweepstakes was a major hit. We FedEx’d this package in a wooden box to about 85 marketers who were attending the Summit and who we carefully selected as target prospects for us. We enjoyed an incredible 35% response to this! One in three of these marketers came to our booth and not only entered our Sweepstakes, but almost all demonstrated high interest in the “golden opportunity” Passage is pioneering in experiential marketing.
Here are the Summit highlights:
- Sunday and Monday were spent on setting the stage at the conference - the Starbucks sampling stations were prepped, booth built, and tongues sharpened.
- Come Monday, as the conference attendees registered, our select group of 85 potential clients received a personalized golden envelope further reminding them to come to our booth for a special gift (a digital picture frame loaded with our Golden Moments – images from past events).
- Who would pass on the complimentary cup of aromatic Starbucks coffee for breakfast, especially if it’s served by our team?! Dozens of unforgettable connections and impressions of the Passage Events services were made to start the day.
- At the 8am opening key note speech (the most attended and important part of the conference) Brad Stevens, VP of Advertising and Marketing for Starbucks, talked about how his company became a leader in experiential marketing, AND mentioned Passage Events, as a great partner responsible for their out-of-store promotional activities, not once, not twice, but THREE times, directing all attendees to the sampling stations and then to our booth for a Starbucks reward card. Over a hundred attendees (more than 10%!) redeemed their Starbucks Passports (left on each conference chair by our team) for a $5 gift card at our booth.
- As the crowd rushed to fuel up on coffee, the sampling team was once again at their best creating memorable moments with the sniffing and tasting techniques as well as stories of growing and roasting the Starbucks coffee in exotic Latin American locations.
- Then this caffeinated and energized wave of attendees descended on our booth, including those from our highly desired brand marketers list, showing great interest in the Passage Events capabilities.
- After lunch the sampling team took the spotlight again providing the Orange Crème Frappuccino Blended Crème as part of the nationwide Starbucks summer campaign launch, which coincided with the first day of the conference.
- The last day of the conference went even smoother with more sampling, more lead generation, and more hard work and fun had by all.
- The bottom line? Passage Events definitely made a long-lasting memorable impression, and gathered lots of sweepstakes entries from very interested prospective new clients.
Now, our new web site has been launched (click on post title above), new literature produced, sales & marketing wheels on track and turning, we’ve made a huge debut at the industry’s leading conference of the year, and our operational and service capability has been geared to scale up as business volume requires.
Get ready world, here we come!