Trade show secret ingredient: Chocolate chips
Or, making dough by baking dough
L-R: New West’s Maria Ladd and Becky Simpson, and our client, Steve Fung of General Imaging.
I don’t want to overstate this. I’m not going to say that cookies got us in front of 11 million people.
A client making a quality product, along with good, old-fashioned media relations, were the main ingredients behind our latest success story.
But let’s face it. Warm, chewy chocolate chip cookies, freshly baked and strategically placed every half an hour throughout your trade-show booth (you’re thinking about cookies right now, aren’t you?), can certainly be the – ahem – icing on the cake when it comes to capturing media attention in these days of overworked, underpaid, job-hanging-by-a-thread news people.
That’s why New West likes cookies.
A couple of weeks ago a team of New Westers headed, um, west to Las Vegas to coordinate and staff our client’s booth at the Photo Marketing Association trade show. We did all the usual stuff – preparing media kits, setting up meetings with industry writers, TV shows and bloggers, and working with the client to make sure the booth got finished – but then came the coup de grace: the cookies. So we fired up the portable oven and got to baking.
Within minutes, the smell of fresh cookies, Mom in the kitchen, home and childhood and everything else you hold dear was wafting out into the concrete abyss of the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. And we saw that it was good. Reporters and analysts and buyers and sellers and, frankly, even our competitors, were suddenly finding reasons to drop by. One reporter in particular came by several times over the three-day show. “Man, those cookies are good,” he’d say each time. And each time we’d talk a little more about business.
A few days after I got home, that reporter emailed me:
Cary:
Gave ya a good ride this week. Thanks for the cookies!
And beneath his signature were the links to his tech column announcement about our client’s cameras – a column that appeared in 30 major newspapers around the United States. Total audience: 11 million people.
Again, I’m not going to say cookies did that. But I do think they greased the baking sheet. The point is, when you want your business to cook, every ingredient is essential.
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