Last week, I got a call from my son Aidan. He was at a the CMA, a marketing conference in Toronto to hear Seth Godin speak (while he didn't get the intern job with Seth that he was gunning for, Aidan has remained part of a network that converses regularly with the ubiquitous Mr. Godin), and had stumbled upon an opportunity.
"Dad," he whispered, "I'm at the display and demo area, and there's an empty table here. Do you think I'd get in trouble if I filled it with my business cards?"
While I appreciated his concern about pissing off some people, my initial advice was simple:
"Get in trouble for what?
Marketing yourself
at a marketing conference?"
Guerrilla marketing sometimes gets a bad rap, but it's the entrepreneurs, the campaigns, the marketers that bend, break or re-write the rules who reap the most rewards (and don't forget that the root word of "guerrilla" is "guerre," which is French for "war," so...).
I remember in the early days of Airborne Mobile, when we could hardly afford to attend conferences, never mind have a booth or be an official "sponsor" of them, we used to pull all sorts of under-the-radar stunts to grab attention and promote wireless entertainment on cellphones.
One of my faves were the cheap wirecutters we attached to a card and called a "Wireless Conversion Kit." The copy read:
"Converts anyone to wireless in a snap!"
"Perfect for cutting your ties to old-fashioned phone lines."
"Helpful for convincing others to convert, especially when applied to fleshy areas."
What we used to do is sneak into keynote rooms or demo/display areas, and place these on every seat or empty spot we could find (one of our covert operators was none other than Mitch Joel, the uber-digital marketer and President of Twist Image, and Airborne's Director of Marketing at the time).
Did it work? Well, after doing the dirty deed myself at a conference in L.A., I was stopped by two people in the halls.
"Are you the guy behind all those pliers?" asked one. She was one of the event's organizers. "If I catch you doing that again, I will have you thrown out of here!" she threatened.
Skulking away sheepishly, I was approached again.
"Are you the guy behind all those pliers?" I was asked again. It was an executive from Disney named Tripp Wood. "I think they're great. I love 'em. In fact, I'd like to set up a meeting with you and see how we can work together."
I was at his office the next day and the end result was a contract to come up with a mobile game for the film Monsters, Inc. That meeting with Tripp spawned a friendship that lasts until this day, as well as a five-year professional relationship with Disney that brought us our first big client, immediately established Airborne's credibility, and gave us the heat to sign up clients like HBO, Maxim, A&E, the NHL and The Food Network within a year.
So back to Aidan. My closing bit of advice to him was when opportunity knocks, don't be afraid to answer. But be yourself, and do something more than just lay down a pile of cards, which will be about as effective as tossing them off the CN Tower. So, as a music marketer and blogger...this was his end result:
Well, not exactly the "end" result.
He generated a couple of leads that he's following up on this week. 