There is no delicate way to eat beef jerky in public.
Visitors to the New York Incentive Rewards & Recognition Show would have done well to remember this. Omaha Steaks hosted one of the first booths to greet attendees on the exhibit floor, and was handing out samples of edible leather. Tasty, yes, but the results weren’t pretty.
Ah, well, maybe the booth’s placement was a novice mistake by show management. This was, after all, only the second year Selling Communications hosted the expo, which fills the void left when VNU Business Media folded its Incentive Show two years ago.
The exhibit hall’s offerings moved away from the tchotchkes and trinkets of the former show, as well as the fun items direct marketers could co-opt for their own purposes. Seemingly forever banished are the talking postcards and the LED-flashing nametags, which could be programmed with messages or URLs.
What’s replaced these items is, apparently, high concept. In at least half a dozen instances it was difficult to determine a vendor’s wares. The Little Giant booth appeared to be under construction, with ladders and stepstools scattered around it, obscuring what signs there were. Turned out this was by design. Little Giant sells ladders and stepstools. Why the exhibitors felt they had to block their signage remains a mystery.
Often a booth’s dominant decoration was a video display. Images ranged from running rivers to a man on a tether wire slamming full-on into an icy peak, as opposed to whatever the exhibitor was actually selling. At the Premco spot, a video screen featured images of bison. Premco sells a variety of brand-name merchandise – electronics; fishing reels; bicycles; office equipment; luggage and so forth. All of which can be customized with a marketers name or contact information.
So what does this have to do with bison? When asked what his company does, a booth attendant said “We sell [poop]!” Ah, of course! (Don’t tell me the company was using a nature documentary to illustrate the quality of its television offerings. Let the company show a video highlighting its wares.)
There were some interesting booths, with clearly marked, innovative products. CharityCDs.com enables nonprofit marketers to offer donors one of five different music collections (Believe; Campfire Collection; Classical Magnificence; Love; and A Winter’s Night), each with liner notes customized to the organization. The music selections were limited, however, with no mixing and matching allowed.
Some of the song choices were curious. For instance, The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” is featured on the “Believe” collection. The song starts with the phrase “'Cause it's a bittersweet symphony, this life/Trying to make ends meet/You're a slave to money then you die…”. What is this collection trying to get us to believe in, socialism?
The best-direct-marketing-application prize goes to a product from View-Master. Parent company Fisher-Price allows marketers to submit seven Photoshop images – PowerPoint slides, merchandise, contact information or what have you – for either 2D or 3D rendering as customized View-Master slides. Love it. Anybody who can come within three feet of a View-Master without picking it up and playing with it doesn’t have a soul.
The customized slides offering isn’t new – it dates back 70 years, to the earliest days of the product, when a bourbon company commissioned a run of them. (Side note: Folks, don’t drink, drive and look through a View-Master. A bad idea. Trust me.)
Alas, that pretty much was the extent of interesting, customizable direct marketing related offerings. Film Movement offers a DVD subscription service that delivers an independent movie to subscribers’ doorsteps every month – but everyone gets the same movie, and there’s no way to influence what is chosen.
As Michael Upp, SVP of business development for incentive travel package company Mitch-Stuart Inc. told me, “We are in a consumer society, therefore people want choice in their incentive program.”
Or, assumedly, a video screen filled with bison.
To respond to this column, please contact richard.levey@penton.com
