Promotions

As the late deadline for entering the 2011 PRO Awards looms (May 11), it’s an appropriate time to take a look back at last year’s Best Overall winner: “Give a Day, Get a Disney Day.” In addition to exceptional planning and execution, two outside influences helped raise that campaign to the top of the pack among hundreds and hundreds of stellar entries.

For one thing, the economy was a mess. Visits to Walt Disney World had fallen off and the expense of vacationing there, even for a day, was out of reach for many. So Disney offered 1 million people a free day at its parks if they donated some of their time and energy to a charity. more

I’m sure Jay Weintraub didn’t envision such a turnout when he came up with the idea to host the first-ever tradeshow for flash sale sellers and technology platforms. Heck, he planned for 300 attendees to be at the Daily Deal Summit in New York. Weintraub instead yesterday had a party of about 500.

Daily Deals are kind of a big deal. Social sellers, coupon code aggregaters, deal-providers and local couponers all had a story to tell. To sum everything up, they educated each other on the benefits of new technologies that allow merchants to offer up the most relevant deals at the right time, in the right place and to the right customers.

It’s too bad traditional merchants weren’t there to listen. more

Lisa Gavales, the chief marketing officer at apparel company Express, stood on stage today at a Hyatt in New York City and talked about Twitter. The Express customer is a 20-something, a good demo to engage with tweets. But when she personally took on the task of tweeting with her own handle, she wondered what she had gotten herself into. The fan base was growing and the pressure was mounting from the top down to keep pushing out the tweets. Many of us have been there, haven’t we? For Gavales, it was time to change the game. more

The Lynx brand, known as Axe in the U.S., got a whole lot of attention from commuters last month at the London Victoria Train Station when an ad on the floor asked people to “Look up.” When they did, they were watching a large digital billboard that used augmented reality to show a golden fairy magically appearing beside them in a puff of sparkly dust. Later in the month, Lynx staged a similar event at the Birmingham Bullring Centre. The stunts launched the new fragrance Lynx Excite and got plenty of laughs as guys tried to get their arms around the winged fairy—and quite a crowd. One viewer summed it all up: “Brilliant.” Watch the video.

This is the final piece in the three part series of StorySelling. The first two articles dealt with what StorySelling is and why you should be employing it now. This article will show you how to turn your story telling into StorySelling.

StorySelling allows you to connect with your clients at the level where decisions are made.

Great StorySelling, like great marketing itself, begins with a goal. You need to determine what you expect your StorySelling efforts will do in terms of increased leads, conversions to sales or more referrals, among other metrics. Without an established goal, you may as well just keep cold calling and hope you luckily find the right customer.

You begin the process of StorySelling by asking lots of questions so you can truly understand what is important to your prospect or customers. Once you understand their wants, desires and needs, you can craft a brilliant, real-life story example that will resonate with them and their situation. This technique works much better than bombarding your audience with complicated charts and graphs. more

In the East Village of New York, single pages from a novel are being pinned to telephone poles and other locations where the curious have stopped to read the text, which also offers clues as to where to find the next page.

The search for “hidden treasure” is not a new promotional concept in the larger world of brand marketing. One of the longest running promotions in the history of Canadian Club Whiskey has been a consumer hunt for missing cases of the spirit with clues teased in advertisements. Harrah’s is also well versed in staging treasure hunts, in one sending consumers up and down the Las Vegas strip to its casinos in search of clues leading to a $1 million prize. more