ShowStoppers at CES 2009

Back in late December, I blogged about my preparation for CES and ShowStoppers and that follow-up and relevancy were lost disciplines in sales and marketing.

Feedback and control loops are familiar things for engineers, but not necessarily for marketing, sales and business people. In our case Feedback is just the continual updating of the information and changes to the ROI and the control loop are the reporting of this information to update the system/marketing plan. I owe you the update and feedback post CES show and will again update you in a month or two to justify the initial and continuing ROI of this investment.

First the ShowStoppers media event, even the media is feeling the pinch, but life goes on. Some 1,300 members pre-registered or RSVP’d in advance of the show. At the show some 1,000 actually came a received their badges and a few hundred more tried to gate crash after either not pre-registering, not being invited or not qualifying as media.

Of the 1,300 pre-registered which I sorted and filtered with my client’s media database I sent about 900 invitations/teasers to visit me at the event. From the e-mail: I had a number of media contacts inform me that their budgets were cuts and would not be attending, I had a number of requests for samples and did two pre-show interviews. We set another 2 interviews with TV and Radio at the event, and had about 6 committing to stop by. At the event we firmed up another TV interview.

We brought some 160 product samples representing three new and two existing products to the event for media samples – we ran out! Historically most media would have requested that we send them samples to their offices to avoid having 100 lb suitcases, but with the instantaneous world we now live in everything happens NOW, although the recent media related downsizing may be part of it as well.

We collected about 80 business cards for the samples, have 9 additional sample requests were fulfilling this week, and have to follow-up with everyone we missed. We’ll be filtering the media list for follow-up and expect to get at least another dozen or so requests from people we missed at the show or could not attend.

Now for the ROI:

What did we spend?

We had a $8,000 sponsor fee, about $1,400 in expenses for T &E, about $400 in shipping costs and gave away about $8,000 of product at retail (our cost is obviously lower). So we spent about $18,000 to attend ShowStoppers and CES (we had meetings as well) and also used our own media list and media efforts.

What did we get?

So far we can confirm:

A product mention in the CES Show Daily (Day 1)

A product mention, pre-show, in a major trade publication.

Two TV interviews

One radio interview (with significant syndication)

A Major gadget Blog review

Mid level gadget blog and re-syndication of the article

International TV & Blog media coverage

Pending we have about 85 members of the media with sample they requested and we expect to supply another dozen or so.

I’d say we’re well ahead of the game. We’re getting press, strengthening our “google”, creating demand and interest in our products, and creating “pull through” at the retail and e-tailer level. If you need help with your marketing and media strategies, don’t forget, I’m a hired gun and can be reached at MikeR@FuelMarketingandSales.com