Some people have learned the hard way that when it comes to giving a gift—say, to your significant other—you don’t want to get them something without giving it any thought. No way. Similarly, when a client comes to you with a need for promotional products, you wouldn’t throw a dart at your catalog and just pick whichever item it hits. Shimon Kaminetzky, director of sales for Atlanta-based Booker Promotions Inc., explained how he went from the bottom up (literally) to create a fully custom promotion.
Promo Marketing: Could you tell us about one promotion you thought was one of your best?
Shimon Kaminetzky: We recently completed a promotion that I’m thrilled about. It was a great promotion, but more than that, the client is finding [success] with it—so much so that I submitted it for a Pyramid Award.
The base product was a drone. The reason we used a drone was that it spoke not only to the client themselves, but to the specifics of the campaign. They had titled the campaign, “Be the agency that rises above the competition.” They’re a travel-related company, so it really fit all the pieces they were doing in terms of what their objectives were, who their target audience was, what they were trying to achieve, and, to date, what the results have been—which have been better than they expected or anticipated.
PM: What did you like about this promotion in particular?
SK: [I liked] the ability to work with their creative team, to hear what they wanted to do and to understand the in-depth analysis of why they identified this particular campaign as something they wanted to go after in 2016. Then, on the creative side, we came up with a lot of creative packaging for it, which really made it stand out. And we took what really could’ve been a toy into a really high-level executive gift.
There’s so much ability today with full-color process and variable data. For example, the package had a band that was wrapped around it, and, through variable data, it was personalized for each recipient. Very quickly, I think, people in our industry look to make a sale. To me, it’s not about making a sale. It’s about answering the call to action the client is trying to achieve.
PM: Did you run into any challenges while, to use a bad pun, getting this promotion off the ground?
SK: The challenges that we ran into were really more internal on my client’s side. Because they’re a large corporation, [the promotion] had to have numerous clearances and signatures, etc. It got [held] up at their legal department, and then it got [held] up at their compliance department. We had to make some adjustments to our messaging in order to resolve what their concerns were. So, you know, there were legal concerns, like if someone were to get hurt or misuse it—that sort of thing.
Part of the messaging with this promotion had some language about how if you don’t want to use the item, you can return it, and you’re assuming risk by using the product. That sort of thing.
PM: Do you have any advice for distributors looking to do a similar promotion?
SK: The most important thing is to really understand, in-depth, what your client is trying to achieve. There are so many wonderful promotional items that are out there. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something totally crazy that no one’s ever seen or heard of. It’s really how you use the product and how you apply it to a particular campaign that’s going on. In this particular case, the item, a drone, spoke to all those components.
