Atlanta – IMS2008 – A Look Back
Don’t you always remember your first? Who doesn’t, right!
Easy, tiger – I am talking about the first IMS-specific ad I ran for Reactel. The ad was titled “Dirty Secrets” and was centered on hotel drinking glasses’ filthy condition. What does that have to do with filters or the IMS Conference? Absolutely nothing, of course. But…. there was a tie-in with our booth giveaway, and that was the point of the ad.
For a reason I cannot remember, I had stumbled across an Atlanta TV station’s hidden camera report about how local hotel rooms are cleaned, focusing on the drinking glasses generally kept in the bathroom. The report showed staff from several local Atlanta hotels using the same cloth used to clean the bathroom to wipe down the drinking glasses. While the video from the TV station’s website is no longer there, it does live (in pretty rough quality) here: https://www.snotr.com/video/662/Don_t_drink_from_hotel_room_glasses. I passed that video to my friend Mike Hallman of Microwave Journal who liked to enjoy a Diet Coke over ice using those same glasses in different hotels during his travels. As expected, I ruined this little slice of bliss for him forever. But, since the hotels featured in the TV station’s report were from Atlanta, and IMS was going to be in Atlanta in just a few months – an ad campaign was born.
To be completely honest, the ad was only partially my idea. Like any brilliant thing, many hands are required to do the heavy lifting. Me with the video, Mike with the idea to tie it into IMS08 in Atlanta, our web-team creating a landing page with the video, our terrific graphics-team who created the ad, and the ad-specialties folks we used who made hundreds of collapsible cups for us to hand out from our booth.
I’d rate the entire campaign a huge success. We ran through hundreds of cups and displayed the news video on a continuous loop in our booth the whole time. I lost count of how many attendees said they were staying at the hotels featured in the video, but I do know they were happy we had a cup for them to take back to their rooms.
Fond memories, indeed, of my first time.
If you care to discuss Filters, Multiplexers or Multifunction Assemblies, drop me a line – jassurian@reactel.com
