Trade show season is starting – over the next 6 months my team will have a major role at five shows and a supporting role at another six to eight. While there are many exciting aspects of putting together a presence at a trade show, I am always frustrated with the options and choices for giveaways. I want something more than the typical branded schlock – something that actually talks about my products and isn’t going to sit on someone’s desk or worse, desk drawer, for the next four years. There are plenty of companies who have a catalog of items on to which they want to slap your company or product logo. I once had an hour long meeting with one such company in which they tried to convince me that what we needed to give away to show off our products was blue balls. Seriously??? Putting the obvious sexual innuendo aside, what do balls have to do with data center technology? What message does it send?
This season I was determined to do something different. No more portable USB batteries, no more bluetooth speakers, no more blue balls. What could I find that would be more than “fun” yet would still be small and relatively cheap? What would geeks like to take home? What could tell our stories? I wanted to leverage the Xpert brand we have been using for “How to” videos, the one with the animated intro. And that’s when it hit me, we needed something animated, we needed comics books!
We spent a few weeks writing a few scripts, locating someone who could help us draw and produce them – and I found http://yourcomicstory.com. They did a fantastic job and we are going to have an awesome show season.
Follow the Xpert’s latest adventures in our first edition – Polar Vortex.
Techno Tchotchke 