Promo - November 2008 - (Page 12)

Weather Makers #4 Best Vehicle-Based Experiential Campaign realism, making it look and feel like an actual storm. GORE-TEX AND WINDSTOPPER When visitors emerged—dry— KNOW WHAT’S INSIDE TOUR they could watch demonstrations AGENCY: Marketing Werks to learn about the science and CLIENT: W.L. Gore and Associates technology behind the making of Gore-Tex products. For example, What better way to introduce people learned about the breathabilpeople to the weather-fighting ity of the fabric and its waterproof attributes of Gore outerwear than to capabilities. Attendees also watched dress them up in it, pound them with footage of the products worn in rain, lash them with high winds, and real-life situations and tests being set them shaking to booming conducted in Gore labs. thunder claps. “The whole idea was to provide That’s exactly what the company a different consumer experience,” did when it embarked says Leela Sullivan, on its Know What’s senior director of Visitors to Gore’s What’s Inside Tour braved a Mother Inside Tour, a travelclient services for Nature-inspired storm to test ing road show that out Gore-Tex and Windstopper gave visitors a chance products inside the vehicle’s rain chamber. The experience to try out Gore-Tex garnered more than 49 million and Windstopper media impressions alone. fabrics in real-life weather conditions. “This was a way we could sort of pull back the curtain and get consumers to touch, feel and experience our products,” Melissa Riggs, a consumer marketing associate for the company, says. “We said, come and check out our science experiment.” Gore created an extreme weather chamber, modeled after labs the company uses to test its gear, inside a 30by-20-foot vehicle. Once inside, people dressed in Gore-Tex outerwear and “dialed up” their own stormy weather, controlling the severity of the wind, rain and intense cold. A f lashing strobe light and claps of thunder added to the IDEA TO STEAL: KEEP IT REAL “As marketers, we run the risk of being hokey or trying to do something that isn’t genuine,” Melissa Riggs, a consumer marketing associate at Gore, says. “By putting the real ‘us’ out there, our tour worked. Today people are so savvy. They see right through stuﬀ that is not genuine.” Marketing Werks, the agency that manages the program. Gore received such a positive response during its first tour in 2006 that it renewed the event in 2007. It made stops at everything from balloon festivals and film premieres to snowboard championships and retail outlets. As a result, the tour logged 43,032 miles and made stops at 39 events and 18 retail locations between October 2007 and June 2008. More than 833,000 people saw the chamber over 127 days. What’s more, 28,489 people either went into the weather chamber or interacted with the vehicle. And the experience is still going strong. Now in its third year, the tour is again crisscrossing the nation through next spring. “There are a lot of tours, but this is one that definitely sticks out in people’s minds,” Sullivan says. While Gore says it can’t track sales leads from the event, retailers reported positive feedback from newly acquired customers. “We really put Gore out there as we are,” Riggs says. “Yes, we are a bunch of scientists and engineers. The old cliché is we’re pretty dorky, but at the end of the day, we found people are really into it.” —Amy Johannes 12 november 2008 / WWW.PROMOMAGAZINE.COM / Promo http://WWW.PROMOMAGAZINE.COM

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Promo - November 2008 Contents Editor's Note Pro Awards The Promo 100 The Agency Center Resource Center Index of Advertisers Promoland

Promo - November 2008

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