Offline Marketing | PPC Ian

Showtime Capturing Email Leads In Las Vegas

Posted by: PPC Ian Comments: 11 comments so far

May. 16

I’m a huge fan of Las Vegas! One of my current personal goals is spending a good amount of time vacationing and working remotely from Las Vegas within the next few years. Recently, I took an amazing trip to Las Vegas with my wife. We had a great time! Also, we happened across a really cool Showtime photo booth that captures email leads. Today, I’m going to discuss both!

Another Awesome Trip To Las Vegas

PPC Ian Las Vegas 2011

My wife and I try to visit Las Vegas a few times each year. In 2010, we made it there 4 times! We typically like to go when the weather is warm, and that’s exactly why we visited Las Vegas at the end of April. While it was still a bit chilly here in the Bay Area, we enjoyed 70-80 degree weather in sunny Las Vegas.

This time, we decided to stay at the MGM Signature. It was my 2nd time at this hotel, and I highly recommend it. At the Signature, you get to enjoy all the amenities of a condo hotel. The rooms are amazing, the hotel is smoke free and quiet, but you are connected to MGM Grand and all its amenities as well. We really enjoyed the MGM pool and especially the lazy river. I’ve stayed literally everywhere in Las Vegas (Wynn, Aria, Bellagio, Caesar’s, Paris, etc.) and rank the MGM Signature towards the top of my list. It’s great if you’re going to Vegas to relax!

Showtime Las Vegas

In addition to relaxing at the MGM Signature, we did a lot of fun stuff in Vegas including shopping, eating out, a little bit of gambling, and enjoying a great show! In the picture above, you can see us right before The Lion King show at Mandalay Bay. Going into the show, I didn’t know if I’d like it, but must say The Lion King was great. The show was rather long, but definitely worth seeing. I’m also pleased to announce that I actually walked out of the casino making money this trip, always a great thing! It’s always fun coming home from Las Vegas because I now have some new clothes to enjoy as well.

My blog is called PPC Ian, so you know I’ve got online marketing at the top of my mind, even when I’m vacationing. This brings me to my next point: Email lead capture, Las Vegas style!

Capturing Email Leads Via The Showtime Photo Booth

Showtime Photo Booth

Connecting the Signature to MGM Grand is a tunnel with moving walkways. The tunnel connects to MGM right near the pool, a variety of restaurants, some shops, and a Showtime store. You can see a picture above where I’m in front of the Showtime store. We’re fans of Showtime, especially Dexter. Having a store dedicated to Showtime is a really great opportunity for branding. However, that’s not what really caught my eye.

Right across from the Showtime store, we discovered a photo booth. Upon first glance, it looked pretty standard. Then, however, we noticed it was completely free. How could this be? So, we decided to investigate and learned that it was a truly unique, interesting marketing ploy. Here’s how it works: You go in the booth, take a picture with whatever background you want, enter your email address, and then the booth emails you the picture with some special Showtime offers as well. How cool is that? We had a lot of fun, although the picture did turn out a bit crazy!

Showtime Photo Booth Dexter

I’m a huge fan of both online marketing and also offline marketing. (A while back, I wrote about a really neat WebEx offline campaign.) This is a neat case of online marketing and offline marketing converging. Basically, Showtime is capturing thousands of valuable email leads while branding their shows. Email leads are amazingly valuable. Search engines can change their algorithms and traffic levels from SEO and paid search will fluctuate. However, email leads are yours forever. For that reason, Showtime’s strategy makes perfect sense!

We’re now planning our next trip to Las Vegas and I’m thinking maybe we’ll stay at The Cosmopolitan next time. What’s your favorite place to stay in Las Vegas?

All images in this post © PPCIan.com

Posted in: Offline Marketing | Tags: email marketing, showtime photo booth | Comments: 11 comments so far, join the discussion!

WebEx Caltrain Station Takeover

Posted by: PPC Ian Comments: 4 comments so far

May. 26

I was having lunch with my old Stanford pal Alex today, fellow online marketer and owner of The Hamburger Phone, a website where you can buy that super cool Hamburger Phone featured in the movie Juno. Alex has some other sites, but this one is my favorite because I can’t get enough of the hamburger design. Maybe I just like hamburgers, but I digress…

WebEx Caltrain Station Takeover

We both agreed that the pay per click corporate world is hot right now. In fact it couldn’t be hotter. Despite an overall crazy economy, careers in SEM are recession proof. However, as with anything hot, it’s important to plan for the long run. What happens when search engines get really smart and start abstracting a lot of the day-to-day work? What happens when SEM becomes super easy and large teams are no longer needed to manage campaigns?

Simple! Search marketing professionals will need to rebrand themselves across marketing channels: offline, display, email, and others. The search marketing career path may become a well-rounded one. For this very reason, I’m a big proponent of diversifying one’s skill set. In fact, I joined my current company to learn all about television and radio advertising, disciplines none of my prior companies participated in.

With this very long introduction, I wanted to take some time today and share a very cool offline campaign that I recently noticed, one that took a lot of creativity: WebEx’s San Francisco Caltrain Station Takeover. While SEM in its current form is here to stay for a very long time, it’s never too early to start diversifying your skill set into the offline marketing world. This will not only round out your toolkit but will also make you Director or even VP material!

I Really Enjoy Taking Caltrain To Work

I spend the majority of my time in my company’s San Francisco office. It’s conveniently located near the San Francisco Caltrain station and I take Caltrain to work. For those of you new to Caltrain, it’s basically a train that goes all the way from the South Bay to San Francisco. It’s an amazingly convenient, cheap, and fast form of transportation, one that can save you thousands of dollars of wear and tear on your car while allowing you to relax (or work) on the way to your job.

The Demographics of Caltrain Are Top Notch

As marketers, we all know that demographics are important. Target the right group of individuals and your returns will be through the roof. Caltrain, in my opinion, offers amazing demographic targeting for savvy marketers. Most of the folks I see on the train going to and from work are very similar to myself: Decision makers and executives in the Bay Area corporate world. If you’re selling B2B solutions like WebEx, this is the group you’re after!

WebEx Completely Takes Over the San Francisco Caltrain Station

A month or so ago, I got off the train in San Francisco and noticed that WebEx took over the entire Caltrain station. Everywhere I looked, I saw ads for WebEx. It’s hard to miss them! You can view just a few photos below of the WebEx’s banners, clock, pillars, and even advertisements on the floor! For the reasons mentioned above, I personally feel like this offline campaign is pure genius. WebEx targets the right demographic audience at the right time! Not only are they targeting decision makers, but they are targeting these decision makers as they arrive at work in the morning.

So there you have it, one of the really cool and innovative offline marketing campaigns of the last few months. While the charter of my blog will always be online marketing, I’m looking forward to sharing other great offline campaigns as I come across them! As a closing tip, I encourage you to approach your CMO as you come up with great offline strategies. You don’t want to do this too frequently (you might dilute your brand as a PPC expert), but the right tempo can work wonders for your career.