Event Marketing

As I worked for Sony we frequently used Events in our marketing mix. It's a great way to get your target audience engaged with your brand and use them as Brand Ambassadors - especially when you have a well known and respected brand with a high degree of brand loyalty as Sony. Because of our brand recognition we also had the advantage of being an attractive partner for co-promoted events. One example is an event done in collaboration with MTV and Icelandair.

In 2003 Sony had just launched a small digital camera, the so called Cyber Shot U, and the objective was to communicate a new lifestyle with this camera and make it as indispensable as your phone (capturing pictures of your lifestyle 24/7). As we know now, the phones have since taken over the role of cameras, and pictures are captured and shared on social media sites as a constant and instant thing. But 10 years ago, this lifestyle was still a new thing in the making.

To achieve our objective, we entered a partnership with MTV and Icelandair and wanted to design the coolest event of the year. It turned into a competition called "U win it all". The competition was promoted on MTV and had one winner from each of Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark. The winners could bring for free, 14 of their friends to an all expenses paid for highly entertaining weekend in Iceland. They would receive their own Cyber Shot U camera to capture their unforgettable moments. MTV supplied a film crew that recorded the event, which was screened on MTV. The mechanics of the campaign was a viral campaign, where the winner was the one who could "spread the word" the most.

The event was very successful. In 4 weeks more than 63,000 people in our target group were highly engaged in the viral activity. The winning trip with participation of 60 people was filmed and broadcast several times on MTV and generated lots of PR.

Another successful event was a special event for our HiFi business division, with the objective of increasing the awareness of a fairly new audio format called Super Audio CD (SACD). The Event was called "Get Inside the Music" and was held at the National Museum of Arts in Denmark. In short the event was set up to showcase the high quality of sound when played in SACD format. To achieve this we arranged a number of live concerts in the setting of the museum combined with listening stations set up in cozy sofas, so the live music could be compared to the demonstrations of the SACD sound format. The point was that SACD performed at the level of live concerts with its depth and clarity in tone.

The event was highly successful and won a "Media Lion" at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes. It was the first time a Danish company had won such a prestigious award and I was honored to be the one to travel to Cannes to accept the award.

My role:

• As MarCom Manager for Sony I was responsible for all planning and implementation of the events
• Negotiated and finalized all partnership deals