🍐#121 Marketing ideas from ICML 2025 conference

Hey,

We ran this private boat lunch event and I ended up drinking Canadian cider. Liked it a lot. So I checked what it was and low and behold it was pear🍐, obviously!

This week on the agenda:

• Booths and activations

• Giveaways, swag and ruffles

• Unconventional conference stunts

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

Developer marketing insights

NOTE: This issue is mostly images from the ICML conference in Vancouver, so if anything doesn’t load or cuts out the email you can read it online on newslepear.beehiiv.com.

1. Swag and giveaways

If you are in machine learning you know that famous paper “Attention Is All You Need”. We went with that theme across various ideas. In this case “Attention Coffee Is All You Need”.

Big hit. We’d give it out together with a small spiral notebook with a pun connected to the product.

Continuing on machine learning puns and a scratch that idea we did sweet and savory snacks. Again tried to connect to product where possible but make it mostly fun.

Really nicely done t-shirt from Bagel Labs. They had a logo in the front but the back was all this super cool print connecting various hummanity milestones with machine learning milestones. Super cool.

Mechanical keyboard giveaway. Really nicely done with a logo on spacebar and brand colors. And the box is small enough that you’d definitely fit that in your bag going back home.

Tencent went for super cute figurines and plush penguins. Awesome stuff and people loved it.

Yoyo’s from Lambda. I wonder if it is just me and my nostalgic memories of playing with this thing but I loved the idea.

Lego set giveaway is always a good idea. Simple and very dev conference will have more people who love it than not. And when your company is called Comet connecting it to space is an additional nice touch.

Playstation raffle. Simple and works.

Jane Street always does AMAZING job with booths, activations, and swag. They have everything figured out on the logistics front too. This is how they dispatched thousands of t-shirts.

2. Booths and activations

But the thing that Jane Street does best and what always brings big crowd is their riddles and puzzles. Spoke to people at the booth and they have a “riddles guy” who designs them. This is next level but folks LOVED THEM. They change riddles every few events too so you can count on returning customers ;)

Coffee at the booth is simple but who doesn’t need coffee. Optiver did this print on it and as I spoke to them they shared that idea for printing photos of participants (below on a napkin). They used this company https://evebot.cc/ that does coffee printing. It was super quick and super nice.

Connecting that coffee to your product doesn’t hurt either. Nice little otouch from Handshake.

You can also connect it to the theme of the conference (AI/robots) and do a robot coffee. Though this time this seemed less of a hit than half a year ago.

Games and challenges get lots of people interested. It is fun to play games. Especially when there are leaderboards that you can climb.

3. Unconventional ideas

This time we wanted to go unconventional and it was a great decision. These coffee bikes that we put in front of the venue had lines the entire conference. People loved the funny coffee names (all machine learning puns) and everyone seemed to have seen us. Nice.

Runpod was the only company that figured there are digital billboards in front of the venue and rented some space on one of them. I’d perhaps try and go for something more funny/attention-grabbing but even being there with your message was a good idea imho.

They also went a bit more guerilla and put stickers on sidewalks around the venue. It was hard not to spot it and lets be honest. Probably doesn’t cost a ton.

You can also go super guerilla and just put stickers in the conference bathrooms. Don’t know what organizers thought about it but when you are super early stage there is likely not that much risk that you are taking so why not.

We tried this idea and some folks found it really funny. Selfie frames that looked like that famous paper but had puns all over them.

I also loved this small touch from Ollama. I think they rented an office just across the venue and put a funny billboard in the window. Not sure how this worked out but if you tweaked this idea it could have gone viral I think.

Need more developer marketing insights?

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2. Bonus links to check out

• 📰 5 things I learned from 5 years at Vercel | Lee Robinson

• 📰 How we built the Fern site, an honest-take | Fern blog

• 🎧️ Wordware founders, Filip Kozera and Robert Chandler - non-engineers can build AI workflows | Scaling DevTools

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