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- 🍐#94 Guerilla marketing, riddles, raffles, and more from the NeurIPS conference
🍐#94 Guerilla marketing, riddles, raffles, and more from the NeurIPS conference
This was my week.
Jakub Czakon
December 15, 2024
Hey,
Happy holidays everyone! I’ll be coming back in Jan.
But just a reminder before this holiday season. Don’t get too drunk (on fermented pears🍐or otherwise). You saw uncle Jeff last year. Not a great look.
This week on the agenda:
Guerilla marketing at conferences
Games and riddles at booths
Raffles and giveaways
Cool brand plays
+ a few bonus links at the end
Total pearusing time: 4min
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Developer marketing insights
I am at NeurIPS, the biggest AI research conference of the year so figured I’d share some cool ideas I saw.
1. Guerilla marketing ideas for conferences
Two companies went for really cool “in front of the venue” stunts that gathered a ton of attention for what I presume was not crazy amounts of $.
SKIM.AI did a few coffee stands with free coffees handed out to folks for scanning the badge. Bonus points for making the coffee names AI/ML themed like a decaf being “Restricted Boltzmann Machine” and stuff.
Shadeform set up a truck with digital banners on it.
2. Games and riddles at booths
I think the biggest winner was games and riddles. People loved them. Fun, competitive, different. For the crowd that loves to solve problems (ideally better/faster than others 😉 ) that was a great match.
Jane Street probably did the best job overall. They went all in on riddles and had 4 or 5 different ones spread out across the booth.
Re
Recogni (a chip company that does 16-bit precision at 4-bit energy) struck that great balance in their game between simple-to-learn and hard-to-master while connecting the game to the product (bits).
Jump Trading went for a simple, hyper-competitive game that also tested fast in-your-had calculations. Makes sense for them for sure.
3. Raffles and giveaways
I like raffles cause people typically have a bias for a chance to win something big (vs certainty of getting something small). And they are happy to share their contacts and stuff for a chance to win.
There were free GPU/AMD/Cloud credit raffles.
But I liked the fun ones like Lego blocks (don’t have a photo of that, unfortunately).
Branded snowboard from Lambda:
We did a robot transformer (at an AI research conference where 90% of people trained transformer architecture models).
4. Other cool branding ideas
Databricks had some actual branded bricks on the booth ;)
Recogni had branded coffees. Bonus points for serving matcha latte (and a good one at that 😉 )
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