🍐#94 Guerilla marketing, riddles, raffles, and more from the NeurIPS conference

This was my week.

Author

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

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

If your 2025 plans include reaching a highly engaged tech audience, TLDR should be on your radar. 

If you haven't heard of TLDR, they are a trusted dev resource for the latest news in Tech, AI, InfoSec, etc. with over 5 million total subscribers.

Learn more about running your first campaign with TLDR.

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 😉 )

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"Thanks so much for your time and all the thoughtful feedback coming from the workshop.

I feel like we are in a much better place to start our website rebuild. "

Sarah Morgan, Head of Product and Customer Engagement, Scout APM

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."

Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2000+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Reply

or to participate.