My Best Promotion

FEBRUARY'S MY BEST Promotion comes from Patricia Keays, business development manager for Right Sleeve Marketing Inc., Toronto. Patricia was kind enough to share her recent work with the advertising agency TAXI in designing a limited run of promotional figurines, complete with retail packaging, for the cell phone and service provider Koodo Moblie, using the company's mascot, the luchador El Tabador.

Promo Marketing: Could you describe a promotion that you consider one of your best?

Patricia Keays: The mini muchachos and their packaging were a project created by TAXI for Koodo, which is a youth-oriented telecommunications company in Canada. TAXI wanted to create a value-add offering that would work in conjunction with the current Koodo advertising campaign. Basically if you purchased a new phone for the holidays of 2010, you received one of four muchachos for free. The entire set was also available for sale, with a portion of the proceeds going to charity.

PM: What made this a good promotion for you?

PK: I thought it was the best because it was fun—a new, cool brand with a lot of traction in the marketplace. The idea of producing a collectible was fun. And that it was custom, it was outside of the box. it wasn't a T-shirt or a bag or a pen. It was a toy, it was a collectible, etc. Also the collectible figurines were, as I said, being sold across Canada to raise money during the holiday season, and the charity of choice was Food Banks Canada. So another reason it was cool was because it's always nice when the swag we produce will in some way help others.

PM: What was the best decision you made with this program, and why?

PK: Continually setting client expectations is common practice at RIGHTSLEEVE. Mark Graham, our founder, is constantly reminding the team that this is as important as creating a great customer experience. So from the very beginning, all expectations were laid out, from the very start when we submitted our first proposal for the project. So knowing that it was going to be an overseas production and what that involved, ocean versus air and what kind of PVC, what hard PVC versus soft PVC is, constantly setting those expectations.