Mobile World Congress: Drive Traffic, Not PR

Mobile World Congress is likely one of the biggest trade shows your company does every year. With more than 85,000 attendees and 3,900 media and analysts attending, it seems like a great time to make an announcement and get plenty of coverage, right?

Hold on a minute. For a few companies, that may actually be true. But for the rest, an announcement made at the show is likely to get lost in a sea of voices screaming for attention. Think about it: there are more than 1,800 exhibitors across several halls. If even half release news at the show, there will be close to 1,000 announcements. Is yours strong enough to get the attention it deserves?

Instead of competing with every other company out there for coverage, consider announcing your news before the show to drive traffic, not PR, at the show itself. This strategy has several benefits:

• It will drive more traffic to your booth because attendees will see the news ahead of time and put you on their “must visit” list for the show.
• You have a better chance to get on a reporter’s calendar. Reporters are getting inundated for meetings at the show, mostly because PR teams feel they need to fill up their executive’s schedules with meetings to have a successful show. The average reporter gets 300-400 requests to meet at an event like MWC. They’ll likely max out at fewer than 25. Do the math.
• MWC is loud and there are tons of distractions. Reporters and analysts traversing the huge show floor(s) might be late or miss meetings altogether, lessening the impact and coverage of your release.
• The above executives will have a lighter media briefing schedule and can commit to more customer and partner meetings.

So, how should you do it? There are two schools of thought here, and neither one is wrong. They just depend on your overall marketing strategy:

• Make your announcement two weeks or more before the show, and use your internal media list as well as the MWC list to schedule pre-briefs. Reporters aren’t yet crazy busy with pre-show briefings. This will help put your company’s booth on the “must visit” list, but you have to plan well in advance and stick to your internal deadlines.
• Make your announcement at the show, but conduct briefings under embargo one to two weeks in advance. This gives you some buzz factor at the show. Make sure the show daily is on your pre-brief list.

In both of the scenarios above, you can also invite media and analysts to your booth for a demo if it makes sense to keep that personal connection, but remember, they are looking for news to fill their daily quotas, so don’t be offended if they pass. In the best case scenario, they’ve already covered your news based on the pre-briefing and their articles are driving traffic to your booth. Mission accomplished.