A Physical Copy of Digital Collateral

Oftentimes a physical giveaway doesn't give us quite the capacity we need to create the value we want to share or even convey our message. This can be unfortunate because, not only is a physical giveaway an actual branded reminder of what we represent, but also digital material is so easily lost that our impression risks evaporating altogether. That's why it can be helpful to come up with a physical embodiment of digital collateral. This gives you the best of both worlds.

Flash drives are an excellent example. We brand them, obviously, and an empty flash drive has value, but we can do better than that! By putting something useful on the drive, we offer people the value of digital storage as well as the thing we include.

We partnered with a university School of Business to do just such a thing. While prospective students visited the campus, we built them a visit that moved quickly from the "all about us" section to a genuinely interesting business topic. We had them highlight "building wealth" (or in other words, retirement savings, but in a much more appealing way to teenagers way on the other end of their working lives!). We had them meet in a space with an extremely large monitor and begin the session by having the guest indicate how much oney they expected to amass over the course of a career to retire comfortably. Then we mapped that on a curve.

Then we displayed a complex Excel spreadsheet that we had created, and discussed the most important contributing factors to building wealth, things like starting income, rate of saving, company match, etc. We indicated which parameters the guest could change, and the wealth curve that we had built adjusted automatically as they played with those parameters. Over the course of the discussion we modeled for them an ideal wealth curve based on their priorities and feedback, and matched it to their initial assessment.

To conclude, we gave them a branded flash drive with the programming we had built on it, as well as plenty of room for them to save future work.

Guests leave with a hugely positive impression of the school, smarter for the experience, a useful giveaway with plenty of storage, and an incredibly valuable digital tool that they won't forget to return to!