From: Ramon Chen
Sent: Monday, October 15, 2001 2:12 PM
To: *All MetaTV
Subject: Hot News Alert: Update on Marketing Strategy for Western Cable Show 2001
Hello everyone,
This is a note to update you on our current Western Cable Show strategy.
After careful consideration of all the variables, we have decided to adapt our strategy for Western Cable 2001 to focus ONLY on partner booths and will not be deploying our own booth. Please note that our public position is that we are “NOT withdrawing or pulling out of western”, we are altering our strategy to optimize our resources for our customers.
Because a show as large and as complex as Western, although driven by marketing, is a company wide effort, the timing and resources needed to execute our own booth would definitely put additional pressure on our ability to deliver on the projects we have ongoing. We are currently showing incredible momentum in our business, with much demand from key customers. By adapting to this new strategy we intend to relieve resources and allow everyone to focus and support the tasks that will make our customers successful.
In addition we believe that we can achieve many of our marketing and sales lead generation objectives within a partner booth focus/concept and as a result will be able to realize Western show cost savings as well as personnel time savings. Finally, although we will not be positioning this to the public at large, because of the current trade show climate and various corporate travel policies, it is unclear as to the attendance and value of the show this time around based on any number of unpredictable variables.
As many of you may know Western Cable http://www.cct-assn.org/westernshow/ is being held this year at the Anaheim convention center Nov 27-30.
MetaTV participated last year and we kicked off our trade show campaign over the last 12 months with our own 10×20 booth. We then followed it with a very successful suite of additional shows, the most significant being NCTA in June with our 30×50 booth. (see enclosed shortcut for all Capt. Midnights for a recap of our show activities throughout the history of MetaTV).
We are tremendously proud to have been able, in a short space of time to take full advantage of themes, locations, booth positioning and key interests of our target audiences. Each time we have been able to leverage our 3 traits of IAA (Innovate. Adapt. Amaze) through our ability to produce innovative demo’s, marketing concepts, adaptive give aways and guerrilla marketing opportunities. The results have been an amazing number of leads, brand awareness and sustained momentum for MetaTV. We have continuously set high standards in how we market and represent MetaTV at major shows and the marketing team as well as everyone who will be representing MetaTV will still deliver upon the results we lay out on our new strategy. Our revised plan will include optimizing our press coverage and guerilla marketing tactics to ensure that we once again capture significant brand, leads and awareness at Western 2001.
Finally, any marketing personnel time and other resources freed as a consequence of non-full booth deployment will continue to be redirected to support Engineering through QA efforts, Portal Designer activities, training and customer support site build out.
As ever, thank you for all of your hard work and continued efforts. I believe our updated strategy shows once again how we are able to adapt, continuing our impressive momentum while being ever conscious of an ever shifting landscape. If you have any questions at all regarding Western or other matters, please feel free to stop by marketing and we’ll be happy to answer them.
– Ramon