Meet Me In St. Louis – Capitol Broadcasting Company

by FOX 50 Marketing Coordinator Terri Overby

When our promotional partner Second Street Media announced they were hosting their first annual Media Summit in St. Louis, I jumped at the chance to go. I was asked to do a presentation on our award-winning Lip Dub campaign and co-host a roundtable discussion on Sales Promotional Events planning. I was honored, very excited and honestly, a bit nervous.

Personally, I have always wanted to visit St. Louis. It is the setting for one of my all-time favorite movies (same title as my story) and I love to travel and visit monuments, so seeing The Arch was definitely on my travel bucket list. The Arch itself was also featured in a terrifying way in one of my favorite books where it basically held down a giant zombie-demon, so the thought of me staying in the hotel right beside it made me chuckle. I actually felt a humming vibration when I touched The Arch which was as thrilling as it was unnerving. (Insert the “Twilight Zone Theme” here.)

Traveling somewhere new also meant I would be able to add another snow globe to my growing “Travel Globe” collection. Yes, this is a real thing that I get excited about. Some of them are on my desk if you want to check them out. I was also able to visit the St. Louis Zoo, which was amazing! I even had a gorgeous pink and black butterfly try to hitch a ride out of the butterfly house on my purse. I sadly returned it.

Day 1
The conference kicked off with me being able to finally meet my WRAL co-hort Tara Whitfield. (Yeah, we had to go to another state to meet.) It was electric! We walked in to upbeat music and images of famous scenes from movies projected around the room as memes with their famous lines replaced with the word “promotions”. (Ex. – from Frozen – “Do you wanna build a promotion?”). Very creative.

We had marketing experts like Gordon Borrell give fantastic presentations that I truly believe everyone learned something from. (Ex. Did you know that the average person passes by 5,000 ads a day, notices 285 and only truly pays attention to 6?!) The rest of the day was spent watching fellow promoters present successful contests and promotions from around the country and breaking off into groups to brainstorm ideas and real solutions that attendees could take back home.

Day 2
I’m not gonna lie, Day 2 was ROUGH! We started bright and early at 7:30am, and after a long night out, where the majority of folks had a little “too much fun”, the room shared one, big headache. Hardly anyone was speaking, but everyone was texting and inhaling coffee. All of us were split into groups and challenged to do something that we all do on a daily basis: create a multi-media, multi-level sales promotion for one of three major clients in the form of a Powerpoint presentation in a VERY short amount of time. Let’s just say, our group started off with 14 people and by the end, there were six of us and the rest were nowhere to be found. The Six Pack (that is what we decided to call ourselves) hammered out a project based on an idea that I came up with that had Luke Bryan performing a charity concert and judging a pizza competition for a pizza to be named in his honor in his hometown (hey, stranger things have happened and our budget was huge, so, my theory was “go big or go home”). I presented it and honestly ad-libbed most of it. It was entertaining.

How I confirmed my belief that you should never depend on technology when doing a presentation…
The final part of the conference was a panel where I presented the Lip Dub Project which we won Best Video Contest for in 2013. So, you know that dream where you are up in front of a group of people and everyone is laughing at you and you don’t know why and you look down and it turns out you are in your underwear? Well, nothing like that happened, but the entire projection system did fail after my third slide. I did get to play our video recap before it died, so visually, not much was lost. I had several people come up to me afterwards interested in how they could do something similar for their market.

The whole computer system eventually failed which provided one of the most enjoyable parts of the whole conference – a joint sing-a-long to “Don’t Stop Believing” via Journey pumped through the conference room speakers.

Overall, the summit was an exciting event that explored how media companies can drive revenue and results for clients with promotions. It was a unique gathering with many different media types and market sizes represented, with a diverse audience including everyone from corporate leaders to local sales staff. The summit focused on the shift in how advertisers spend and how media companies are generating millions of dollars and seeing results through promotions. It was refreshing to spend time with folks who understood exactly what I do and how it positively affects business without having to explain how. I learned as much as I shared and made great networking connections for future projects. This conference was worth the travel.

I was totally serious about the snow globes. I bought three.

Thanks to FOX 50’s Terri Overby for this capcom story & for these capcom photos.