Not your typical gatecrashing

Having been a marketer for 15+ years now, I’ve gathered a fair share of gatecrashing campaign experiences in my bag–right from my first ever flash mob at the HDI event in Chicago in 2012, to flying the Failsforce blimp at Dreamforce in 2018. 

What I’m writing about today stands out not because of the size of the campaign, or the extravagance involved. It’s unique because it is a classic case of how just listening to the market and acting swiftly can work wonders for your brand. 

In 2018, Freshservice was about to position itself against the market leader as the better alternative.

The marketing team felt it was time to make some noise in the market about the product. After discussing a bunch of ideas, we decided to make the splash with a gatecrashing campaign. Gatecrashing the Knowledge 18 event at Las Vegas was an obvious choice, considering how ServiceNow’s annual user conference typically attracts around 20,000 people each time. 

Budgets were secured, ideas were drawn up, the battle plans were made, and around the time when the ITSM community landed in Las Vegas for the event, Freshservice had taken the city over. Our logo was everywhere—billboards, walking billboards, taxi top boards, and just about everything else you can think of. There was no way anyone who landed in Vegas didn’t notice Freshservice. 

But that successful execution of a well-planned takeover isn’t why this campaign is special. 

On the first day of the conference, while surfing through the sea of #knowledge18 tweets, we noticed a trend–attendees were annoyed because they didn’t get a good cuppa coffee at the conference. Thousands of attendees were at the venue, bright and early, but found themselves waiting in long lines for coffee and had to cough up several tens of dollars for a simple breakfast. That, right there, was the launchpad we needed to elevate our campaign and take it to the skies.

We decided to jump in and give the people the coffee and cookies they wanted before the conference started. In quick time, we took over a Starbucks outlet that was right outside the conference venue at the Venetian, hung up a Freshservice banner, and started handing out free coffee to any event attendee who came by. And we had thousands of them, since most attendees had to walk past the Starbucks to get to the conference venue! 

Here’s Noel Wax, the CEO of GroundSwell Group, who worked on this with remarkable agility and creativity, talking about how he executed this in quick time:

We didn’t have to wait for users to complain about the competitor product, or sell our features hard to ensure people noted our brand and could recognize our name and logo. We simply listened and observed smartly and acted quickly, and by the end of the two-day event every ITSM professional there knew the name Freshservice. Branding Mission, Accomplished.