My Best Promotion: Bill Resnik

Working for a tech company in New York City can mean long hours and a lot of work, but there’s always room for a little bit of fun. Bill Resnik, vice president, partner and owner of Proforma Printing and Promotion, Boston, described one promotion that stuck with him, and gave employees at PayPal an opportunity to play some games.

Promo Marketing: Could you briefly describe a promotion that stood out to you?

Bill Resnik: [My favorite promotion was] for PayPal Media Networks—they were beer pong tables. One was for New York, and one was for the Boston office. [It depicted] New York City, and [showed] all the little sub brands under them, and there’s actually a Google bubble burst that shows where they’re located, and same in Boston. And they have a place for the cup holders. So, you can see where they’re located, which is Midtown. The people loved it in these two offices. That was one of my favorite ones. I don’t know if they were celebrating completing a project, but PayPal Media Network also has a lot of companies under the PayPal name, so we’ve gotten a lot of work through those spin-offs. [The cups in the game] were a Hit product—that’s a double acrylic or double plastic [cup].

PM: What did you like about the promotion, and why?

BR: I think the creativity was the best. It’s just so fun to show you that we can brand anything. [It had] the galvanized metal bucket made in the U.S. These little symbols are some of the sub companies. They all mean something. I think the artwork—the fact that we did one for the New York office and the Boston office, the ‘wow’ factor that we heard from the corporate client, and we’ve continued to do some really cool and creative stuff. And now, a lot of these small companies, these people who have left PayPal and [have] gone to small startups, they’re with us now. We have a lot of unique, small, cool tech startups that are using us and only us. They’re really doing some out-of-the-box, creative stuff. My brother is the one who actually handled it, but I love the art. I love the whole concept of it and it’s really unique.

PM: Do you have any advice for your other distributors who want to work for a big tech company like PayPal?

BR: Get spec samples, take advantage of free specs and get them their hands. We’ve done some unique things with Prime, where we worked it out with our Northeast rep, where we had a lunch like this and said, ‘We want to put something in the hands of Prime every two weeks.’ You can’t just ship samples without prices. I could send you a pen, and you say, ‘Oh, that’s so cool. It’s got my name on it,’ but there’s no pricing or any sales with it. It’s not going to do anything. But if we sent them a car charger that has PayPal’s logo on it, and it has a sales sheet with it, and the pricing, and ways you could use this for whatever—trade shows or employee thank-yous—so that’s what we did.

Want to be considered for a future edition of My Best Promotion? Contact Executive Editor Michael Cornnell at (215) 238-5449 or mcornnell@napco.com for a list of questions and other details.