My Best Promotion: Ed Levy

Self-promotion is a necessary tool. Ed Levy, president of Edventure Promotions Inc., Chicago, described a promotion that his company did to show off their many capabilities and what it has to offer.

Ed and his team put together a direct mail piece in a custom packaging that highlighted the five most popular categories in the industry. The promotion yielded a high response rate and changed the way Levy approached advertising his brand.

Promo Marketing: Could you briefly describe a promotion that you consider one of your best?

Ed Levy: Well, the first pyramid award I won was for a self-promotion back in 2010. It was a direct mail piece in a custom packaging that described the five most popular product categories and our ability to take basic items and, with a little bit of graphic creativity and packaging ingenuity, make something really special. We had such a high rate of response that we never ended up sending all of the kits we made out.

PM: What items did you use for the promotion, and why?

EL: 64 percent of the sales in our industry are things you wear, things you write on, things you write with, things you drink from and things you carry. So it was a t-shirt, a notepad, a pen, a water bottle and a tote bag.

PM: What was the promotion’s goal, and what did you do to make that goal happen?

EL: The goal is—because I hated cold calling—that I created something that really explain the capabilities of Edventure without having to make a cold call and let our actions speak for themselves. It was something that showed we could take five basic items that everyone loves to buy, and package them differently with a creative graphic treatment and create something meaningful, memorable and measurable out of it versus just, ‘here’s a pen, here’s a water bottle, here’s a T-shirt.’ We put a creative strategy into it. I would send these out and I’d say four out of five people would call me unsolicited so I really only had to follow up with one out of five people to make sure they got the box because everyone saw it and would just call me to tell me how cool it was.