What You Can Learn From: Aon

Sometimes, the best marketing ideas are just staring you right in the face. Take Aon’s presence at last year’s Risk and Insurance Management Society show. Looking for a concept through which the company could better explain its global capabilities to attendees and position itself as a dynamic industry player, the firm picked its theme from the first name of the event.

Aon licensed Risk, Hasbro’s venerable board game, as the platform for its show activities—an ideal fit not only because of the name itself, but also because of the game’s objective of world domination.

Branding began pre-show with a boxed invite designed to resemble the game, a color-coded card assigning the invitee to one of six teams, and a note that members of the winning team would be eligible to win two round-trip airline tickets to anywhere.

Attendees could earn points for their team by scanning their badge at the booth, talking to a company rep and other activities; Aon reps also could award points.

Brand reps chatted up attendees, handing off qualified prospects to Aon sales staff.
The Risk theme continued on the show floor: An 8-foot-by-10-foot interactive map, projected from above, let attendees step on different regions of the world to learn insurance factoids about that area.

More than 700 attendees participated in the activity, with more than 250 turning into qualified leads. Aon reps liked it, too, as 83 percent said they achieved their business goals for the meeting, and 87 percent said the Risk activities were either helpful or very helpful.