Injecting excitement into plastics
The inaugural Plastics Design & Moulding (PDM) event was a finalist in the best launch show category at the prestigious annual Awards for Excellence run by the Association of Exhibition Organisers (AEO). PDM’s success lay in its clear focus on its target audience and on the creative, yet cost-effective, PR approach taken by Wildwood PR to inject new life and excitement into a manufacturing exhibition.
Rather than trying to be all things to all people, like many failing B2B exhibitions, PDM was aimed at a well-defined sector of the UK plastics industry – injection moulding, which accounts for roughly half of the plastics market, and allied this with plastics product design. This original approach gave the exhibition appeal to product designers, who had never been targeted at plastics events before.
As the show’s public relations agency, Wildwood PR was charged with building awareness of the new event to encourage exhibitors, drive visitor attendance and improve perceptions of the plastics industry amongst the general public.
Wildwood PR generated extensive media coverage in the plastics trade media to support the exhibition sales and visitor promotion programme. They also reached out to design audiences with features and previews of the event in “Eureka”, “New Design”, “Engineering” and “The Designer” magazines.
One of the most successful elements of Wildwood’s PR campaign was a ‘Plastics Classics’ on-line vote to find the best plastics product design of all time, with the 12 short listed products displayed at PDM. This generated advance publicity in key design magazines and local press, emphasising the all-important design element of the show and resulting in more than 5,000 votes. The day before the exhibition opened, Wildwood PR announced that Lego had won the vote, securing a half page article in the Daily Mail, a feature on BBC online and a 10 minute discussion on Plastics Classics and PDM on the Business News section of Radio 2’s Johnnie Walker show, thus promoting the importance of the industry to a much wider audience, generating profile for the event and instilling confidence and a “feel-good” buzz amongst PDM exhibitors, conference speakers and visitors.
Since its launch the show continues to impress. The 2006 event saw 30% more exhibitors than on its debut last year, a rise in visitor numbers to 2,880, up more than 5% on last year’s total, and a PR campaign extended to embrace “The Engineer” and ” MCAD” amongst others.