Technology

Every conversation in the event marketing industry eventually comes around to technology. You want to know what tools are out there to make your jobs easier, make your programs more successful and most crucially, make your target consumers love you the most. We have heard your clarion calls for help and now, with this monthly series, EM’s own Ken Briodagh will collect and codify the hottest, newest, most interesting, best (and sometimes worst) technological doohickeys available to you.

Ben & Jerry’s is on the road again, but this year the brand’s sampling tour has a new component—a campaign called City Churn. Fans are encouraged to vote on Twitter for a limited-batch flavor that will be made from locally sourced ingredients in 11 tour markets located on the East and West coasts. Unveiling pop-up parties are then hosted two weeks later alongside local ingredient partners where consumers can test out the result. The tour began in April in Miami and San Diego and wraps up in September in Boston and Seattle.

There’s no better way to win the hearts of wannabe professional baseball players than to create the experience of the best kind of field action there is— pitching, stealing bases and catching fly balls. At this year’s MLB FanFest, Under Armour offered just that, and the opportunity to share all the fun with friends.

Intel wants consumers to know that it’s more than just a chipmaker. So to demonstrate its breadth of innovations to the public, in May it launched a six-month global tour to give consumers the opportunity to experience and interact its technology through Intel-based devices. The tour kicked off in New York City and hit Chicago, Tokyo, Beijing and London in June and July. It will make stops in Sao Paulo and Moscow before wrapping up in Sydney in October.

As part of a multi-faceted national launch of a new bottled water brand called resource, Nestlé Waters North America in June held an event in New York City that caught the attention of national media and put the brand on consumer radar screens. 

Resource is a premium water brand made from 100-percent sustainably sourced spring water and natural electrolytes that give it a distinctive, crisp taste. It comes in bottles made from 50 percent recycled plastic.