In honor of Veteran's Day I thought I'd write about this promotion that I was involved with during my agency days. It didn't have an online component, but was a highly interactive promotion nonetheless that started back in 1999 while I was working with Eastman Kodak and the Wal-Mart photo teams.
Wal-Mart wanted an in-store promotion that would help its customers and store associates express their patriotism and pride around Veterans Day. The Wal-Mart photo department was the perfect place to host this in-store promotion and we were
asked to propose some ideas to help reach this objective. The Kodak Picture Kiosk was at the time still a fairly new service and Kodak's objective was to get people to try it as a way to make photo enlargements and reprints.
So we proposed a Veteran's Day promotion in which invited Wal-Mart customers to bring a photo of their favorite veteran into Wal-Mart and make a complimentary sheet of reprints on the KODAK Picture Kiosk. One 5" x 7" reprint would be displayed on the "Wall Of Honor" to celebrate local veterans and the other 5" x 7" print the customers would keep. To add additional value a special photo holder was created which was used to showcase the photos both in-store and to give to the customer.
The promotion highlighted Veteran’s Day and created a sense of
patriotism and pride in Wal-Mart shoppers and associates while
reinforcing the local “hometown” culture. It was a huge success and store participation was tremendous. Some stores displayed more than 1,000 photos. One year a store built a scale model of the Washington Monument for their photo display. Wal-Mart´s Director of Photo Center operations praised the promotion as "the most successful Veterans Day event of the past years."
The promotion was recognized as a finalist in the 1999 PRO Awards that first year and then in 2002 it won Best of Show in the Account Specific Category. That was of course a year after 9/11 and we were now at war in Iraq. So the promotion was extended to include not only veterans but also current men and women enlisted in the armed forces. Then in 2004 the theme of the promotion was tied into the yellow ribbon which was used as the picture holder.
I am no longer working with the Kodak and Wal-Mart teams, but I understand that this promotion is still going on in some of the stores this year. It's a promotion that is timeless and perhaps Wal-Mart will consider incorporating an online element into the program sometime in the future. I am very proud to have been involved in this promotion for so many years and today being Veteran's Day I would just like to take the time to remember and thank all our veterans as well as our current service men and women.
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