SUMMARY:
The government of Finland hired Rocket Science to launch a new office in Silicon Valley that would market the country’s intellectual resources to local entrepreneurs, investors and universities. As one part of our overall marketing strategy, Rocket Science conceived a launch event/publicity stunt designed to integrate Finland into the entrepreneur culture of the Valley and generate word-of-mouth among the bloggers. The event was so successful that, not only did it make our client a recognized name among our target market and pack the room at a VIP launch event, but now both Nokia and O’Reilly Media are vying to turn the competition into an annual event. We created fame and immortality.

STRATEGY:
Our initial market research among entrepreneurs, investors and academics found that nearly every country around the world maintains a business development office in or near Silicon Valley. These offices/efforts were almost universally derided for being stuffy, out-of-touch, governmental bureaus that bear little resemblance to the entrepreneurial culture they are trying to court. So we quickly decided that traditional marketing approaches would not work. We told the Prime Minister to stay home while we set about to create a social ground-swell—to figure out a way to become part of the Valley ecosystem and not simply shout our marketing messages at an already saturated audience.

So we conceived the Web2Mobile business plan competition*—designed to show entrepreneurs and investors (and innovators lurking in universities) that Finland can walk the Silicon Valley walk. The name derived from two hot trends: Web 2.0 and Mobility (our research confirmed that the one thing Finland is well known for is their mobile technology). But because the Valley is already awash in business plan competitions, we had to come up with a prize better than a pot full of money as well as something unique to Finland. So our prize was something that money can’t buy: access to the inner-most people at Nokia -- perhaps the best known company from Finland.

IMPLEMENTATION:
With Nokia on board to support our competition, all we needed to do next was to guarantee a massive turn-out of qualified entrepreneurs and accompanying interest from the media, investors, and Silicon Valley VIPs.

Since neither the FinNode office nor the Web2Mobile competition yet existed, the traditional media was reluctant to provide any coverage until we had proven our stripes. So to promote the competition and attract high-quality business plans we tapped the entrepreneur social networks and called upon bloggers to engage in dialog and spread the word as they saw fit.

But we didn’t just pitch the bloggers; we set in motion a tsunami: We enlisted the support of angel investors and well-known serial entrepreneurs to blog our competition and post their logos at our competition page; We formalized a partnership with Red Herring to be the official co-host of the event and to supply their editor-in-chief for the competition judging panel; We solicited award candidates from respected entrepreneur networks and incubators. Soon we had Yahoo! wanting to host the judging event at their campus, and we attracted a panel of 10 top-tier VCs and investors to be the competition judges.

RESULTS/ROI:
As a result of our work, our foreign client is now integrated into the ecosystem of the Silicon Valley, and when the director makes his biz dev calls people say “I’ve heard of FinNode.” While that result alone is priceless, some of the other measurable results are:

• 14,388 unique visitors came to the Web2Mobile competition site within just 6 weeks of the November 2nd call-for-entries date
• 2,184 competition entry forms were downloaded
• 101 qualified entrepreneurs submitted complete entries before the December 17th  deadline, and entries came from 20 countries around the world including Australia, India, USA, Finland, Peru, Russia and even Afghanistan
• 21 companies agreed to co-sponsor the event including Yahoo!, Red Herring, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Garage Technology Ventures, BridgeBank, SK Telecom (Helio), and many others (see supplemental materials package for screen shot)
• 300 people attended the launch party after the competition judging event (only two hundred were invited) and the crowd was packed with Silicon Valley ‘insiders’
• 54 bloggers and reporters wrote articles about the events (during the project term)

In addition, two influential companies are now vying to have our one-off publicity stunt become an on-going event: Nokia’s top executives now want to sponsor a worldwide series of Web2Mobile business plan competitions hosted in the U.S., Asia and Europe. And O’Reilly Media wants to feature the Web2Mobile competition as a key attraction to their 3-day Etel event which boasts thousands of attendees annually.

Rocket Science delivered more than just an attention-getting publicity stunt, larger than a sold-out launch event with a star-studded guest list, and more effective than anything money could buy. We made our client a famous and respected name in the community and we’ve given them immortality.