American Express - Gets and Gives Credit

Another successful collaboration ends in accolades for our team's performance at CES 2010.

Since 2005, American Express’ OPEN Tradeshow channel has been a terrific source of profitable, high wallet, net new Charge Accounts. In 2009, we began broadening our approach, seeking to drive deeper awareness, consideration and customer engagement in the channel to compliment our success with acquisitions.

As part of that larger effort, I'm thrilled to share some highlights and initial results from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which took place in Las Vegas January 7-10, 2010. As many of you know, this show was the first time the OPEN Forum and Tradeshow teams collaborated to bring OPEN Forum to life in the tradeshow environment. The teams created a unique experience for CES attendees and OPEN Forum readers through an interactive booth experience, robust speaker series, and live blogging and tweeting from the show. This was an exciting event which brought relevant business tips and tools to prospects and Cardmembers at CES, and to those following the show online.

Highlights of the show include:

• 
  Our largest Tradeshow footprint ever, including acquisition stations, terminals with live access to OPEN Forum, and touchscreens with interactive sales collateral
  
• 
  The full launch of OPEN's new handheld devices in Tradeshows, which enable electronic Card applications and instant decisioning capabilities


• 
  The first OPEN Forum Tradeshow speaker series, with Tony Hsieh, Guy Kawasaki, Anita Campbell, John Jantsch, Ben Parr, and Barbara Dybwab speaking directly to prospects and customers in our booth


• 
  Our first live blogging and tweeting on OPEN Forum from the tradeshow floor about the OPEN booth activities and CES product highlights
  

A test of exciting new booth premiums, including a Kindle sweepstakes and excerpts from Seth Godin's new bookEarly results exceeded expectations:

• 
  430 new Charge Card applications, the most applications ever received at CES



• 
  Over 425 attendees at the speaker series over 4 days
  
  
• 
  30,486 page views for all CES-related pages and articles to the OPEN Forum CES experience page



• 
  413 unique Twitter users used the #opences hash tag on tweets during CES. Their tweets reached a combined following of 1,046,478 users
  

CES articles posted to Open Forum during CES continue to drive traffic post show. For example, Anita Campbell's article "10 Tips I Got from Kawasaki at CES" (posted 1/9) has generated over 7,750 page views and 622 tweets to dateWe have strong survey results from customers and prospects who visited the booth:

• 
  80% of all respondents scored their overall experience a 9 or 10 on a scale of 1 to 10



• 
  45% of respondents said they are very/extremely likely to seek out additional information about other OPEN offerings
  
  
• 
  43% of respondents said they are very/extremely likely to visit OPENForum.com after the event
  

42% of Cardmember respondents said their experience will change how they use their CardsQuotes overheard during CES at the OPEN booth include:

• "You have something special for me? Really? That's amazing."

• "I want to get a Card because of OPEN Forum..." - Prospect (who later applied for a Platinum Card)

• "Signing up for OPEN Forum is a 'no brainer' " - Platinum Cardmember

Please join me in thanking the OPEN Forum and Tradeshow teams for their terrific collaboration in making this unique experience come to life for our prospects and Cardmembers. I'd also like to thank Momentum, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Federated Media, Czarnowski and Ogilvy Action for all of their help making this event a success.

Nancy Hood, VP of Marketing - American Express