National Restaurant
Association – The Show

The National Restaurant Association approached R&R to initiate a partnership to develop a creative campaign to drive attendance to its upcoming event, The Show, in 2019. Our first step was to relentlessly research the audience – thousands of food and beverage industry professionals.

To drive awareness to the 2019 National Restaurant Association Show, we developed a thought-provoking campaign to make a profound statement that anything new in the industry will be seen heard and tasted first at the Show. We called it, “Before it’s a thing, it’s here.”

Rather than focusing on traditional media like the National Restaurant Association had done in the past, we took a digital-forward approach. Leveraging previous CRM data to segment the audience, we were able to craft custom copy to engage the diverse subsets. We also used third-party data partners (Factual, Bombora, Dun & Bradstreet, and Grapeshot) to enhance targeting. We crafted many versions of copy and creative assets, including standard display, native, gifs, cinemagraphs, video, and a specially developed Yieldmo ticker and positioned the National Restaurant Association as thought leaders and avoided creative fatigue. And through tireless re-messaging, we were able to reengage users and encourage registration for the 2019 Show.

Our strategic digital campaign increased attendance by 3% year over year, including a 15% lift from Chicagoans – a targeted demographic. The paid social campaign led to 11.7 million impressions, while the LinkedIn and Facebook content created 11,000 conversions, with LinkedIn’s sponsored copy garnering an unprecedented 50.81% conversion rate.