Featured
Event
Brand & Identity
A three-day costume contest at New York Comic Con turned a modest photo backdrop into one of Vivarin’s most cost-effective activations of the year – a 50% jump in social followers for roughly $200 in total spend.
The Challenge
What Was the Problem?
In 2013, Meda Consumer Healthcare was pushing Vivarin beyond its traditional retail footprint into pop-culture and gaming events, having already tested the format at PAX East. The brand had secured a booth at New York Comic Con, but faced a familiar problem for a legacy OTC brand stepping onto a convention floor: how to earn genuine attention from an audience with little patience for anything that reads as a straightforward ad.
Costuming and cosplay were already dominating both the convention floor and social feeds. Rather than compete with that, I proposed building the activation around it.
The Work
How I Solved It
I designed a low-cost activation around a single idea: give people a reason to want their photo taken. We produced a compact, Vivarin-branded photo backdrop for the booth and invited attendees to pose there in costume.
Entrants shared their photo on social media, tagging Vivarin and using the contest hashtag. Over the three-day show, the photo with the most engagement won a $50 gift card — a small incentive that turned every entrant into a willing, sharing advertisement for the brand.
The Outcome
What It Delivered
1,245
Impressions
$200
Total cost
50%
Page follower increase
For about $150 in backdrop production and a $50 gift card, the activation generated over 1,200 impressions, drove a 50% increase in page followers, and brought noticeably heavier foot traffic to the booth throughout the show. The backdrop outlived the contest itself — attendees kept using it for photos long after the competition ended, turning one low-budget prop into the de facto photo spot of the booth.
