+44 (0) 7768 145 571 tom@tomherbstpr.co.uk

Palm

You might remember them? Palm Pilot PDAs and one of the first smartphone manufacturers with its Treo smartphone. And yes, a ton of apps, too with a community of passionate users who just loved their devices.

Scope

  • We managed Palm’s UK PR for over two years – from 2003 to 2005 – and created programmes which demonstrated its leadership in the PDA/smartphone markets.
  • This was a time when Blackberry dominated the smartphone sector with Apple and Samsung very much the followers.

Results

  • We launched and promoted the Treo 650 smartphone. 44 journalists attended. To show how easy it was to type on, a hook for the launch was setting a Guinness World Record for the fastest typing on a smartphone with Arttu Harki, the texting world champion. Guinness made it difficult for him and got Arttu to type one handed. He did 24 words per minute.
  • We used the eight-time World Memory Champion, Dominic O’Brien, to launch the Tungsten T5 handheld which had 256 MB of internal memory. To make the link to 256, we got Dominic to memorise a random 256 long number and read it back to press. The then editor of Trusted Reviews said, “Quite possibly the most impressive presentation I’ve ever seen at a press briefing.”
  • We worked on a European-wide research project to determine end-user frustrations towards email resulting in a campaign focused on the 7 deadly sins of email. We worked with Big Brother psychologist, Dr. Peter Collett, who helped Palm talk about the issues and how to resolve them.  It was a project where we acted as spokesperson for Palm on the BBC’s Click Online programme.
  • We launched the LifeDrive – Palm’s ultimate PDA which had a 4 GB built-in hard drive to hold films, music and photos.
  • We got Palm to support the Warren Miller ski film, Higher Ground. Treo 650s were given away at the premier in London and then at regional events around the country.  In addition, Palm had a stand at VUE, Leicester Square with a trailer of the film loaded onto the Palm website.

This is on top of all the ‘normal’ PR activities you’d expect like organising CEO/VP briefings, support at trade shows, work with customers and so on.