At trade shows, startup fairs, and other booth-style conventions, every exhibitor has the same problem:

How do I get people to stop by my booth and listen to my pitch?

Last Thursday, Engage participated in DC Tech Day to promote our new product, Proximity. We’re pretty jazzed about it — it lets you launch landing pages in a matter of minutes rather than days — but we knew we needed something unique to get others excited about it too.

Enter Goldie Wilson, Marty McFly, and Doc Brown.

(Yep, you read that right.)

The inspiration for our booth came from one of our earliest designs for the product. Engage’s designer Shane Helm is a big fan of Back to the Future. And I mean a BIG fan. So it was only natural that he would use a Back to the Future theme for filler copy and images instead of lorem ipsum.

If you remember from the movie (I know, it’s been a while), Goldie Wilson is the present-day mayor of Hill Valley and he’s running for re-election. When they go back to the 50s, the lifejacket-donning Marty McFly recognizes him sweeping floors in the coffee shop and tells him he’ll be mayor one day. This then ignites Goldie’s ambitions — “I will be mayor! I’ll be the most powerful man in Hill Valley, and I’m gonna clean up this town!”

Back in the (real) present, we were planning out our booth for DC Tech Day — a “startup science fair” — and looking for a unique theme. You will probably be unsurprised to learn that it didn’t take long for us — ahem, Shane — to come up with the idea that we should do an ’80s campaign theme with Goldie Wilson from Back to the Future as the star.

So we set out making Goldie Wilson for Mayor of Hill Valley our sample client for Tech Day. We got Goldie buttons, Goldie stickers, yard signs, t-shirts, the works (in addition to a few Proximity stickers and a Proximity banner). We even got some patriotic flag bunting to hang from our table to give it a real campaign feel.

Going into the event, we had a pretty good idea how we’d make it all work and tie it into the product: all of the stickers, buttons, and signs had goldieformayor.com on them, which led visitors to a Proximity-created signup form where they could enter their information and learn about the product. Our goal was to distribute as many stickers as possible to pique people’s interest and hopefully get them to the form. 

Several members of the Proximity team went to Tech Day, but as product manager, I knew I’d be doing a lot of pitching. I planned to talk about how Proximity lets people launch landing pages in a snap and then provide them with extensive data on supporters in the backend, how it can be used by basically anybody looking to build an email list (startups, non-profits, agencies, and campaigns), and how we’re in private beta but preparing for launch in January…and so forth.

But as with many good ideas, we didn’t stumble upon this one until we were actually out there doing it and pitching people. The event had already been underway for about an hour when we stumbled upon this casual opener:

“Hey, have you seen Back to the Future?”

We started asking everyone that walked by this question, and to my surprise, they not only stopped but let us get through our full pitch.* I’ve done events like this before, and it can oftentimes be hard to get people into your booth, nevermind get them to let you give them your spiel.

But this… this worked. We didn’t keep track of every conversation, but I’d say of all of the people who were absentmindedly walking by our booth that we asked this question, 98% of them stopped. And these weren’t always people who were eyeing our booth or causally scanning our product banner from a distance — most of them were just moseying by, looking towards the end of the aisle or in general just not paying attention to our booth.

So why did they stop?

We began to ask ourselves this question later in the afternoon. As I walked by other booths, I realized that most of the hooks people use are questions, and usually the answer to that question is “no.” For example, the answer to “Have you heard of Verbify/Wordly/Adverbio?” is probably going to be “no.” It starts people out on the foot where they don’t know something, and most people intrinsically don’t like admitting they don’t know things, especially to strangers.

But they do like movies. Starting out with a hook like “Have you seen Back to the Future?” made people stop for a second and go “Uh, yes…why?” It was a weird question that seemed to have nothing to do with startups or tech, and it made them interested. It was also a question that they were likely to say “yes” to.

And, it feels like a question you’d say in a real conversation. In marketing, people often talk about having “conversations” with customers. But oftentimes, these “conversations” end up being the brand talking at someone rather than with them. Asking people about a famous movie they’d likely seen made the pitch feel authentic and non-threatening to the point where we made people forget it was a pitch. It was the opposite of a hard sell.

But, I admit it was the startup equivalent of a pick-up line, and people could argue that a truly innovative/disruptive/[insert buzzword] product wouldn’t need something so lowly. (I was actually joking with other people on our team that it was so successful that if I were single, I’d use it in bars.) But it made a connection with something people already liked and opened up the conversation, and that’s what the best pickup lines do (“So, what’s your favorite craft beer?”). An even bigger problem than asking a question that people reply “no” to is one that makes them think “why should I care?,” so why not ask a question that would make their eyes light up and give them a laugh?

Of course, not everyone had seen Back to the Future. But most knew it was a famous movie, and it wasn’t hard to recover — all we had to say was that “Well, it’s this cult classic ’80s movie and one of the subplots is that Goldie Wilson is running for mayor of Hill Valley.” Bam. Done. Onto pitch.

I’m not saying that using Back to the Future is a winning strategy for every trade show booth. Far from it. This one happened to work because it was at a startup convention in Washington, DC — a situation where the combination of nerdy movie tie-in and political campaigns was a natural fit.

But next time you’re at a trade show or startup science fair or hell, even bake sale, try using a relevant movie parody and using an opener that their likely answer to is “yes.” We definitely will.

*Usually our pitch went something like this after getting them in (oftentimes with a laugh on their part): “Well, Goldie Wilson is our fake client for today. As you know, he’s running for re-election of Hill Valley, and because of our product Proximity he can quickly deploy landing pages to target different groups of voters, like people who are interested in saving the clock tower [point to sign] or progress [point to sign] — all without having to hire an agency. Then, after people sign up, he can get enhanced data on those people, like whether they’re registered to vote or Census information for their neighborhood. But it can be used by anyone who wants to build an email list — not just campaigns — and we’re currently preparing for launch in January. You can go to GoldieForMayor.com right now [hold up sticker] and see one of our landing pages in action and sign up for info about the product [hands sticker].”

From there, we could gauge their interest and whether we should continue —  we could extend the pitch and talk about how it’s like LaunchRock on steroids because of the data analytics or how agencies can use it to speed up message testing and email list building (“An account executive can launch 20 landing pages with different messaging as quickly as it takes her to make the corresponding Google Search ads.”)