In the land of the free, the swag hunting is good
Pens, T-shirts, totes are all fair game for grabbing
Collecting swag is an OTC tradition that is probably as old as the conference itself. With entrance fees as high as $280 a day, parking costing $12 a day, and water running $5 a bottle, many attendees make sure they grab their share of freebies that sit on the counters and tables of the vast majority of booths.
Kwang Yoo, 72, has been attending OTC and nabbing swag since the 1970s. Yoo, a retired Halliburton engineer who runs his consulting firm, KYCO, said he grew more selective as he got older, limiting his pickings to items that are unique or useful. But, he admitted, he still has a pen he picked up 10 years ago that he has yet to use to make a mark on paper.
“When we are young and we don’t know better, anything that is free we grab, grab, grab,” Yoo said. “How many pens can you use?”
Amid the pens, notebooks, tote bags and fridge magnets, one company stood a cut above exhibitors’ swag offerings. In what would make Davy Crockett proud, Tradequip International of Crossville, Tenn.,
was handing out black pocketknives. Of all the conventions the oil equipment magazine attends, OTC is the only one where it gives out switchblades.
“We’re in Texas,” Tradequip’s publisher Jon Goodwin reasoned.
Standard items like hats, pins and T-shirts remain in Tradequip’s OTC swag lineup, but the company-branded pocketknives tucked away in a drawer, are typically only handed out to their booth’s more engaged visitors.
“We definitely want to give giveaways to our customers first and then anybody that comes by that is interested in our product and wants more information, we’ll give them something like that to help them remember us,” Goodwin said. “Other than just trading cards, we’ll give them something they’ll keep and take with them and that they’ll use.”
OTC chairman Wafik Beydoun remembers his favorite piece of OTC swag: a rubber earphone wrapper that looked like a fish bone. When he first saw it at a booth, he couldn’t figure out what it was, but he came to love it.
“It was very useful,” recalled Beydoun, who used the fish to wrap his headphones so they didn’t get tangled in his pocket.
Meanwhile, many attendees hope to leave OTC with more than just a bag full of tchotchkes.
“I got some pens, some magnets,” said Natalia Hernandez, a sales representative for the Houston freight and logistics company EP America. “But what I was really here was for the business, to be able to network with some of the biggest companies.” L.M. Sixel contributed.