CR: Okay and Ellis, how about you?

Ellis Bennett: I support the partnerships and promotions team, I’m running trackable promotions and other partnership opportunities that come up. My day to day is pretty similar to Katie’s where we’re talking to people on the phone, we’re answering emails and getting to know brands better and figuring out cool ways that we can work together. One of my favorite parts of this job is being creative and telling brand stories through geocaching. Another role I have here is a little side project for the internal HQ green team and we support the environmental initiatives of the company, which includes the Cash In, Trash Out Program.

CR: And both of you have had other roles before the roles that you’re in now are, which have been interesting. Ellis, what did you do before you got into the business development stuff?

EB: I started at HQ in summer of 2016 on the community engagement team. What we would do is answer emails from the community and engage with them on social media, writing blog posts and other fun engaging things. I learned a ton about the game in this process, and I got to know the community really well. And then, this summer of 2017, I started on the partnerships and promotions team and kick started my role with the Magic: The Gathering launch.

CR: Which is something we will talk a lot about, I hope. People are very excited about magic so we’ll get to that. But first, Katie, your past work here at HQ, what has that been like?

KD: Yes. I started at HQ about six and a half years ago and I was on the community relations team and I was at the front desk as the guest service coordinator. I got to welcome hundreds of geocachers to our office in Fremont from all over the world, got to hear their stories first hand, introduce a lot of new players to the game and it was really a beautiful role where I got to gather more knowledge about the game and got to meet our community firsthand. I am now on the business development team. I started here in 2013 supporting the GeoTours and the partnerships and promotions team simultaneously.

CR: Okay, today we’re talking about trackable promotions. For people that aren’t familiar with what a trackable promotion is, what is it?

EB: Trackable promotions are a unique opportunity for geocachers. They get to engage with some of their favorite brands through interaction with these limited edition, branded trackables. These are things that only come out one time during the promotion period. People get really excited about them because it’s a unique experience. They allow geocachers to work together as a collective on a global level and they get to move these custom trackables from geocache to geocache and then watch their journey through an interactive map on the landing page for the promotion. As geocachers interact with these items, they then have the opportunity to upload photos and some of our promotions have run contests for these photos. Some of the prizes that people have won are cash prizes, they’ve won a cruise to Norway and round-trip tickets to around the world, which is pretty exciting, especially ’cause geocachers love traveling.

CR: Trackable promotions come in all shapes and sizes. What, from HQ standpoint, what makes a successful trackable promotion? What are you guys looking at to try to build something that will be great for HQ, great for the community and great for the game?

KD: Well, first of all, it’s really about community engagement and excitement within the community, and we can do that when we find a brand that has a direct overlap with geocaching and the community. This generates excitement, there’s usually a photo contest with prizes involved, and the other part that really makes a successful trackable promotion is when geocachers activate these trackables, when they move them, when we see lots of distance covered on the map, that’s really how we define the success and see how many hands are touching these and interacting with the trackables.

CR: There’s a list of promotion partners on the promotions webpage, you can see a number of the companies that HQ has partnered with over time, and it’s a really varied list, a lot of different kinds of companies, different sizes, different places, is there a specific size of company you guys look for or a certain industry or any specifics like that or can it be just about anybody?

KD: Yeah, you’re right, we have worked with a wide variety of different brands looking at our list of brands that we’ve partnered with. But really the short answer is anybody can partner with us, and we have worked with several different brands ranging in sizes and industries. Really it comes down to, “Is there a direct overlap with that brand and the geocaching community?” That’s how we create win-win partnerships. A great example of this is with Magic: The Gathering. Their audience and the geocaching audience has very similar interests, and that when you blend those together, you can create a really nice partnership. We have worked with really, really large brands and have produced over 24,000 trackables for campaigns. We’ve also worked with smaller tourism bureaus producing only 500 trackables just to promote their small town to geocachers.

CR: One of the questions that I’ve heard people ask over time, and its especially some of my friends in Canada who say, “Hey, you’ve got this great promotion but I can’t do it because it’s not available in Canada and there’s… ” I always know the reason for that, but I think some people out there might not know, so maybe tell me why it is that some promotions are available in some countries but some aren’t available everywhere?

KD: Oh Canada, I am sorry to the geocaching community in Canada, we would love to have a promotion for you. Really it all depends on the brand and their goals and objectives to meet their target markets. We’d love for our promotions to be on a global scale, so that the entire geocaching community can be involved, but some brands don’t have an international market and or they are trying to build and develop a market within a certain country. An example of this was with a promotion we launched this summer with the brand Hurtigruten. It’s a popular cruise line in Norway, but they don’t have a significant presence here in the United States and they wanted to develop their brand awareness. We worked with them to release trackables within the United States only this summer, and there was a photo contest they’re running alongside of it, and the winning photo got a free cruise in Norway.

CR: The most recent one is the Magic promotions? There have been a couple of waves here, and there is so much excitement around… I think in the time that I’ve been at HQ I haven’t seen as much excitement around a promotion as around Magic, and I think people would really enjoy knowing more about that. How did that thing start, how did it come to be?

EB: The global brand manager of the popular card game Magic: The Gathering reached out to us in January of 2017. Their goal was to release a new set of cards, Ixalan, and then the Rivals of Ixalan and they wanted to do this in a fun and engaging way and thought geocaching would be a great collaboration. We worked together, and we came up with the idea of creating trackable mileage goals, this was for geocachers and Magic players to achieve together in order to earn sneak peeks of their new card set. The first launch was designed to create buzz around this whole promotion, they designed a really cool trackable with the Magic card look and then this was to get awareness out about the first deck. And then the second launch, which just came out in the end of November, is a trackable race between four different tribes so Dinosaurs, Merfolk, Vampires and Pirates, and between those they’re doing a trackable race and whoever gets the most miles wins at the end of the promotion period, and that means they get to decide which tribe stakes the claim on the city of Orazca, and that’s really exciting, you can go on geocaching.com/magic and watch the progress. There is four different colored map pins on the trackable map for you to view.

CR: The first release of those trackables happened and then there was more recently a second release of tracks. Multiple releases which is also a little bit different for the community, was that always the plan and is there going to be another one some time in the future? I’ve heard people wondering about that.

EB: That was really fun because we saw how excited people got about the first release, and they didn’t know there was going to be a second release, so that was kind of a double surprise for them.

CR: I’m not even sure I knew.

EB: Yeah, yeah. We kind of kept that under wraps. The first release was meant to generate buzz, they designed the trackables based on the iconic Magic card design, and then the second launch was really about the new cards and arrivals of Ixalan story. As far as a third release we aren’t going to give any more information about that, but do stay tuned because Magic or not, we will have more exciting promotions in the future.

CR: Some of the trackable promotions that HQ does produce trackables that become very desirable in the community and almost become very collectible, people wanna keep them, but that’s not the objective, that’s not the hope and the goal of these trackable promotions. We want these out in caches, we want people moving them from place to place.

KD: Yes, that’s right. The goal and purpose of these trackables is for them to be activated and placed in a cache so that they can travel and more geocachers can continue to engage with them and also have the opportunity to take photos and upload them. When geocachers request to receive one of these trackables in the mail, they’re agreeing to place this trackable in a geocache within two weeks of receiving it. Yes, we know these are really cool trackables and there’s only a limited edition and there are times when people want to hold onto that and keep it in their collection, but really that’s not the purpose of these trackable promotions. We want to see them moving and traveling from geocache to geocache.

CR: It used to be that there were a certain number of trackables and the word got out and you said sign up here, fill out this form, and once the number was over, the form closed and that was it. And it could be done in a couple of hours as I remember. But now you guys have a much better system, I think, and certainly I’ve heard a lot of good things in the community about it, that hopefully gives more people a chance to get one of these. Tell us about that.

EB: The way that we do it now is we open the web form for a certain number of days, it could be a week, it could be two weeks, it could be three days, it just depends on what the partner wants. And anyone can submit during that time period. And every single time we get more requests than we can fulfill, which is exciting, but I understand that’s frustrating for the community ’cause they won’t always win.

CR: And using Magic as an example, what are we talking about here?

EB: For the first launch we had 1,500 trackables to give away and we received almost 30,000 requests.

CR: Wow.

EB: Which is exciting, we love to see people engaging and submitting and although we can’t fulfill all of those, the nice thing is once people release them into the game and into geocaches, people who didn’t win them still have the opportunity to go find them and engage with them.

CR: ‘Cause that’s like a 1/20 chance. If you get one, congratulations. [chuckle]

EB: Yeah. It is…

CR: You beat the odds.

EB: It’s super lucky if you get one and we do see people celebrating a lot on social media, kind of bragging about it, like, “Look what I got”. And it’s for good reason ’cause they’re hard to get.

CR: I know we can’t go through every promotion that’s ever happened, as much as some people would like to hear about them, but I do wanna touch on one because we heard from a listener and her email was kind of what was the impetus for this episode. She wrote in to ask about Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which was a promotion that happened a few years ago. She was hoping that we might be able to have the author of those books onto the show which we weren’t able to do, but I at least wanted to hear what Katie has to say, since you worked on that project. And a little bit of the history of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid trackable promotion.

KD: The Diary of a Wimpy Kid was a really fun promotion in 2014, because it was the first of its kind where we worked with a children’s book author to develop a series of trackables. There were six different designs and they came… There were 2000 tags in each of those designs. And they mimicked the story line of what the book was about. Essentially the Heffleys, the family in the book, was on a road trip and their luggage kept falling off of their car. Each piece of luggage also represented a trackable. There was a pair of socks that fell off the car, you could find a socks trackable or a sunscreen trackable. And it was really fun because all of these were released into the community and people got excited if they could find multiples to match up all of them in the same series. The cool thing about these trackable promotions, although this launched in 2014, there’s stilltrackables moving today. I looked at the map today before the podcast, and I saw that a trackable from this promotion is still… Was just placed in a geocache today. The geocache was called Christmas Card Lane, which is fun because it’s around the holidays and fun to just see that even though that promotion has ended, thetrackables are continuing to travel.

CR: And if somebody has an idea for a great company, a partner for HQ on a trackable promotion, is there something that they can do to help make that happen?

EB: Yes, we do love receiving suggestions from the geocaching community for trackable promotions. If you do know of a potential partner and you think they’d be a good fit, feel free to send us an email at promotions@geocaching.com, with your ideas. If you have a contact it would help if you could introduce us to them or send us their contact info. All you Canadian geocachers out there feel free to email us.

CR: Well, this has all been great, extremely informative. Anything else we missed?

EB: Yes. We have a spoiler alert.

CR: Spoiler alert!

EB: Spoiler alert! There will be a trackable promotion launching in Spring 2018 with a fun ice cream brand. This will be a US-only promotion. But if you email us by January 1st 2018, either Ellis or Katie will get your email at promotions@geocaching.com and we will send whoever the first person to contact us with the code word “Happy promo” a special trackable in the mail.

CR: Is it gonna be a gallon of ice cream that you’re gonna send out? That wouldn’t work, no.

EB: It might melt. [chuckle]

CR: It might, it might. It might melt. Promotions@geocaching.com with the code word…

EB: “Happy promo”.

CR: “Happy promo” is the code word. Okay, spoiler alert out of the way. Anything else? Any other spoilers?

KD: No more spoilers but just one big gigantic thank you to all the geocaching community out there for your participation in our trackable promotions. Without you these trackable promotions wouldn’t be possible. Thank you for being a part of it and for submitting all those fun photos.

CR: How about that? A chance to win a special trackable to the first person who emails Ellis and Katie at the address that they mentioned. We will update our podcast page once I have confirmation that the prize is claimed. But we are not finished yet. Next up is Bryan Roth. He is one of the Geocaching HQ co-founders. And I thought it would be interesting to ask him about some of the legendary trackable promotions. One that still ranks very high in the hearts of geocachers is the Jeep promotion which dates back to 2004, and that is where we started our conversation.

CR: Yeah, let’s talk about the first one because that’s one that people definitely still remember, it had some allure within the community. The whole Jeep thing and you were saying that Jeremy was hugely involved… Jeremy Irish for people that don’t know. One of your co-founders here at HQ. That he was extremely involved in the beginning and then of course you involved as well.

Bryan Roth: Yeah, it’s true. Jeremy really drove the initial Jeep travel bug promotion that we did in 2004. I wanna say it was 2003, we got contacted by Rodale who is a big publisher, I believe they’re out of New York and at that time they did Backpacker magazine and a whole bunch of other magazines. One of their big publishingclients, or one of their big advertising clients was Jeep. And they were looking for a way to use geocaching, or leverage geocaching to create a fun and engaging promotion for Jeep. And at the time they reached out, they spoke with Jeremy, and Jeremy had the idea of creating trackables using Jeeps, Matchbox car style jeeps. And Rodale at the time was working with Jeep and Jeep was willing to give away vehicles which was really cool especially in the early days, the thought of geocachers being able to win an actual Jeep through something relating to geocaching was just a fantastic idea.

BR: And working with Rodale and the agencies that represented Jeep, we were able to get a few thousand little yellow Matchbox car Jeeps. We custom made travel bug tags that have the Jeep logo on them and had some information about the landing page being jeep.geocaching.com. And in the first year there were three ways to win a Jeep. They actually gave away three vehicles in the first year. There was a sweepstakes where anybody could just enter their information and a random drawing would be conducted and one winner would win a Jeep at the end of the year. And then we had a monthly photo contest where there was a goal of liberty or discovery or adventure, or something like that, and people had to go out and find these little Jeep travel bugs and take a picture of them in a scene that would depict liberty or adventure or whatever that goal was. And every month we would have, there was community voting, and the community could vote on which picture they thought was the best. I believe that based on the community votes, once a month they would chose the top photo and that person would win a Garmin GPS device, which was really cool.

BR: And then at the end of the year all of the top photos went to the agency that represented Jeep and they chose their favorite photo and that photo, the creator of that photo, the photographer actually won a brand new Jeep. That was the second way to win a Jeep. And the third way was essentially an essay contest, but it was using geocache logs. You had to write about your experience of finding one of these, something like that. And that one was the hardest because it required us doing so much reading to figure out which were the best logs and it’s subjective. And ultimately I don’t remember which one was chosen but that person actually won a Jeep as well. And in the subsequent years of the Jeep promotion, we went from a little yellow Jeep and we had a one year was a white Jeep and one year was a red Jeep and one year was a green Jeep. And in each of those subsequent years we did not have an essay contest. It was the photo contest. You had to find one or receive one somehow and then take pictures of a different scene and it was a similar format where the community would vote. People would win a Garmin device on the monthly contest and then for the annual contest Jeep would choose, or the agency would choose the photo and that person would win a Jeep. And then there was always the sweepstakes element, which was just a random chance to win one, because not everybody could find one.

BR: Sometimes they were collected and kept by geocachers. I think that still exists when it comes to trackable promotions, unfortunately. But it made it harder for people to find the more that they were out of circulation. And here was this sweepstakes option, where you could still get an opportunity to win a Jeep. As part of the Jeep promotions, because we were working with Rodale, they would do these full-page spreads in a variety of Rodale magazines, talking about geocaching and here’s how you can win a Jeep in this really fun Jeep travel bug promotion. I think that that in itself helped to draw a lot of attention to the game of geocaching, as well as giving geocachers and new geocachers an opportunity to actually win vehicles as part of this promotion. That was the biggest promotion that we had ever done back in the early days, and it has obviously gone on to spawn a whole lot of different trackable promotions that we’ve done over the years. A lot of people really appreciate them.

BR: I love them. I love seeing all the different trackable tags and there’s been coins done, different opportunities to win trackables by either finding them in caches or visiting some retail stores. We’ve done some promotions with Mountain Warehouse over in the UK, where you could go into a retail store and get a Mountain Warehouse trackable. We’ve done promotions with Garmin over the years, where you could go into the Blacks and Millets retail stores, also in the UK, and get some really cool Garmin coins. Back in the old days, there were five different coins that you could collect by going to these different retail stores, and that was a really fun promotion.

CR: When you think back on other trackable promotions that have happened over the course of years, are there any that come to mind for you that are particularly special?

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