OK - so every show has the moment of genius when a vendor shows up with the cool booth that everyone talks about.  No, I'm not talking this year about the money booth where you can go in and get your hair tussled or the opportunity to talk to Kevin Grossman of HRMarketer (which is nice, btw...), I'm talking about the gritty street campaign that gets everyone's attention.

Without further adieu, the guerrilla marketing award from the Capitalist goes to..... 

Sonar6. (To see any way that this award might be conflicted by my meager position in the industry, I invite you to put me under the microscope by reading this: My Frauenheim Disclosure)

So, here's the deal about Sonar 6.  I'm the market for performance management play, and I've talked to these guys and really like the solution.  So I'm a prospect in their pipe and was looking forward to meeting them here in Chicago.  Once I arrived, I heard that there was a t-shirt (or a couple of t-shirts) in play that had statements like "I'm a 3" on the front (a clear call out to the 5 point rating scale and the cop out that is the rating of 3 - "you meet expectations" - YEAH!!!), then the back said "myperformancereviewsucked.com".  As it turns out, the co-founders are attendees, and were wearing the shirts on the floor on Wednesday.

The campaign is also tied to a website that looks like it's created by disgrunted employees - you have to squint at the bottom to see that it's Sonar6 - find it here...

So Sonar 6 gets the award.  Here's my rating of their campaign (scale of 5, with 3 being "meets", of course):

Originality: 5
Edginess: 5
Marketing Material (web and t-shirts): 5
Execution: 2 (ouch!!!!)

Dudes, I give you a 5 overall (we don't weight the objectives, I just come in at the end and give you an overall rating like the King), because you had a killer concept.  This would have been the year to rent the booth and go all out.  I didn't know about it until a friend told me about it.

Well played, Sonar 6.  Next time, spend some money and sponsor the bus so I can get videos of your mock employees instead of the Kenexa dude (nothing wrong with that, but I've seen it 10 times now) wearing the v-neck t-shirt with 3 buttons unbuttoned as a result).

I'm out....