From Lenovo’s first days exhibiting at the International Consumer Electronics Show to premiering Lenovo on the world stage in front of millions at its first TechWorld in China to the NBA and Formula 1, I’m humbled to have been a party of a company growing into a major household, consumer brand.

Consumer Electronics Show – IFA – Mobile World Congress

I attended 11 CESs. My first CES in 2008 marked Lenovo’s entry into the global PC market outside of China. We started small with a room off the Las Vegas Convention Center hall where we hosted media briefings. To make it interesting, we hired three actors and divided the room into three sections, or skits, where each actor represented the target audience for each of the three laptops we were introducing. We had a gamer son using a Y710, a 17-in widescreen laptop, a fashionable lady with the Lenovo IdeaPad U110, an 11-inch laptop ultraportable (we nicknamed this little red), and we had a mom in a kitchen with the Y510, a 15-inch laptop. Our VP of Consumer Marketing served as spokesperson, and we did briefing after briefing, and at the time, getting media interviews wasn’t as easy as it would be today.

That show marked a turning point for the company, and soon after, we moved up, taking over a restaurant space called the AquaKnox in the Venetian Hotel. Rather than paying for a booth on the show floor, his takeover would become Lenovo’s booth for many years to come. I designed and hosted so many press conferences there, and we fully used it for hosting social media influencers (I ran our first influencer program called LenovoIN), and for hosting customers with night entertainment and events.

No matter the show, we had a typical playbook for how we announced products:

• NDA 1:1 prebriefings or webinars
• Separated press releases/announcements with products that might not get as much attention announcing a few days before the show started
• Press conference at the show. Sometimes we’d hold a separate one for our Chinese press contingent
• 1:1 and group briefings in our hosted space with executives
• product tours with our technical experts
• Satellite media tours (worth it if we got #1 or #2 placement). Check out this one we did for the Yoga 8-inch with AnyPen technology. Doing a SMT meant getting up at 5 am and heading to the show floor to make sure our spokesperson performed flawlessly.
• Opportunistic TV interviews from the show, particularly with being named “Best of…” awards
• Our own content creation for our channels with video interviews on products and topics

From CES to IFA to Mobile World Congress, I’ve launched hundreds of laptops, desktops, monitors, workstations and phones. Here are some highlights:

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Helping Lenovo Transform with Tech World

One of my most challenging PR programs to design was Lenovo’s first Tech World. Set in Beijing, the company billed it as a rival to Apple’s Macworld. That’s a tall order. I was in charge of creating the PR program for journalists around the world. I worked closely with communications leaders in each of our regions and business units to design a hosted program for 200+ reporters, analysts and influencers. This was CES X2. I’m grateful to my colleague Helen Lung who served as the intermediary from our China PR team with me as global PR. Together, we created a program that included:

• prebriefing NDA webinar for reporters not attending the event on product launches
• press materials (press releases, spec sheets, images) and global wire distribution
• media coaching on key messages and sensitive issues for executives doing interviews
• on-site briefings by reporter geography with key product leaders, including our Chief Technology Officer, CEO, and Mobile Business Group and Commercial and Consumer Business Group leaders
• pre-event welcome dinner with traditional Chinese entertainment
• hotel and bus logistics as well as sightseeing

So of all the things that could go wrong, what did?

I’m pleased to say the products were a hit, the messages landed well with positive press coverage and relationship-building, but one of the EMEA group of reporters arrived late from their hotel – Beijing traffic, you know, and they couldn’t locate their bus after the event to return to the hotel. They all did look the same lined up at the drop off for the convention center. Eventually, we found theirs, and no journalist was lost in Beijing on account of Lenovo.

The Lenovo Stat – Partnership with NBA

For every sponsorship we entered into, PR played a major role. When we worked with the NBA, they used our products for training and keeping track of data courtside, and in a play to get more visibility, we created the Lenovo Stat –

The Lenovo Stat will be a plus/minus statistic that will look at the point differential when a player, or combination of players, is in the game to see what effect they have on the team as a whole. The statistic will identify the best individual through five player combinations for each game, and over the course of an entire season.