A short time ago, I had the privilege of joining more than 330 other marketing professionals at the 13th annual “Stevies” International Business Awards banquet in Rome, Italy. Thousands of marketing campaign submissions were culled down to just over 100 award winners, among them a Silver Stevie awarded to Rainier for our “Unbound Marketing” launch of Nano Dimension, recognized as Technology PR Campaign of the Year.
As I reminded my fellow marketers that evening from the stage, those of us who focus on technology PR are in the business of “telling the stories of human invention.” Making sure great technologies get the exposure they deserve has been our passion at Rainier for nearly a quarter century. I’m grateful to the Stevies judges for recognizing the exceptional job the Rainier team did creating massive market exposure for Nano Dimension, a genuine innovator in the exploding domain of 3D printing. Kudos, as well, to Stevie Awards founder and president, Michael Gallagher, for staging a grand and elegant event to honor the best of the best in marketing.
The city of Rome itself was certainly an appropriate setting for recognizing exceptional technology marketing campaigns. Touring the city, one can’t help but be reminded of just how much innovation emerged from this earliest cradle of democracy and ingenuity. We speak today, with great hyperbolic fanfare, of “disruption” as a wholly contemporary concept that never existed before Clay Christensen introduced the term in 1995. But the ancient Romans busily invented arches, modern sanitation, roads, aqueducts, bound books, surgical techniques and tools, and mostly impressively, concrete. And lest we make the mistake of thinking they were nothing but hardware guys, the Romans also developed newspapers to keep citizens informed about politics, military victories, crime, executions, trials and scandals. Today, of course, we rely on our Facebook feed for exactly the same things. Whether we’ve made progress or not will have to be the subject of another blog…
And then there’s the 15th century innovation legacy of Italy’s Leonardo da Vinci – not just an artist, but an accomplished scientist, architect, engineer and inventor who was never afraid to look beyond traditional thinking or dream “outside the box” as we say today. It was for good reason that I dedicated Rainier’s Stevie Award to da Vinci, and inventors past, present and future.
