Steve Rubenfaer Marketing Profession
Steve Rubenfaer has started up and run several companies since 1980, and has been heavily involved in the marketing efforts of all of them. He started Steve Rubenfaer Stamps in 1980 at the age of 12, selling stamps at trade shows around the Detroit area. These shows were highly competitive, and allowed steve to refine marketing techniques, to differentiate his offerings from the rest. Because many stamp products are commoditized and thus equivalent, marketing skill can be make or break for people in the stamp industry. Steve designed his booth to maximize sales, and learned about marketing.
Steve left the stamp industry, and in 1995 moved to Las Vegas to start a company called Vegas Kids. Vegas Kids produced two huge events, Halloween carnivals. The marketing of this event was very complicated, and to save money, Steve relied on partnerships and other relationships to gain customers. Without any previous experience, Steve signed on huge corporations such as Pepsi, Wendy’s, Blockbuster, and dozens of others. He did this by creating sponsorship opportunities; by creating a potential sponsorship, he received marketing in exchange from huge companies that were serving the demographics Steve Rubenfaer was interested in attracting to the event.
During the month of October, Pepsi ran a promotion with Albertson’s, the leading grocery chain in Las Vegas, with huge in-store displays featuring the Halloween event. These displays sold Pepsi which was accompanied by a $5 coupon for entry to the event, incentivizing people to purchase their product. The coupon didn’t cost them anything, they were provided by Steve; in exchange for offering its customers a discount, Pepsi offered the event an incredible amount of exposure. In addition to the in-store displays, Pepsi also tagged more than $100,000 of radio ads in the month of October with a message advertising the event at the end.
Wendy’s was another company happy to sponsor the events, and even though Steve Rubenfaer never received money from these huge sponsors, the exposure the event received through the partnerships were equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example Wendy’s printed 1,000,000 tray liners and take out bags that were inundated with information about the event, for a city of less than 1,000,000 people. They also tagged radio ads and created in-store displays advertising the Halloween event.
Blockbuster, which was a significant force in the late 90’s, was an example of how Steve Rubenfaer used his creativity to capture another huge sponsor. Blockbuster had a tiny budget for events, $8,000 combined for California and Nevada. That would be tough to get them to spend any money, but Steve figured out a customized sponsorship that they could not turn down, and in addition to marketing help Blockbuster spent almost entirely their yearly budget on one event. The idea was the ‘Blockbuster Toon Tent’, a tent at the event showing nothing but cartoons available at Blockbuster. The head of marketing told Steve that it was the most personal, direct sponsorship that he had ever been offered, he had never
been presented with a sponsorship opportunity that put his product directly in the hands of prospective customers.