American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) is an exclusive international society of physicians of all oncology subspecialties who care for people with cancer. In my layman’s terms, it is a fraternity/sorority of doctors and researchers in the cancer field. 

First organized in 1965, ASCO annual meeting is the most internationally-renowned scientific conference in the world. Besides 3-day packed sessions and workshops for MDs and researchers, the conference allows only 5,000 slots for qualified exhibitors whom the Committee views as valuable resources, and potential collaborators for their members’ profession and patients. 

• Introduce AVM Biotechnology and the team’s innovation to attendess of the biggest scientific conference
• Generate leads, Centers of Excellence and Key Opinion Leaders, for non-Hodgkin’s Lyphoma clinical trial
• Train scientists to pitch company’s story
• Gain feedback from experts on additional data and how AVM can tell the story better

One Month to Get Everything Ready

Out of 5,400 exhibitors this year, 3/4 are old-timers and the remaining are newcomers. After having our scientists submit the abstract a week before the deadline, we were put on the waitlist. The annual meeting was to take place on May 31 – June 4, and not until May 1 that I was notified that AVM made it to the show, which means that, I have ONLY 1 month to get ready with set budgets below:

1. $5,000 budget for booth design, construction and furnishing rental
2. $4,000 for brochure and giveaways design, printing and shipping

The Strategy: Personalized Treatment in Immunotherapy

I started out with this year’s ASCO theme “Caring for Every Patient. Learning from Every Patient”. That means all the activities this year are to answer the questions such as “How do we treat ALL patients, even the very frail ones?” and “What have we learned from our patients past years, and from those insights, how can we deliver better treatment with less toxicity and long-term effects?”.

I then looked into the statistics for last year’s ASCO conference to predict the trend of interests this year. As a matter of fact, when it comes to managing tradeshows for brands, all the MarComm specialists should look at the show statistics at least for the past 3 years. Legitimate conferences provide those statistics on their sites or in the invitation emails. The power of data, along with your knowledge about the industry, can give you directions for your content and design. This makes brainstorming more efficient. Deliverables, therefore, will be turned around quicker.

In this case, the last year’s primary interest is Immunotherapy, followed by Breast Cancer, Lung Cancer, Gastrointestinal and Tumor. I read the statistics of professional roles of attendees and scanned the biographies or blogs of guest speakers on the agenda, combined with my 3 years’ of proven track record experience in the biotechnology field, I identify that this year’s trend is Immuno-Oncology, Gene Therapy, Car-T and possibly, leukemia/lymphoma (blood cancers). Actually, these hot topics are one of many SEO keywords of the site I built www.avmbiotech.com since 2016. Another lesson learned: always plan 3-5 years ahead for brands you work for, ask yourself “What will the world’s focus in the next 5-10 years? How will the industry adapt to that? Is there any potential problems for the brand to solve in the future, even if now nobody talks or thinks about it?”  With listen-in sessions with AVM scientists and countless meetings with the Founder, a renowned stem cell expert, I see where AVM is going, and I want to put that vision onto papers, into my mockups. 

I am going to sell the idea of one-size-does-not-fit-all therapy. Every patient has a unique biology mechanism of action (MOA).