My first Event Marketer Summit was a blur of speakers, case studies and seminars, getting lost in the hotel, stealing sombreros, and eating my weight in Mrs. Fields cookies.  I was excited to take it all in until I noticed how out of place I was, standing in the registration line behind a lot of stuffy suits.  Fortunately, it soon became clear the line was for a biotech conference.  As soon as I found the right registration area the crowd around me was casual, lighthearted, and dressed in green ties, purple sneakers, feather skirts, etc.  You know…the usual marketing look.

The days were crammed with engaging speakers, “BeLinking” and conversation.  The highlights for me were HP, BlackBerry, AT&T, Yahoo, Sports Illustrated, Virgin Galactic, and several authors.  Impossible to ignore was the massive amount of branded swag from room drops and vendor exhibits, ranging from cheese to charcoal to notebooks.  It was nice to finally to put some faces with some of the names I’d been chatting with by email – and to check out all the latest technology on display.

The nights were full as well.  On Monday I attended The EX Award Gala, along with other Javelin folks, to represent Bacardi B-LIVE in the Best Nightlife Program category.  Cheering for ourselves and our competitors was equally fun, and we looked damn good doing it!

Donna Meier, Jen Novak, Erin Bagby, Meredith Goette - EX Awards 2010

Tuesday, after dinner with my colleague Meredith and some of her Chicago agency friends, we headed to MasterTent’s Cuatro de Mayo Party for free food, free booze and free sombreros.  Actually, I’m not absolutely sure the sombreros were free – but we took them anyway.

Reconnecting with friends

The best part was dragging our sombreros to all the morning seminars and then through the airport.  Not.  It was worth it, though – we had them for the real Cinco de Mayo.

Ole!

All in all, my first experiential marketing summit was a success.  I met tons of vendors, learned new ideas and ways of approaching projects, and my suitcase weighed about 10 extra pounds with all the swag I brought back!  I’m looking forward to many more in the future.

In-your-face authenticity is hot

There is something alluring about in-your-face authenticity. It’s sensational yet attractive, like Arthur Fonzarelli, better known as The Fonz.  People liked Fonzie.  He got what he wanted seamlessly, without sacrificing his values. That is, until he literally jumped the shark.

Jumping the shark is not

Jumping the shark, an idiom for when something well established begins a decline, originated when the writers of Happy Days had Fonzie literally jump a shark while on skis, wearing his trademark leather jacket and all.

Ride your Harley into the party

Losing your base can be pretty easy when you’re a big name with a known reputation like The Fonz or (insert your favorite brand name here).  A solid brand has already established where it fits, and has spent significantly to be there.  Any experiential program, event or otherwise, should be authentic to the soul of the brand, and honest to the expectations attendees have.  If you’re the Fonz, ride your Harley into the party. If you’re Grey Goose, showcase your signature cocktails in a super premium lounge.

Going over the top is not always better.  Simply slapping a well known name on something overly-sensational is unlikely to be good for a brand, even if it would get eyeballs.  You’ve probably already had an example or two come to mind, so I’ll politely refrain from naming any myself.

Cultivate an honest relationship

Experiential marketing — whether at a large event on in private — cultivates an honest, well-defined relationship. Isn’t that why we loved The Fonz?  He was edgy but he was true to the core.  Then…he jumped the shark.  So, aaay!  Learn from the Fonz.  Be cool. Authenticity is where it’s at.  Don’t be something you’re not, even if it promises to be a unique experience…or your brand may become the next symbol for jumping the shark.

The human mind is the ultimate experiential consumer.

Where can we find some intellectual street cred and big brain support for our beloved discipline, experiential marketing? It is with keen insights and modern truths we can see and prove that the human mind is the ultimate experiential consumer—that experience drives all perception and opinion forming.

It is with great thanks (and enduring apologies) to Jonah Lehrer that I have done a mash-up of his great work, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, and our beloved discipline, experiential marketing. Briefly:

Proust had already discovered what Lehrer was trying to find out. He knew that 1) smell and taste produce uniquely intense memories, and 2) memory is dependent on the moment and mood of the individual. Scientists didn’t establish these facts until a few years ago, yet Proust made the point in 1913.

Smell and taste are the most intense of remembered sensations.

As we continue to learn more and more about the brain’s complex chemistry, we should – as experiential marketers – help our clients understand the primacy of the impact consumers will experience when they are addressed head-on in a sensory capacity. In fact, this bit says it all:

Proust’s goal in Remembrance of Things Past is to anatomize memory. His literary examinations teach him that smell and taste are the most intense of remembered sensations. Fast forward some 90 years to 2002, when Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown, shows that smell and taste are indeed uniquely potent evokers of memory.

This power, she speculates, lies in the direct connection the gustatory and olfactory nerves have to the hippocampus, which Lehrer calls “the center of the brain’s long-term memory.”

Establish the memories, then we can tinker.

Memories are not immutable as Herz and others have found; rather, they change as we remember them. I believe the key in experiential marketing is to first ESTABLISH the memories. We can then tinker with the nuance via social media and ad campaigns, but without base-line experiences to “fiddle with” we cannot gain serious ground in the consumer’s mind.

To me these are enlightenments equal to – if not more powerful than – ROI models. The discoveries of modern neuroscience, combined with the insights of these great thinkers, show that demonstration is king…that stimulating the senses is the coin of the realm in creating real, lasting memories…resulting in converted customers.

Enjoy Proust Was A Neuroscientist if you are so inclined. It’s a nice visit with Woolf, Stein, Escoffier, Stravinsky and of course Proust…our experiential forefathers.

Like you, I do my marketing homework.  I keep up with industry pubs, must-attend seminars, über-hip “expert” ad execs, cool school, Gladwell, Bob Garfield, Bob’s blog, your blog, etc.  The plethora of expert supposition/opinion/fact is enlightening, it really is, but who can keep up with it all?  In an effort to simplify our lives as experiential marketers, brand stewards and idea-generators, I’d like to propose an experiment of sorts.

I contend that everything we need to know about marketing, branding, and getting to great ideas has already been surmised by two people born over a century apart but united by their mutual distaste for monotony, monogamy and prison. Oscar Wilde and Paris Hilton have done a damned good job of generating axioms about life that are applicable to marketing – and easier to digest than the next must-read Fast Company book-of-the-month.

So here’s what I propose: skip reading What The Dog Saw and Baked.  It’s okay, people.  Really.  Let’s take a short break – a Nestea plunge if you will – from all the marketing intelligence surrounding us.  It will all be waiting for us tomorrow.

Today let’s run our marketing efforts through the WildeParis Experiment.  Sound kinky?  Here’s how it works:  simply see if the idea you are thinking about pitching or buying fulfills upon all or most of the following list of quotes – marketing axioms, as I like to call them.

The following lines are quotes from Oscar Wilde and Paris Hilton. Have fun guessing who said what (click on the quote to see who said it), but that’s not the point of the experiment.  The point is to take a break from the plethora of expert supposition/opinion/fact, and simplify what you need to know to deem an idea great.  Here we go.

“There is no sin worse in life than being boring.”

Go ahead; be honest with yourself when assessing your work.  Do you like the idea? Love the idea?  Are you passionate about it? You know if it’s boring. If you don’t…you’re boring.

“I can resist everything except temptation.”

That’s what we do for a living; we tempt.  Is your idea irresistible?  Is your story tempting?

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

Look, there’s a lot of money being wasted on marketing shit nobody cares about, notices or talks about. There are many, many examples, and I don’t want to be cruel, but consider this.  Almost every brand seems to believe they need a website, right?  And I agree, most brands do. But have you ever visited the black, depressing, corporate, empty, pointless hole that is macys.com, walmart.com, century21.com, aa.com? AA.com is American Airlines, not Alcoholics Anonymous; their site, aa.org, is pretty good.  Anyway, the list of grotesquely expensive, meaningless, never-talked-about marketing goes on and on.  And it is the worst thing in the world.

“There’s nobody in the world like me. I think every decade has an iconic blonde – like Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana – and right now, I’m that icon.”

Homogeneity abounds.  Brands and marketers alike are too often risk-averse, and without risk — intelligent risk — there is no innovation.  I give out Failure Awards at the agency to recognize those who embrace risk to achieve something great, truly creative and original.  Without risk, your brand is just another pair of khaki pants in a button down shirt, hiding behind a laminated desk, waiting for the clock to strike 5 so it can rush home in its minivan to a plastic house in the suburbs.  But if your brand is consistently taking inspired risks and sometimes failing, you become something original or, on rare occasions, iconic.

“When people agree with me, I always feel that I must be wrong.”

Embrace a culture of friction and passionate discourse.  Never hire your doppelganger. Fire every “yes” man in your organization.  If you don’t, you’ll never have a great idea.

“I don’t have sex unless I’m in a relationship. I’m old-fashioned when it comes to that. I really am!”

Consumers want to have relationships with real, committed brands like Mountain Dew, not blowup dolls like (insert your favorite poseur brand).  Know what your brand is.  Know what it isn’t. Commit to it.  Not everyone needs to like your brand, and your brand doesn’t need to sleep with everyone; we’re not in high school.

To get a consumer into bed you need to know them.  Know who they really are.  Love them.  Eat fast food with them.  Play Halo with them.  Ride scooters, walk dogs, go shopping at Wal-Mart (yes you, go to Wal-Mart), watch obscure movies, eat fish heads, wear latex body suits…do whatever your demo does.  Here’s why: if you commit to what you are, you’ll never be a part of another lifeless brand and you’ll never garner lifeless results.  You’ll be in the hottest, sexiest relationship of your life.

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

To support this point, I’ll break with consistency in the WildeParis Experiment, and take a look at what Seth Godin, the maestro of expert supposition/opinion/fact, has to say about consistency.  Or is it inconsistency?

Consistency
How can someone:
… be opposed to euthanasia but in favor of the death penalty?
… be in favor of the impeachment of Bill Clinton but not of George Bush?
… be worried about global warming but fly in a big private plane?
… be in favor of the impeachment of George Bush but not of Bill Clinton?
… be opposed to amnesty for illegal aliens but in favor of a pardon for Scooter Libby?
… be in favor of military intervention in Darfur but not in Iraq?
… be opposed to big government but want the government to control public speech?
… be in favor of banning medical marijuana but opposed to government regulation of cigarettes?
… be opposed to judicial meddling except in cases where you disagree with the current laws?

Easy. Because people aren’t consistent. Sure, you say, each of the above examples isn’t fair. They don’t match. They don’t line up. [Smart people are lucky: they can hold seemingly contradictory ideas in their head while they look more deeply into the facts and make good decisions... it’s called nuance.]

We don’t eat dessert because we’re on a diet but we put blue cheese dressing on our salad. We don’t pay extra for first class but we refuse to give up a seat to get bumped from a flight, even though the reward is a thousand dollars. We curse the spam that clutters our e-mail boxes but turn around and authorize millions of pieces of junk mail to go out to support our new business.
The local hardware store owner curses the existence of Home Depot but buys his family’s clothes at Wal-Mart. The vegetarian wears a leather belt…

Everything is a special situation; everything begs for inconsistency. If all we did was market to computers, life would be a lot simpler, but a lot less interesting.

So, there it is: the WildeParis Experiment.  It may not be perfect but it’s certainly a reprieve from all the expert supposition, opinion and fact.  Give it a try and let me know how it turns out!

Large-scale events don’t get any bigger than this… U2’s 360° stage is one of the biggest sets ever built, weighs 170 tons, and requires 200 trucks to transport the elements.  It was originally nicknamed The Claw until the Spaceship idea formed around the overall look.

The Claw - set-up

It has been reported that the tour has overhead of $750,000 per day, nearly 400 tour employees, 250+ speakers, 13 video cameras, and incorporates astronauts from the International Space Station into the live show.  From a production viewpoint, a large-scale event of this magnitude was something that simply had to be experienced.  Javelin’s home base, St. Louis, wasn’t a stop on the tour so a road trip was in order to experience this massive event in person.

We headed west towards Oklahoma, taking in the sights and sounds over the next 500 miles.  A road trip down Historic Route 66 would not be complete for any experiential marketer without a few stops to soak in some of the nostalgia, local ambiance and food.  So, when a large highway sign near Cuba, MO beckoned us to visit Missouri Hick Bar-B-Q we immediately agreed to check it out.

Route 66 stop: Missouri Hick Bar-B-Q

Mark McInnis and the Happy, Oblivious Pig

Ambiance:  3 out of 5 stars.   The mullet-clad, iconic cartoon (on the sign) welcoming patrons to the establishment was a little disturbing.  The placemats were amusing, featuring a smiling pig wearing a bib, ready to partake in some delicious Missouri Hick Bar-B-Q, unaware of impending doom just around the corner.

Nostalgia:  4 out of 5 stars.  No modern cuisine or diet-of-the-moment to be found here.  Kitschy, rustic decor.

Food:  5 out of 5 stars.  Don’t let the mullet deter you; the Missouri Hick delivers fantastic BBQ and excellent side dishes.

Sufficiently Q’d up, we continued heading west to see one of the most talked about concerts of the year.  Something very difficult to achieve in an arena/stadium setting – especially in the round – is a fully immersive sound, light, and video concert experience.  Years of our own production experience with large-scale events (good and bad) and rumors of what gear might be employed fueled miles of debate about what to expect when we arrived.

The Spaceship, up close and personal

Unbelievable - U2 does it again!

Needless to say, U2 360° has done an outstanding job.  A four-pillar design lifts the sound system out of the crowd’s way and provides the live equivalent of surround sound.  The transformable 360° LED screen is quite an awesome piece of engineering, comprised of more than 500,000 Barco FLX LED modules.  For more information on the screen design, check out these interviews.

The tour continues to set records and raise the bar, not just live on the road, but online as well.  On October 25, 2009 the full 2.5 hour concert was streamed live on YouTube, from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA.  Breaking all previous records for the site, the webcast was watched by nearly 10 million people around the world.   The concert is available on YouTube in its entirety, and has (as of this writing) been watched by more than 1.1 million viewers to date. Check out the Rose Bowl concert and this amazing set here!

Posted by Mark McInnis and Mark Russell

We attended Lolla last week to see some music and catch a quality contact buzz – mission accomplished. We also attended as students of the industry, eager to observe what brands brands were doing to activate their sponsorships. Typically, there were the brands that are aware that Lolla is a young, hip music focused event and then there are the brands that come off like mom chaperoning at a high school dance.

The Good – Adidas
Adidas had a couple of really engaging experiences. Concertgoers were invited to design a pair of shoes on a custom Mac for  Lolla performers: Kings of Leon, A-Trak or Kid Cudi. The artists chose the winners and both the designer and artist were given a pair of the custom shoes. How cool.

Lollapalooza - Custom Adidas

There was also a VW van set up to showcase shoes. You could check out all the classic sneakers, get product info and also get you photo taken next to the VW. A Photo Card was given out which directed to a URL where you could upload your photo after submitting some info – can you say data capture.

Lollapalooza - Adidas VW

Finally, Adidas had a marker board filled with classic sneaker illustrations. Consumers were invited to color in the illustration and ultimately create a piece of community created artwork  – can you find the oh-so-clever obscenities.

Lollapalooza - Adidas Marker Board

The Bad – Energizer
Energizer put a couple of frightened girls in oversized, pink, Hanes Beefy Ts out in front of the main entrance. They handed out free battery powered phone chargers – how useful. The girls had no battery-powered chargers for the #1 selling phone on the planet earth – how sad.

Lollapalooza - Energizer

Johnson County Library, in Kansas City, has redesigned their courier trucks to resemble the delivery trucks of some of literature’s most famous characters.

Library Truck

Library Truck

Library Truck

I would have enjoyed an offering from Mr. Anthony Burgess. Perhaps a Mobile Korova Milk Bar… that would be real horror show.

Korova Milk Bar

The extreme growth of Facebook and Twitter over the past several months has garnered a lot of attention and buzz, but the most interesting article I read was by Chris Matyszczyk, a creative director who advises major corporations on content creation and marketing. He is described as bringing an irreverent, sarcastic, and sometimes ironic voice to the tech world.

He explores the impact that the aging of members of social media sites will have on advertisers on those sites.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10215837-71.html

Although the social networking sites will continue to explore new, innovative ways to generate advertising dollars, essentially he predicts the greatest success will be found if they provide advertisers with something recognizable as traditional, monetizable advertising.

The trends Matyszczyk points out in this write up expand beyond the inherent advertising opportunities within the social networks, but into many other marketing disciplines including continued growth for experiential marketers.  As an agency we continue to stress that once a brand has made the investment in an experiential marketing campaign to engage their target consumers; it is critical to continue the conversation with these new people.

As I continue to see more and more reports of these increased adoption rates of social networking communities by consumers in a wide variety of demographics; it is clear to me that this will provide another channel to continue these conversations.   On par with many experiential marketing campaigns, these consumers are now able to choose their level of interaction and engagement within a familiar environment.  Just some of the early examples I have come across include “Fan Pages” and “Groups” where like-minded individuals are able to gain access to the latest updates, information, news, etc. about products, services, retailers, entertainment, and just about anything else imaginable.

http://mashable.com/2009/04/13/facebook-brand-marketers/

Experiential marketing does the best job of speeding up the consumer trial process, however maintaining contact with these potential new long term consumers and preventing “drop off” after the engagement must be the next step.

I crack up every time I see a slightly inebriated sign waver in a soiled gorilla suit, frantically waving an offer for “$5 Pizza,” “Taxes Done Now” or “Buy a Lazy-Boy, Get a Free Plasma TV.

I created a not-so-scientific competition between a sign waver for a local pizza shop and a Google Ad Word campaign for Javelin. The competition was full-on for a nail-biting 24 hours. Results?

IMPRESSIONS
Sign Waver – 22 (cars that drove by)
Google – 75,000

HOURS WORKED
Sign Waver – 2.4 (he was supposed to work 6 but ended up passing out)
Google – 24

ACTIVATION
Sign Waver – ? (I spoke with the pizza manager and he said, “it’s probably a waste but I pay him cash.”)
Google – 32 clicks

COST
Sign Waver – $20
Google – $10

So who wins?  Extrapolated over one month, Javelin’s Google Ad generates 1,000,000+ impressions and hundreds of unique visitors to the website while Pizza Shop’s frantic sign waver generates 3,750 impressions.  While Javelin is a casual office, showing up drunk in a gorilla suit is always frowned upon.  We’ll let you decide who the real winner is, Pizza Shop or Javelin…

Be prepared to enjoy the combined anxieties, insights, critiques and commentary from a staff of Experiential Marketing thinkers that make working in this business great while making money for “the man.”  Our mission with this space is to allow our staff to express their thoughts on our industry, experiential marketing, and along the way enlighten the reader, and likely ourselves.

Photo from Cool Hunter

We’ll draw content from the many mall tours, music tours, PR stunts, sampling programs and more we develop and manage every year, as well as from what we see going on in the industry.  Glad to have you reading .

–BRC