This month Big Kahuna Imagineering attended the Experiential Marketing Summit in Sydney. It was great to see the revival of an event dedicated solely to experiential marketing and there were some fantastic pioneers in the industry sharing their strategic insights.

 

 

Here’s a few of the highlights…

 

 

“You don’t have to be Disney with Disney budgets to give great experiences.” – Steve Randazzo, President of Pro Motion, Inc.

Several other presenters made the same point throughout the two-day event: Experiential marketing (XM) budgets can be in the millions but they can also be in the thousands, and that doesn’t mean one is necessarily any more effective than the other.

Since the GFC/recession, everyone has been tightening their belts and steering clear of harder-to-measure strategies like experiential marketing but there has been a recent revival as budgets are slowly getting bigger and more clients are realising they have to break away from the pack. As Blair Crouch, senior marketing consultant at Gemba, said, “As a brand, we live in a cluttered world. So, (the question is) how do we break through?” Most of the attendees would probably agree with us when we say, give great experiences of course!

Game Logic & The Logic of Culture

On Day 2 of the summit, Creative Director of TBWA|ChiatDay Los Angeles Josh Bletterman insightfully said that game logic is very much interchangeable with XM activities because a lot of XM design includes a contestant level that allows consumers to become players. And, everyone wants to be a player because people love to participate. More so, people love to win.

In her keynote address, Vice President of Client Services at InXpo Angie Smith said that everyone, especially men, love having their name up in lights. With that, a lot of XM is about making people feel that they have the stage. Gone are the days of filling out forms because today’s consumers want immediate acknowledgment of their participation. A common message emphasised during the summit: Experiential marketing today has to touch the social networking interface partly because it provides that instant gratification.

Consumers Have the Power

Johannes Weissenbaeck, managing director of Play Communication, started off his seminar on the fusion of live and digital experiences saying that experiential marketing is no longer about engagement, but participation. Brand managers used to want to highly control the experience from beginning to end. But, now the power is back with the consumer. As marketers, we’re no longer creating experiences for consumers but with them.

One of the big hurdles many old school marketers have to learn to get over is their urge to control. Today’s consumer can smell a pitch from a mile away and they won’t do anything they don’t want to. The trick is to make them want to. To do that, you must know your audience which brings up a second big hurdle: Getting over yourself.

Fi Bendall, managing director of Bendalls Group, said, “It’s not about you (the marketer or the brand). It’s actually about the people.” Her advice was to think of your relationship with your consumers as a good, old-fashioned relationship in that it’s genuine. The goal as a marketer is to be useful and relevant to your consumer, talk about what they want you to talk to them about. Again, read more and do your research.

Design for Expansion & Embrace Digital

One of Johannes’ best tidbits of advice: Design the experience to be amplified. Chris Garrity, former director of marketing and communication at Netflix, touched on the same point when he said, “We’re the pebble that starts an avalanche of buzz and publicity.”

If you do your consumer research and keep thinking, “What more can I incorporate that will excite or interest my audience? Or, “How else can this campaign or experience be extended?” You’ll find new ways to empower your audience to contribute and spread your message. If done well, a small budget experiential marketing campaign can have a bigger impact than one with twice the budget but half the potential to be extended.

It’s About the ROI and the ROE

One of the big questions addressed time and time again over the two days was measurement. With the bean counters back at the agencies and client offices demanding measurement and numbers, everyone wanted to know how best to measure the success of an XM campaign. The trouble is, so much of this is not able to be measured (sorry bean counters!)

You can measure the interactions, impressions, web hits, anything remotely quantifiable to try to appease those most concerned with returns, but it’s not just about the ROI. There is the ROE, or Return on Experience, as well. The true leaders of experiential marketing are the ones at the cutting edge and they are there because they propagate the belief that XM has to occur based on cultural ROE prediction, on gut feeling of what’s cool/hip/funky/adventurous now. Those are the people with the campaigns that are pulling the awards and the brands that stick in the consumer’s conscious (whether they love them or hate them).

So much of what’s happening in the field of experiential marketing has never been done. And the nature of the beast is sometimes it may not work, but when it does, it can catapult your brand into new heights. As Johannes Weissenbaeck said, “Hit and miss is just part of the business.”

Along the same vein, John Du Vernet shared his ‘Rogue Theory’ with us on Day 2. Managing Partner of Tongue John told everyone to get a rogue on their marketing team. Someone who’s not a classically trained marketer/communicator. If you bring someone new into your organisation, don’t get them to just tow the line rather make your organisation adapt and change according to the new blood because the sum of all of those different people produces a better team as a whole.

Don’t Sell Your Ideas Short

With such a focus on budgets in a highly competitive world, someone asked John if agencies are doing themselves a disservice by submitting a restrained, more budget friendly Plan B alongside their super cool, edgy Plan A. His answer, ‘Yes, yes you are,’ (amid murmurings of agreement).

It can be tempting to try to cover your bases in case your Plan A doesn’t hit the mark with a less impressive Plan B, but as John told us, “if you believe in it, then push it.” The trick is to sell it to the powers that be as best you can. ‘If you can build a case for ROI (or ROE), you win,’ Steve Randazzo of Pro Motion said.

Wrap Up

• Culture is the real foundation of experiential marketing. From its start as industrial theatre where the focus was on customers interacting with the product and gaining data on your customer base at the below-the-line level, experiential marketing today focuses on the culture of groups and the psychology of what’s cool.
• “Stop selling and start story telling,” Blair Crouch, senior marketing consultant at Gemba.
• “Let a dying promotion die, but also be willing to pump money into one that’s working,” Chris Garrity, former director of marketing and communication at Netflix.
• Regarding the debate about the cost of a build during the ‘To own or not to own” seminar, John Du Vernet from Tongue put it best:  ‘Sometimes you just need a proper budget.’
• Why go into a really good idea with only 60% of what it’s going to take to make it work?
• Josh Bletterman said what is really raging hot at the moment in experiential is human-powered, interactive devices (You don’t say, Josh! What, like the VW Pod (see right) we built for Play Communications a few months ago? Check it out here)
• From the mouths of the XM Summit’s international keynote speakers, there is nothing more groundbreaking in the world of experiential marketing than what’s happening in Australia. And, we should be proud!

All in all, the 2011 Experiential Marketing Summit brought together a lot of pioneers in the industry and the two-day event left us feeling inspired. Big Kahuna Imagineering was one of the few custom-build companies among the attendees, representing the practical, production level of experiential marketing. It was great to see some familiar faces and meet a few new ones. Hopefully our fellow attendees were just as inspired as we were and we’ll be seeing more brands taking on experiential marketing campaigns in the near future!

Oh yeah, did we mention our team won the Ultimate Experiential Smackdown?? Out of the four groups, our pitch for promoting health insurance for your pets tugged on the heart strings of the pet owners in the crowd and won! Hats off to team members John Evans, Peter Wales, Julie Bishop and Adam Mortimer as well as our own Managing Director at Big Kahuna Imagineering Will Colhoun.

Check out some of the experiential marketing projects Big Kahuna Imagineering has done in the past here.