Experiential Marketing
“Stop! Collaborate and listen.” Experiential Marketing’s back with a brand new addition.
Forget a high budget shoot with Mario Testino at the Hanging Gardens Of Babylon.Brands are coming to realise that they need to look further than traditional channel like TV or outdoor if they want to engage their audience. Experiential Marketing can help as it’s now all about That Moment: creating instances of enjoyment for customers. Times they will share because they had the most amazing experience with your brand.
Through these Moments, the consumer becomes your copywriter. They write the ad campaign for your brand: they post their experience on Facebook and Instagram, they share their experience with their friends, who in turn, share with their friends, who go on to discuss with their friends – and before you can say “How should we market this product?” the Marketing Snowball is gathering momentum and, more importantly, followers and sales, without you having spent a single shekel.
Forget a high budget shoot with Mario Testino at the Hanging Gardens Of Babylon.
Consumers now act as ambassadors and advocates for brands through social media. A huge reason why your Experiential Marketing campaign must provide a fully rounded experience for the potential customer.
Audience-produced content can be extremely powerful for brands. It makes perfect sense – people trust the voice of their friends and peers much more than the voice of a brand. If you connect with your customers, and allow them to produce your content, your brand can win.
People trust the voice of their friends and peers much more than the voice of a brand.
A Little Aside
As is usually the case when I start researching, trawling and surfing, I uncover a myriad of amazingly pertinent viral and Experiential Marketing campaigns that add weight to my arguments/hypotheses/musings/rants/annoying babble. In this case, it’s even more potent and fruitful. So, I shall have to split my findings and ramblings over two blogs – or there would be Juice Overload for you, poor reader. Not a good look for a work day.
And now on to some seriously juicy case studies:
MTV VMA Green Screens
Two weeks before the event, MTV chose their favourites and changed the green-screen media for fan-made VMA art. All art was continuously cycled, so many people never saw the same art twice.
To promote MTV’s VMAs in August 2015, the channel came up with a wondrous piece of user-initiated promotion. They called on ‘artists’ from all over the world to finish the promos for them. The campaign took out green screens on billboards and wallscapes across the States. All media drove traffic to MTVVMA.net, where people could pretend they were Van Gogh, Picasso or Rolf Harris (without the aftermath) and make whatever art statement they wanted. Incentivized by the promise MTV would pick the best pieces to replace all the green-screens out in the world, people shared their works of VMA art on their social channels, spreading the word far beyond traditional media. Two weeks before the event, MTV chose their favourites and changed the green-screen media for fan-made VMA art. All art was continuously cycled, so many people never saw the same art twice.
Straight Outta Somewhere
But perhaps no other campaign in recent years has made such an impact virally, through the engagement of the audience. In this, consumers do, indeed, becoming copywriters. This particular viral marketing campaign became a sensation. Almost overnight.
Straight Outta Somewhere showed that if you have empathy for your target audience they can and do engage.
North Kingdom, a Swedish ‘experience design agency’ (really?!), was approached by Beats By Dre to create an innovative and buzz-worthy Experiential Marketing or otherwise immersive consumer-centric experience to support the release of the film about N.W.A., Straight Outta Compton. What they came up with was a masterpiece in consumer engagement that trended No.1 two days in a row across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, with an average of 15,000 #Straightoutta tweets and retweets per minute. According to Twitter, there have been more than 400,000 Tweets mentioning #StraightOutta since Aug. 6. The site has had over 7 million visitors since it went live on August 5, plus over 6 million downloads of the meme. Not bad for a campaign that relied heavily on the fan to create.
Straight Outta Somewhere showed that if you have empathy for your target audience they can and do engage. The idea was to use the iconic STRAIGHT OUTTA logo, and invite the audience to get creative on social media. In addition to the creative output of Normal People across the globe, celebrities, the White House AND UNHCR used it to comment on current events.
As the site itself outlines: “We certainly think that the campaign helped to make people excited about the film and a desire to see it in cinemas. Because the meme created an emotional connection between the people and the plot. It’s a unified experience.”
TBC: Tune in next week for more juicy consumer copywriting shenanigans.