A brief Conversation about Experiential Marketing TedX Fulton Street


Last year I had the pleasure to attend a brief conversation about experiential marketing at a TEDx Talks, that was held in Fulton Street. I happened to have had a break from work and decided why not. I can grab a pizza on my way back.

The best part about hearing from Layne Braunstein Chief Creative Officer at Fake Love. Is his carefully outlined step by step program to creating effective experiential campaigns. Based on his definition, your birthday party was an experiential campaign if you had tried to sell something haha.

Seriously. Having focused on digital media for so long, it feels like this is the only communication venue that exists sometimes. After learning about what experiential is, I realized that when I was at FAO Schwartz in my childhood days, I was really just taking part in an experiential campaign.

What makes experiential campaigns so special is that deep down inside all of us are seeking to replicate the feeling of that first experience. It is essentially what drives us to try new things. The first experience is so powerful that it stays in your mind forever. Remember your first kiss?

The firm Fake love has found great success, by creating experiences that meet the following criteria:

 1)  They must engage the audience. A movie theater is not an experiential campaign because you are not experiencing anything. You are just sitting there. But an improvisation theater group, that brings you up on the stage and encourages you to be a part of the show is experiential.

2) going back to my movie theater example, the experiential campaign has to be live as well. The event has to be developing itself in real time as well as making you a part of the experience.

3) The experience also has to be multi-sensory, it has to engage all the senses. It has to make you feel, touch, taste, hear the experience so you can start connecting with the moment.


Layne then gave everyone some examples of how his company was able to design experiential campaigns for a wide variety of clients.  Some examples below.



There was a Google and Coke experiential campaign where a person in one part of the world can walk into a booth, and create a video message for another person in another part of the world, and with that, they also got to send the other person a coke.

The Volvo campaign which is encouraging people to go into a separate area and play live video games with formula 1 racers.

Some of these experiential campaigns are so good, they should generate tons of media coverage on their own. Layne described a 7up sponsored event where they created a concert for deaf kids. The results were really touching. I am sure they were able to create memorable moments for 7up.

Since one of my capstone projects had to do with a client involved in science, Layne also got to speak about an AR initiative sponsored by IBM, and NY times and Twenty Century Fox, where if you downloaded the app, you can place a statue of an overlooked NASA scientist next to a monument anywhere in the world.

Remember next time you want to celebrate your birthday, you too can create an experiential campaign our of it. Just remember the 3 key aspects.

1) Engaging
2) Live
3) Multisensory.

So sending videos to grandma does not count.

Donald






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