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[This is a transcript of the free audio program, Experiential Marketing Today. The audio version of this content is available at: Episode 007: The Event is the Middle]

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Announcer: Welcome to Experiential Marketing Today.

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Todd Austin: Welcome to this episode of Experiential Marketing Today. This show is about the theory and practice of using experiences to engage audiences with the authentic nature of a brand or company. We believe that it may be the most powerful tool marketers have, but it’s also something of a mystery.

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Todd: My name is Todd Austin. I will be your host for this episode.

Episode 7: The Event is the Middle.

In this episode, we build off of the statistics released at the Experiential Marketing Summit about the effectiveness of events. As an aside, we highly recommend that you check out the summit for next year. Red seven Media does a fantastic job of organizing the conference, and it will be well worth your time.

Part of the title of this episode is borrowed from the summit. In several presentations we kept hearing people say, “The event is the middle.” When we talk about taking a 360 degree approach we mean the same thing. However, “the event is the middle” has the advantage of being simpler. So we’ve co-opted the phrase for this episode.

John Roberson and I will get into what that means and why it’s important in just a bit. Before we get started I should acknowledge that this episode is a bit longer than our typical program. We like to keep these short enough to fit into a daily commute, but you may have to divide this one into two commutes. Please accept our apologies. We’ll try to be more succinct in the future.

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Todd: John, one of the interesting things to me about some of the stuff we’ve heard at the Experiential Marketing Summit and saw in the event you’ve surveyed is that these chief marketing officers at these billion dollar companies and larger, view experiential events as the marketing piece that provides the greatest return on investment. And that kind of surprised me.

John Roberson: It is surprising. It’s a brand new paradigm, and that’s kind of an old expression. But I think there is a new model emerging. We have this perception that ads reach so many more people. But the problem is, that cast really maybe reaching in their philosophy of how effective ads are, Todd. Because while they may reach that number, they may not connect with, or they might not actually touch that number.

What we know about events is we can prove with so much more validity, that they actually reach and connect with an audience. They really are proven. You’ve heard that old adage: “Our ads are seen by a 178,000 people monthly while your event can only reach 750 people.” And we also hear that events are expensive.

But I think today, in this conversation, we can really talk about the difference and why some of those assumptions are bad.

Todd: Absolutely. You think about it. There may be a 178,000 of those publications out there. How many of them are actually opened? And if they are opened, how many people actually notice that ad? And of those that noticed, how many of them are our targets?

John: It’s so true, especially in the B2B world. Even in the B2C world, business to consumer world, I think that so many of the ads are really vendors in the B2B world talking to themselves, or brands in the B2C world talking to themselves.

Magazines, print ads, sometimes even broadcast media — we are just doing those, number one, because we’ve always done them before. We’re doing them, number two, because that’s what we believe everybody else does. We still can’t prove whether or not we’re connecting with an audience. Lexus cannot prove whether I have seen their ad or not.

Todd: That’s right. And this isn’t to say that we don’t believe that ads should not be a part of a marketing mix, because there are places where they do fit. But the influence an ad has is one that takes time to build up. You have to have multiple impressions before you create any action with these ads. And that takes time and it takes money. Therefore, it’s a fallacy to think that it’s cheaper to go with ads than with some experiential event.

John: Events are so much more efficient through the cycle of engagement. The involvement factor, the multi-sensory factor, the edutainment factor, the memorability factor — all that is so much quicker and condensed than the old advertising model of building awareness and creating an interest. All that’s collapsed. By highly targeting, we’re using our marketing dollar so much more effectively.

Todd: Some of the stats they gave us at the Experiential Marketing Summit — they were released as part of that event view survey — showed that 78% of attendees at an experiential event share their experiences with someone after the event. 78%, that’s word of mouth influence. That’s the sweetest form of marketing we can get our hands on.

John: Even before that, from our experience in this sector, we know how many are responding to our invitation to the event. So much more productive, so much more measurable. If you really want some sort of validity here at being able to put metrics in place, events are certainly the way to do.

Todd: That’s right. So let’s talk about that measurement angle for a second that you bring up.

One of the key performance indicators that a marketer should track with an experiential event is this metric called “cost per touch.” And you want to talk about cost per touch for a second?

John: Sure. Well, touches have more impact than impressions. The two are not the same. When we talk about an experiential event, we’re talking about something that is multi-sensory: sight and sound and smell; an emotional experience. At the heart of brand differentiation is this theme of emotion.

Well, an event is a touch. It’s a direct connection. When we talk about experiences, it’s being those connections that are unforgettable. It’s this direct connection with a prospect or an indirect with someone that that prospect or that audience member refers or talks about through word of mouth. Those are things that are really important.

When we think about that, we think about a CPT, or cost per touch. And this is a function of increasing touches and lowering costs. You’re the gifted one with math, talk about how this works.

Todd: Well, just as you said, a simple numbers example here. Let’s say we have an event that costs a $100,000, and we get a thousand attendees at this event. Well you take the $100,000, you divide it by a thousand, and you get your cost per touch is $100. So it’s a pretty simple metric in the end.

John: That’s right. That sounds like an expensive number. It’s relative to the sector that you’re in. In the business to business world, a $100 per touch is not an expensive number. If an engagement with an average client is $25,000 a year, spending a $100 on someone to get their business is how much we would spend on them for dinner.

The problem with that is, if we took them to dinner in a nice restaurant, we dropped a $100, the dinner would be much more about their family, it would be much more about the wine, whether or not the wait service was on time, whether or not the entree was hot, whether or not the fish was cooked properly.

But here, when we talk about an experiential event, we are creating this experience where all of these facets are part of our persuasion process.

Todd: And I think it’s important to hit that point again that you started off with here, that impressions and touches are not the same. Because a touch can lead to action immediately, whereas impressions, you have to build up several impressions over time before you generate any action.

John: That’s right. I am reminded also, we just talked about the average purchasing potential of a customer within a year, but the reality is a customer has purchasing lifecycle. That lifecycle, or long-term value of the customer, can be created by this investment in the customer. So again, I think it’s much more efficient.

Reach with ads has a low cost-per-impression, but we just don’t know if we are actually connecting with the audience.

Todd: That’s right. One of the things to keep in mind as you start to think about touch, is this idea of impact zones. We often think of the people who come to our event, and that’s who we focus our attention on primarily. And that is the center of the bulls-eye. That is the impact zone, the Zone 1, that we are focused on as we plan for an event.

But we also have to consider those people the people who attend our event will influence after the event is over. This influence zone, or Zone 2, is something that we need to think of as well. It’s the next concentric circle out from the center of the bull’s-eye. It’s one that we can generate a lot of influence with because, again, we’re using word-of-mouth from people that they trust to influence them.

John: I’m thinking — I’m going to interrupt you. I’m thinking there’s an article than ran in the “New York Times” two weeks ago about HBO launching a new series about vampires. I believe the series is called “Tru Blood.” The story is of vampires that live among human beings.

To launch this series, which they badly need to get traction and be successful in the exit of the “Sopranos” and “Sex and the City,” they decided to target those influencers that you are describing and use their level of respect and esteem and their reach, their own influence, the reciprocating influences, the other ripples and rings in the pond, if you will, by targeting them with a personal interaction, to get them blogging and writing and discussing and talking about the new series.

So your point is well made and very well documented, even two weeks ago in the “New York Times” at how people use influencers to cast that word of mouth in a much wider way.

Todd: That’s a great example and we’ll provide a link to that article in the show notes for this episode. The other piece to that, and I think you touched on it in that example as well, is you have that immediate influence right after an event, but there is also some residual influence that happens over time.

If we really had an impact with the people who attended the event, they’re going to talk about it immediately a lot, but over time, it’s still going to come to mind from time to time. They’re going to speak about it in the positive way. The people that they spoke to initially are also going to talk to people about it. So we kind of have three zones here that we’re managing, as we plan for this event.

That first zone is, again, those who attend the event. The second zone is those that are influenced by the attendees shortly after the event. The third zone that we want to think about is that residual impact that happens over time.

John: Maybe we could show a graphic of this in the show notes.

Todd: Sure.

John: I want to bring out the thesis — you and I both believe this — with the audience that, put quite simply, the event is the middle. The event is the middle. Because so many clients we work with think of the trade show booth, think of the event that we are throwing as the thing. And they put 95% or almost 100% of their energy into the event.

It’s the middle. We really have to focus a lot of time and effort and strategy and resources intensity on the before, the pre-event strategy and the after, the follow-up. We can’t see this one time thing and it’s over. We’ve got to see this as a relationship, a dance, a persuasive experience over time with the customer and with the audience.

We got to see the event as the middle portion. This is a relationship. If we can extend our event backward and get our prospects and our audience engaged before the event, we can build excitement. We can build engagement. We can improve the quality of the touch.

Todd: We can get more people to show up.

John: We can get more people to show up. We’ve had in the last month and a half, a client who told us that an event we worked on with him was spectacular. They wished they had had more people there. The interesting thing about that was that they cut back their pre event budget.

Todd: That’s right.

John: And we could see that coming with them and we hated that. But that was a necessity of what happened. We also were compressed a little bit on the advanced timing of that. We didn’t have enough time to build that groundwork. But it just stresses to us how important… And then what happens, Todd, on the backside is, we spend all this energy in the event.

We just put all our energy into it and like it’s an athletic performance, we’re just completely spent at the end and we collapse into a ball of nerves. What we forget is that the customer and the audience is longing for some sort of follow-up. They want something that reminds them of the event afterwards.

Todd: That’s right. If we actively manage post-event influence, as best we can, if we encourage word of mouth, if we enable word of mouth, then, not only can we extend that reach beyond what would happen naturally, but we can also find a way to measure that extension.

John: That’s right. Talk about some of the effects of an improved realization that the event that the event is the middle. What are some of those outcomes?

Todd: For one thing, you improve the quality of the touch dramatically, because all of the sudden your impact isn’t limited to the time and space of the meeting. You’re communicating before and after, so the quality of the communication, the quality of the touch, is improved.

But you also have an opportunity to improve your cost per touch ratio. Like we said a minute ago, you can get more people to come to the event by carefully managing the pre event process. And then you can also extend the touch by encouraging, enabling and measuring word of mouth influence after the event.

So in our example from before, if we got instead of 1,000 people to show up, we got 1,200 people to show up, our cost per touch ratio just got a lot better. And then after the event if we can encourage and measure touching 3,000 other people through word of mouth, which is a very realistic goal, then all of a sudden we’ve got over 4,000 touches from this one event that we can measure.

So our cost per touch has gone done 75%. And the quality of touch is very high.

John: I think it’s important for our audience to understand that to extend this event, we’ve got to do a few things. First, we’ve got to get our mindset right that the event is the middle. As we think about buckets into which we invest resources, that while the middle may be the largest bucket, similarly proportioned buckets are prior to the event, the pre-event strategy, and after the event.

It may look something like 15/70/15. It may look something like 25/35/40, as we think about the pre-, the event, and the post-event strategy. The other thing I think about is we have to get a strategic perspective. So quickly, if we’re not careful, our mind can go to the things that are very demanding of us. The things that sometimes people from an egocentric point of view, prioritize really high. What is the menu going to look like? What is the food and beverage going to look like?

Todd: Exactly.

John: Sometimes if we’ve got an agency partner working with us, an event agency, an experienced agency working with us, we are able to see the menu as one of many elements that we have to think about.

And so as we’re balancing in managing to a budget, we might cut back and not serve lobster crepes at the event, but instead have a much nicer and more robust invitation to the event. And still be able to get the audience that we need there and get the effectiveness of the touches that we need there.

So I think those two things: getting our mindset right, understanding the balance equation, what the new equation looks like, those three components.

Todd: Right.

John: And then getting a partner who can navigate strategically to see this holistically.

Todd: The advantage of that partner is it gets it off of my shoulders. I can stop worrying about it. I don’t have the emotional energy tied into it anymore and I’m free to think about those pre- and post- things that, like you said before, often get lost in the shuffle.

John: So whether the folks listening to this program want to design this on their own, or whether they want to design it with an agency, Todd, let’s give some advice on how do you approach this. How do we break this now into pieces that we can manage?

Todd: I think one of the first steps that we have to do and it’s also an attitude adjustment, more than anything. Instead of planning the event, I think we need to get focused on designing the experience. Planning the event is all about the logistics of making this thing come off.

Whereas designing the experience is starting with: well, what impact do we want this event to have? What is the outcome? What is the impression we want to create? How can we do that? What’s the best way to make that happen?

John: You got some examples of that. Talk about that.

Todd: One of the things that stood out to me is the great job that American Express has done with the specific event that it sponsored year after year after year, the U.S. Open Tennis Championships.

American Express has an exhibit at this event every year and if you are a card member, you can walk up to the exhibit, show them your card and they will hand you a flat screen wireless television that you can carry with you throughout the complex.

So if I am sitting down and watching a specific tennis event on this little flat screen TV, I can keep up with five other matches at the same time. That’s only if I’m a member of American Express.

John: Membership has its privileges.

Todd: If I’m not a member, all I have to do is sign up on the spot. They just happen to have the application right there. Once I’ve signed up, they’ll allow me to carry around the flat screen TV as well.

So they’re giving their customers a reason to check in. They’ve designed the experience so American Express care members have a reason to come by and make a connection with them. And they are also giving perspective customers a reason to check them out.

John: One other example from the consumer sector is the thought of closing the loop. And Best Buy did a program with college students where they took mobile marketing out into the streets and let the college students on the campuses interact with new technology.

And the thought there was: OK, we’ll give college students exposure to. We might acquire some and we hope to convert some, we hope to retain some customers. At the end of the interaction with technology, the first year they gave college students a coupon to redeem in the store.

The second year, they extended the experience and allowed a bus there to take the college students from the campus, after interacting with the technology, right to the store and made the bus trip even an interactive experience on the way. What college kid doesn’t love the socialization aspect of being a part of a larger group?

The key theme there is that they closed the loop. And I love that theme. Some people are ready to act. We talk about the efficiency events. Some people are ready to act right there. It reminds me of how Disney and other entertainment complexes, some of the aquariums are getting very sophisticated at this. At the end of the experience we terminate in the gift shop. We end up in the gift shop.

Todd: Right.

John: And that’s really the greatest call to action, right? We felt so strongly. We’ve interacted in a multi century way with the fish or the Disney experience and now we can buy a souvenir of that experience immediately.

I know that you and I being parents of four children each [laughter] sometimes resent the fact that we end in the gift shop.

Todd: It’s a little too well designed.

John: Yes, it’s a little too well designed, but it does suggest to you that we’re closing the loop there and that we as marketers should take a lesson from that.

Todd: That’s right and that is the result of careful planning and approaching it as an experience, not an event. I mean, it would be so easy to just say: OK, this Best Buy event. Let’s just go out and have an exhibit. Let’s let them interact with the technology. We had a thousand college students come interact with the technology and we went home.

And we would say that that felt good, it seemed like it was a success, but by designing the experience, by thinking about what we really want to happen here and what would it take to make that happen. Best Buy was able to close the loop, as you said, and get people to actually make purchases and measure it.

John: The other thing I think we have to think about is this continuous engagement. Within the experience, use technology, use virtual media, use social media to really extend the experience with people. Make it very, very engaging.

We just did an event with clients and real time, on the spot, they had keypads within which they could play and participate in games that were messaged around the customer’s message. But it was real time engagement. The keypad was right there in front of them. And the results and the graphs and the respondents were flashing up in front of the stage on the screens to show this level of engagement.

That’s really important. Sometime technology does that. Sometimes people and brand ambassadors do that, but the thought is this continuous engagement throughout the event.

Todd: One of the best examples of that that I have seen that is really simple, that anyone can do. The technology is readily accessible is this simple thing of the photographer wondering around, snapping photos of people at your event and then handing them a card, saying, “Hey, this is how you get to your photo online after the event.”

Then when they come to check out their photo, making it easy for them to forward it to people. All of the sudden you have given them a reason, using technology, to come make another connection with you after the event is over. And then, “Hey forward this to 14 other people if you want to.”

John: That’s right. And that can be as passive or as active as you want. We’ve seen some of our clients who overtly forward those photos out to clients. The photos are branded, the green screen is dropped in and the logo is placed there. But the key there is that’s very important and that gets at kind of the pre and post communication strategy, as well.

That allows me three days, ten days, three weeks after the event to send some sort of reminder that might be a surprise for folks.

Todd: That’s right. And a pleasant surprise, something they want to see.

John: That’s right.

Todd: Another thing to plan for and we say this in just about every episode, but it’s so important. That is to plan for measurement from the beginning. There are lots of ways to do this.

You can make your event a destination, which takes some planning. But if people want to be there, then you make the admission ticket be some sort of data acquisition. You ask them for some kind of marketing information.

John: Absolutely. The Stoli brand of vodka had a Stoli Hotel experience. Because of the age requirements of serving liquor, attendees to that event had to register. That registration then became the data acquisition and the triggering.

As a part of the process for them registering, Stoli was able to measure their awareness of the various flavors of and their experience with and consumption of and loyalty for the Stoli brand. Then those same folks were able to be surveyed after the experience and we were able to see how much we moved the applause needle.

How much more engagement they received, how much more brand affinity, how much more product trial, how much more loyalty they had stimulated. How much more word of mouth advertising and relations that they had created as a result of that experience. It was very much a good one.

Todd: So, to start wrapping up, we believe and we have seen that experiential events are extremely powerful. And we’re not talking about last minute mixers and meet and greet type of events. We’re talking about planned marketing events, where you have thought through what you want out of it, how you are going to get there, how you are going to measure it and then you’ve developed a strategy pre-, at and post- to make it happen.

John: It really is that. One of the key questions to ask yourself is: if someone were to come to our event, do they know it’s us? Do they know it’s our message? Are they connecting with our strategy? Or could this be any cocktail party? Any event? Any food and beverage event, you know, thing for anybody?

Todd: That’s right.

John: It would be easier to hand those audience members $100 bills. It would be much faster and equal the expense. What we’re trying to say is our strategic objectives satisfied? Did we move the loyalty meter, the awareness meter, the persuasion meter by efficiently taking someone through a planned event that we were involved in?

Todd: And maybe final point is get help. Don’t leave all this on your own shoulders. An experiential agency can probably help you reduce costs, or at least stay within the same budget and help you be much more effective with the money that you are spending.

John: I think the other thing there is, it’s OK to start small. But regardless, there is a powerful strategy for measuring your marketing effectiveness.

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Todd: As we wrap up, one of the things we should make clear is that we aren’t anti-traditional marketing. We believe that ads, direct mail and other more traditional approaches have a valued place in an integrated marketing mix. Our point is that for many companies, the mix is heavy on the traditional and light on the high potency experiential that we talk about here.

As always, we appreciate the time you spend with us as you listen. We hope that you find the content useful. Your input and feedback helps make it more relevant for your needs so we welcome that feedback.

The simplest way to do that is to use the comment tool on our website. The address is: www.experientialmarketingtoday.com. And the comment tool is at the end of the show notes for each episode.

We also have two alternate methods you can use. You can send an email to feedback@experientialmarketingtoday.com or you can call our voice comment line. That number is 615-690-6796.

On our website you’ll find links to the resources we mentioned in this episode. We usually try to put a few links to related material that you may find useful, if you want to dig a little deeper. Once again, our site address is: www.experientialmarketingtoday.com.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Experiential Marketing Today.

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