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May 21, 2008 In Transcripts By Advent

xmt-006: Interviews from the 2008 Experiential Marketing Summit

[This is a tran­script of the free audio pro­gram, Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today. The audio ver­sion of this con­tent is avail­able at: Episode 006: Inter­views from the 2008 Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Sum­mit]

Announcer: Wel­come to Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today.

[music]

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.

My name is Todd Austin. I’ll be your host for this episode.

[music]

Todd: Episode Six: Inter­views from the 2008 Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Summit.

[music]

Todd: The Sixth Annual Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Sum­mit recently wrapped up in Chicago. The sum­mit is a gath­er­ing of the lead­ing prac­ti­tion­ers in the field of expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing. Approx­i­mately 1,000 peo­ple attended this year to hear pre­sen­ta­tions by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Jet Blue, Glaceau — which is the Vit­a­min Water Com­pany — Microsoft and others.

Over the next few episodes, we’ll cover the con­cepts and prac­tices that stood out as par­tic­u­larly effec­tive, use­ful, clever, or insight­ful. But first, we’re going to give you an overview of the con­fer­ence through inter­views with two of the peo­ple who orga­nized the sum­mit. John Rober­son starts off our con­ver­sa­tion, and then we’ll intro­duce our guests.

[music]

John Rober­son: In this episode, Todd, I’d like for us to take a sum­mary of some of the recent con­fer­ences we’ve been to and had pre­sen­ta­tions from. Let’s enu­mer­ate those con­fer­ences. Will you help me round out the list?

Todd: Sure. I think we started off the year with the Exhibitor Conference.

John: The Exhibitor Con­fer­ence in Las Vegas.

Todd: Yep.

John: And then Glob­al­Shop in Chicago.

Todd: EuroShop was in there somewhere.

John: EuroShop in Europe. And then the Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Con­fer­ence most recently in Chicago. And what we’d like to do for our audi­ence is start with a sum­mary. Let’s start with a sum­mary of why the sub­ject that this pod­cast cov­ers — expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing — why this sub­ject is so rel­e­vant, why this is so top­i­cal, why it’s so impor­tant right now.

And we’re going to do that through some invited guests, the guests that we inter­viewed at the Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Con­fer­ence. Do you want to tell us about our first guest?

Todd: Kerry Smith is founder and CEO of Red 7 Media. Red seven Media hosted the con­fer­ence. They pub­lish four pub­li­ca­tions, which he’ll talk about in a minute, and which we’ll link to in the show notes. They also host a cou­ple of other con­fer­ences. They host the Event Design Con­fer­ence, which hap­pens in the fall. And they have a brand new con­fer­ence, which is called the Green Event Sum­mit, which hap­pens this summer.

This inter­view took place on the last day of the con­fer­ence, I believe, and it hap­pened on the show floor of the con­fer­ence itself, so you’ll hear the hus­tle and bus­tle of the crowd behind the inter­view. But lis­ten closely to what Kerry has to say. There’s a lot of good stuff in here.

[back­ground noise]

John: I’m here with Kerry Smith. He’s the pres­i­dent and CEO of Red 7 Media. Kerry, tell our audi­ence what Red 7 Media does and the valu­able con­tri­bu­tions that you all make to the event mar­ket­ing sec­tor and the expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing sector.

Kerry Smith: Red 7 Media is a media and pub­lish­ing com­pany, busi­ness infor­ma­tion com­pany. One of our major served mar­kets is the event indus­try, so we pub­lish four mag­a­zines that serve event pro­fes­sion­als: “Event Mar­keter Mag­a­zine, ” “Event Design” for the design com­mu­nity, “Expo Mag­a­zine” for the trade show orga­niz­ers, and “Agenda Mag­a­zine, ” which is for spe­cial events media plans.

The Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Sum­mit is our largest event serv­ing the event mar­ket­ing indus­try, so this event is ties to the “Event Mar­keter Mag­a­zine” fran­chise. This is the sixth year we’ve been doing this con­fer­ence. We have about 1,000 peo­ple, rep­re­sent­ing brand-side mar­kets, as well as event agencies.

John: As you have put together the speaker lineup, as you and your team have worked on the top­ics that are ger­mane to folks in the mar­ket­ing sec­tor, specif­i­cally in the expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing sec­tor, what are the major trends that you’re seeing?

And then also, you shared an impor­tant piece of research yes­ter­day after­noon. If you could tell our audi­ence about some of the find­ings in that research, that would be great.

Kerry: I think some of the major trends are mar­keters look­ing for ways to inte­grate live expe­ri­ences into their over­all mar­ket­ing mixes. That’s a big one. And try­ing to fig­ure out how to extend the life of an event beyond just the one or two days that the event is tak­ing place, but to weave it into a con­tin­uum that’s sup­ported by other mar­ket­ing dis­ci­plines. So fig­ur­ing out ways to make that hap­pen is a big topic of con­ver­sa­tion that’s going on here.

I think one of the ele­ments of that is this whole idea of branded con­tent. So that’s con­tent that you’re deliv­er­ing at your events, whether it’s a con­sumer event or a busi­ness event. How you can pack­age that con­tent up and make it live online or in other places.

ROI and man­age­ment is a huge area of con­ver­sa­tion. For so many years, events were eval­u­ated on sort of the gut feel­ing that it looked good and peo­ple seemed to have a good time. With all the scrutiny of senior man­age­ment these days, ROI is a big deal. Try­ing to fig­ure out events that are mea­sur­able and know­ing what you want to mea­sure are huge areas of inter­est to event mar­keters these days. I think those are prob­a­bly the big three.

The research that we pre­sented yes­ter­day was based on a sur­vey of about 1, 000 CMO-level senior exec­u­tives on the sales and mar­ket­ing side around the world at bil­lion dol­lar and up cor­po­ra­tions. We wanted to find out from them their views of events rel­a­tive to other ele­ments in the mar­ket­ing mix.

Some of the inter­est­ing find­ings there were that those senior-level exec­u­tives, when asked which mar­ket­ing dis­ci­pline buys the great­est ROI, events came out num­ber one by far, which is kind of interesting.

Not a lot of them, prob­a­bly aroundd 10%, feel that they mea­sure their events. But when we cross-sectioned those who mea­sure against those who expect bud­get increases around events, we find that events that are mea­sur­able are the pro­grams that get funding.

So mea­sure­ment obvi­ously is an impor­tant area. I think the take­away for mar­keters is that they need to be build­ing mea­sure­ment cri­te­ria into every­thing that they’re doing. Know­ing what you want t mea­sure and build­ing pro­grams to drive those mea­sure­ment ele­ments, and then actu­ally doing the mea­sure­ment to see what happened.

That is going to be the key to mak­ing these pro­grams sus­tain­able and to get con­tin­ued fund­ing, and for those peo­ple within those cor­po­ra­tions who are respon­si­ble for those events to move up that lad­der of impor­tant and really hav­ing a seat at the table with the adver­tis­ing peo­ple and some of the other mar­ket­ing disciplines.

John: Why do you sur­mise that expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing is more effec­tive? Why do you sur­mise that it’s gen­er­at­ing higher returns? What are the foun­da­tion level themes that are unique to expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing than any mar­ket­ing ele­ment they could be invested in?

Kerry: If you look at some of the speak­ers who were here who were talk­ing about… you know, Amy Curtis-McIntyre from Jet­Blue, Rohan Osa from Vit­a­min Water… you know, where they talk about the prod­uct and the mar­ket­ing being one and the same and the abil­ity to cre­ate an expe­ri­ence around your brand that gets peo­ple to pre­fer it over another just based on this ephemeral sort of feel­ing they have towards the brand is very powerful.

If you go from that to why are events being sort of char­ac­ter­ized as pro­vid­ing the great­est ROI… if you can get in front of a cus­tomer or a prospect and have a dia­logue and an engage­ment — a real con­ver­sa­tion with them — what bet­ter way to lead some­one to pre­fer your prod­uct and under­stand it bet­ter? So the ques­tion is: how do you scale up those con­ver­sa­tions in a way that moves the nee­dle in a large way?

That’s the chal­lenge that all mar­keters are fac­ing but rel­a­tive to direct-mail and web and some of these other things that really aren’t… there’s no per­sonal inter­ac­tion! Per­sonal inter­ac­tion is the most pow­er­ful form of mar­ket­ing. So, it’s the peo­ple who know how to put on events and cre­ate those expe­ri­ences and bring peo­ple together in these expe­ri­en­tial set­tings that, I think, are going to be the dri­vers of mar­ket­ing going forward.

John: Kerry, I want to make sure that our audi­ence knows how to get in touch with you and how to get in touch with the media that your team puts out. Before I do that I want to say that I really appre­ci­ate the qual­ity with which you all con­vey infor­ma­tion, the stan­dard that you have for these kinds of con­fer­ences. You all aren’t afraid to launch titles or ini­tia­tives in fron­tiers where there hasn’t been con­tent or media previously.

Tell our audi­ence how they can get con­nected with some of your mag­a­zines and be aware of some of the con­fer­ences that you all put on.

Kerry: Sure. Well, thanks for the com­pli­ment. You can go to our web­site www.eventmarketing.com or red7media.com and from those two places you can drill through to our mag­a­zines or white papers, research reports and some of our con­fer­ences and sem­i­nars that we put on.

John: Great. Thanks so much for your time. Thanks for a great con­fer­ence and we’ll see you next year!

Kerry: Great! Thank you.

John: I really appre­ci­ated, Todd, what Kerry was say­ing there. I thought he did a great job of sum­ma­riz­ing and I’m sure he was tired because his group had hosted this event. Don’t you think he did a good job of sum­ma­riz­ing the things that really are impor­tant for our audience?

Todd: I thought that was per­fect because he touched on sev­eral things that we were hear­ing from rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the com­pa­nies that were there either as pre­sen­ters or as par­tic­i­pants like we were.

John: So, for our audience’s pur­poses let’s just high­light those. We heard things of return-on-investment and measurement.

Todd: It seemed to hap­pen in every ses­sion I sat down in. Mea­sure­ment is a huge theme and espe­cially when you think about the stat that he high­lighted of: those com­pa­nies who mea­sure their expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing efforts are the ones who get addi­tional fund­ing for those efforts.

John: That’s right. I just want to encour­age our audi­ence: this is some­thing that you’ve got to do! We’re doing this with a num­ber of our clients help­ing them to mea­sure the effec­tive­ness of an event by mea­sur­ing the audi­ence before they go into the event and then mea­sur­ing the audi­ence when they come out of the event and prov­ing how pro­duc­tive and effi­cient that is.

So, that’s one of the things he men­tioned. The other thing he men­tioned was just how impor­tant this as an ele­ment is — this being expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing — as an ele­ment or as a strat­egy within the over­all mar­ket­ing mix and how it’s becom­ing crit­i­cally impor­tant: how live expe­ri­ences are becom­ing crit­i­cally important.

Todd: One of the themes that was repeated over and over again was that what we do in expe­ri­en­tial has to be inte­grated with all of the other mar­ket­ing things that we do. It can’t be a stand-alone piece, they all have to work together or we lose a lot of the power that we can gain by mak­ing these dis­ci­plines work.

John: What I think is crit­i­cal is that he took the time to say that more mar­keters are going to be spend­ing more money here because they’ve proven that it’s more effec­tive, that it gets a higher level of return than any­thing else that they could choose. So I’ll just sug­gest to our audi­ence, whether they’ve done that analy­sis or not, the fact of the mat­ter is: effec­tive mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies, effec­tive brands, are look­ing for the most rel­e­vant way to engage their audi­ence and those com­pa­nies are turn­ing to expe­ri­en­tial marketing.

Todd: One of the other things he said — which was a theme I heard from sev­eral of the pre­sen­ta­tions — was: the focus is turn­ing to find­ing ways to extend the life of the event so we no longer view all our effort and focus being on the one day or three days of the event that we’re plan­ning but we find ways to start inter­act­ing with our audi­ence weeks before the event and then to extend the expe­ri­ence into what hap­pens after the event so that we can encour­age and mea­sure word-of-mouth and influ­ence that extends afterwards.

John: You know, if we’re not care­ful we kind of get the whole machine turned around, don’t we? We say and think that the event is the out­come but the event is a strat­egy to achieve an out­come and so the way our team has being say­ing it around here is we’ve engaged with clients on projects is that the event is the middle.

Todd: That’s right.

John: And that the pre-event strat­egy is the first part, the event is the mid­dle, and the post-event strat­egy is the follow-up that sum­ma­rizes, homes in on and closes in on the rela­tion­ship that was begun within the event.

Todd: That’s a topic we need to spend some more time on in the next episode.

John: Right. The sec­ond inter­view is with Dan Hanover. Dan is the edi­tor in chief and pub­lisher of “Event Design Mag­a­zine” and of the “Event Mar­keter Mag­a­zine”. Dan is going to take us through, again, a sum­mary — very expe­di­tiously — real-time from being on the floor and from also cre­at­ing the edi­to­r­ial plat­form for his mag­a­zines which cover this space very well. So, I want our audi­ence to lis­ten care­fully to what Dan says. We’ll also come back and sum­ma­rize that.

[pause]

John: I’m here with Dan Hanover, the edi­tor and pub­lisher of “Event Design Mag­a­zine” and “Event Mar­keter Mag­a­zine” and we’re here at the expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing sum­mit in Chicago for 2008. Dan, once again, great job putting it together, great pro­gram­ming for folks in the mar­ket­ing space on some of the new and emerg­ing trends and infor­ma­tion around expe­ri­en­tial marketing.

Could I ask you some things for our pod­cast lis­ten­ers? One is: what trends are you see­ing from your per­spec­tive in expe­ri­en­tial marketing?

Dan Hanover: Well, thank you for your com­ments. I think from a trend stand­point, you know, top trends that we are see­ing is num­ber one: from a word-of-mouth stand­point how can we begin to use events to infect not only the peo­ple that mar­keters are talk­ing to in a live set­ting but also oth­ers that may not be at the event? So I think there is a big push to imple­ment word-of-mouth or “buzz” or viral ele­ments that con­tinue a con­ver­sa­tion after an event, but also use the peo­ple that do attend to mar­ket to others.

As an exam­ple, we see eBay doing a great job with some of their “un-conferences” where some of their top buy­ers and sell­ers will go and invite some of their new buy­ers and sell­ers to live events and webi­nars and online sem­i­nars, thereby cre­at­ing dif­fer­ent lay­ers of atten­dees and prospects.

I think num­ber two, from a trends stand point, peo­ple are start­ing to focus on new words. I think “expe­ri­ence” and “engage­ment” and “360-degree mar­ket­ing” is all very good, but we’re see­ing com­pa­nies get­ting a lit­tle smarter and think­ing about things like “acqui­si­tion, ” “con­ver­sion, ” and “retention.”

How can we use event to acquire cus­tomers or eye­balls or bod­ies or con­ver­sa­tions? How can we use smart events to con­vert those peo­ple from a prospect into a buyer? And at the end of the day, how can we have addi­tional mar­ket­ing plat­forms that help us retain those peo­ple. Because at the end of the day, if some­body buys some­thing once, that’s not where this indus­try needs to be. We need to use live events to cre­ate a cus­tomer for life.

And then lastly, we see the com­plete train towards the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion begin­ning to gain speed as com­pa­nies begin to use vir­tual and dig­i­tal events as their own stand-alone expe­ri­ences. Dig­i­tal events as exten­sions of live events. Maybe some­body attends a trade show or event and then they are pushed online to a dig­i­tal space to con­tinue the con­ver­sa­tion. Regard­less, clearly dig­i­tal is a big deal.

And obvi­ously as a num­ber four, green is becom­ing huge. And I think that mar­keters are still try­ing to wrap their arms around it. I think that com­pa­nies rec­og­nize the need to cre­ate more eco-friendly live expe­ri­ences, and that train may be mov­ing slowly, but we see it primed for some speed. Stay tuned on that, John.

John: Now if our audi­ence were to ask you — and obvi­ously you are biased, you do a lot of research and writ­ing and cov­er­age of this space — but why are events and expe­ri­ences more effec­tive, in your opin­ion? You’ve seen the research, but why are they more effective?

Dan: Well, I think that depend­ing on who you ask, some peo­ple may tell you that all other forms of mar­ket­ing are so clut­tered that you can’t really get a clear con­nec­tion to some­body. But I’ll tell you that the preachy side of me says that the magic of this of this busi­ness is two-fold.

Num­ber one, an event done really well can get some­body to fly through the tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing pur­chase fun­nel. And so the mar­keters for the last 100 years have had to use media for aware­ness. They’ve had to use pro­mo­tions and incen­tives for pref­er­ence and incli­na­tion. They’ve had to really use dif­fer­ent pots of money to accom­plish dif­fer­ent parts of that pur­chase funnel.

We’re see­ing that an event, done well, can actu­ally get some­body to go from aware­ness to pur­chase in one shot, and to con­vert them from a prospect into a buyer.

And then the sec­ond part of the magic — and I’ll wrap up on this note — is that when it’s done really well, the best best-in-class events can actu­ally speed up how quickly you can con­vert some­body into a customer.

If the ques­tion is why are these so effec­tive? For two rea­sons. One, you can get some­body in one shot to go from not even know­ing any­thing about a prod­uct to want­ing to buy it. You can’t do that with any other form of marketing.

And part two, done really well, we’re start­ing to see mar­keters rec­og­nize that an event can actu­ally con­vert some­body from a prospect into a buyer faster than any other form of marketing.

John: And to your ear­lier point, from a prospect to a buyer to an advo­cate, who becomes an exten­sion of you brand mar­ket­ing already.

Dan: And that’s where the busi­ness is going. We want to acquire some­body, con­vert them, retain them, and use the top level of our cus­tomers to infect other peo­ple into the acquisition/conversion/retention lifecycle.

John: Dan, I’m a big fan of your writ­ing. Tell our audi­ence where they can go and how to sign up for sub­scrip­tions to the mag­a­zines, what web­sites have this content.

Dan: You can learn every­thing about our “Event Mar­keter Mag­a­zine” at eventmarketer.com. You can learn every­thing about our “Event Design Mag­a­zine” at eventdesignmag.com. You can also check out some of the research, case stud­ies and sta­tis­tics from out Event Mar­ket­ing Insti­tute at eventmarketing.com.

John: Thanks so much, Dan.

Dan: Take care.

[pause]

John: So, Todd, let’s talk about what we heard Dan say.

Todd: Once again, we heard really force­fully the need to extend events. He was talk­ing about using word of mouth, using tech­nol­ogy — vir­tual and dig­i­tal — to extend events. I think that’s some­thing we really need to spend some time on.

John: It was really inter­est­ing to me — and maybe this is a stretch — but I hear this word “effi­ciency.” And it sug­gests to me that kind of the par­al­lel with this move­ment we see toward green, because green is all about effi­ciency, right?

Todd: Right.

John: Effi­cient gas mileage, effi­cient energy con­sump­tion of appli­ances, effi­cient things that are recy­clable. I think Dan is sug­gest­ing the events are more effi­cient. They have a faster speed of ramp-up time for infor­ma­tion, knowl­edge, aware­ness. That intra­cy­cle that was part of the tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing model is sped up so much more quickly.

But then what’s also hap­pen­ing is that on the back-end of the event, you’re not only pro­duc­ing a cus­tomer that may be newly acquired through that quick vor­tex of the event, but you’re also pos­si­bly pro­duc­ing an advo­cate. The advo­cate who then repeats, tells other friends, neigh­bors, busi­ness asso­ciates about the event, about the com­pany, about the company’s mis­sion and mes­sage. And in the process of doing that, they become an advocate.

Todd: Word of mouth is the most pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing tool that we have. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s also the hard­est to con­trol. Expe­ri­en­tial events give us a tool to cre­ate the impres­sion that we need to get peo­ple talk­ing about it to their friends and acquain­tances. That’s one of the rea­sons it’s so powerful.

John: I really thank Kerry and Dan. I thank them for the great work that they do to show lead­er­ship within out indus­try and to pro­vide infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge and net­work­ing plat­forms for peo­ple who work in and around this sector.

[music]

Todd: Well, that wraps up another episode. As you can see, we’ve got some very inter­est­ing ground to cover in our upcom­ing episodes. We’ve put links to inter­est­ing resources in the show notes for this episode. Specif­i­cally, you’ll find the link that allows you to get your own copy of the Event Use Sur­vey results that were released at the con­fer­ence, as well as links to the pub­li­ca­tions that Red seven Media pro­duces, the host of the summit.

Those resources are avail­able at our web­site: www.experientialmarketingtoday.com. Your com­ments and ques­tions are always wel­come. You can reach us using the com­ments tool on the site, or via email using the address: feedback@experientialmarketingtoday.com. Or through our new and improved voice com­ment line. The voice line is 615–690-6796.

We look for­ward to dig­ging deeper in the next episode. We hope you’ll join us.

Announcer: Thanks for lis­ten­ing to Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today.

[music]

Authored By Advent

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