Experience the Message

EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING ARRIVES AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

It's taken years for Stuart Elliot at the New York Times to begin seriously covering the rise of experiential marketing, as he has finally delivered...sort of. Sure, it's taken a cool out-of-home campaign from Kraft in Chicago to get his attention, but at least he's calling it "experiential" in his article.

The gist of the experience is quite simple (as all insight-driven experiences should be): 10 bus shelters in the Windy City will be heated, courtesy of Stove Top Stuffing. The campaign succeeds in equating the warmth of the shelter in the middle of Chicago winter to the warmth that Stovetop Stuffing gives those who eat it. Simple, right?

According to the writer:

Such “experiential marketing” is intended to entice consumers to experience products or brands tangibly rather than bombard them with pitches.

It is a response to the growing ability of consumers to ignore or avoid traditional advertising, thanks to technology like digital video recorders. Experiential marketing is also an acknowledgment that products and brands must offer alternatives to the interruptive model of peddling that has been the mainstay of advertising for more than a half-century, which disrupts what consumers want to watch, read or hear.

(I love how experiential marketing is still in quotes!!! It's as if experiential marketing still doesn't exist in the mind of the NYT writer who covers Madison Avenue.)

He goes on to explain the promotion:

The 10 heated shelters, primarily in downtown Chicago locations like Michigan Avenue and State Street, will have posters that read: “Cold, provided by winter. Warmth, provided by Stove Top.” The posters will also appear on 40 other bus shelters that will not have heated roofs.

During the first three weeks of December, Kraft plans to give samples of a new variety of Stove Top, called Quick Cups, to commuters and passers-by at half of the heated shelters....

...JCDecaux North America, a unit of the global outdoor-advertising specialist JCDecaux, says these will be its first bus shelter heaters in the United States. The company has installed them in other countries for other advertisers’ campaigns. Those sponsored by British Gas included simulated fireplaces.

Tellingly, the article reminds readers and the ad community that:

The biggest risk with experiential marketing is that consumers will deem it an annoying gimmick, which could harm attempts to improve perceptions of brands or products.


There is a precedent. In December 2006, the California Milk Processor Board worked with the CBS Outdoor division of CBS to introduce scent strips on bus shelters in San Francisco. The strips, which smelled like chocolate chip cookies, were an effort to bring to life the experience of desiring a glass of milk for dunking cookies.

The campaign was abruptly ended after an outcry that the scent was inappropriate in public places and could set off allergic reactions.

(Only in San Francisco! Those cats will protest anything, including the smell of cookies.)

Thanks, Elliot! I dig the story. And more importantly, as a Chicagoan, thanks Kraft!!!! I'll warm up with the shelter on Michigan Ave. Hope it won't be too crowded.

EXPERIENTIAL BILLBOARD

Those who know me and read this blog know that I am a sucker for cool out-of-home media like billboards, posters and bus shelters that provide cool and thoughtful experiences for its intended audience. So this quick piece at PSFK is no exception. I just love the simplicity and the use of media for benefit, rather than intrusion. Check out the write up:

A set of billboards in four European cities measure the local area’s noise pollution level and display it live for passerby’s to see. It’s an advertisement for AEG-Electrolux’s quiet running washing machines, but also a simple public service. Quantifying an abstract figure such as noise pollution could help people become more aware of the problem. Besides getting immediate feedback on noise pollution, the data is sent to a website where you can compare noise levels from city to city.

Cool, eh? (my latent Canadian influence)

THE NEW YEAR'S BEST SOCIAL MEDIA

I love this idea. Here's a piece about a form of social media that is wholly disregarding of technology (sort of) and social networks. All it takes is one ton of confetti.

Yeah, confetti. Messages and wishes for the new year from people around the world will float down on the New Year's Eve revelers in Times Square in New York City when the confetti is dropped.

For the first time, anyone can get a message printed on a piece of the multicolored confetti by visiting the Times Square Information Center or by using the Internet to type a message on a "Wishing Wall Online."

That's pretty cool! Talk about a message in a bottle.

The message-carrying pieces will be mixed among the more than one ton of confetti, organizers said. Messages can be serious or silly, said Tim Tompkins, a spokesman for the Times Square Alliance, which organizes the party.

So far, messages have included everything from wanting to be taller or having a smarter boss to healthy children and asking for the safe return of a child from Iraq, he said. "Peace in the World," reads one posted on the "virtual wishing wall."

"Another person wrote that they wanted their husband to get a green card so that they could join them here in the states," Tompkins told WABC-TV.

Here's to a great New Year!!!!! I wish the husband a green card.

PUSH TO TALK

More awesomeness from the duo at Rethink Vancouver.

Mike Milardo and his partner Bart Batchelor (with names like that, they need a sitcom) have come up with a unique OOH execution for Solo -- a Canadian cellular telco. As Mike puts it:

It's a national stunt/promotion for Solo's Walkie Talkie phones. At bus stops in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Calgary, we've connected bus stops with actual walkie talkies phones. People just push the button and are connected live to another bus stop in another city. Should make for some fun, awkward interactions.

How awesome it that? I told you it was a bit of awesomeness. Is there a better way to communicate communication at the press of a button?

If Mike and Bart are smart, they built in a recording mechanism. I would love to hear a conversation between some yokel in Calgary and a pepper in Montreal (sorry to both). Capture the conversations, use them for your next campaign called...Canada Talks.

Okay, that title is lame. How about, Push My Buttons? Stupid, eh.

ART YOU CAN FEEL

The dymanic duo that brought you the People Steal billboard -- Mike Milardo and Bart Batchelor at the Vancouver office of Rethink -- have flipped the script on the concept to create another breakthrough outdoor campaign.

Working for Vancouver's Sculpture Biennale, the shop rolled-out a number of three-dimensional posters for the festival, using guerrilla tactics to spread the posters throughout the city. With a tagline like "Art that you can feel," the idea to use 3D posters was a stroke of good creative thinking.

Here's the twist, tho: The 3D posters also featured empty pedestals -- the kind you use to display sculptures -- so that passersby could leave something of their own (personal or found) on them. This, in essence, made people the artists, and what they left on top of the pedestals became their art.

According to Milardo:

Each of the 3D shelf posters had ‘Place Art Here’ printed on them. The idea was to offer up an interactive public gallery, one that people could change and interact with over time. It went up all over the city, but the main location was in a busy touristy area by the beach with a ton of foot traffic. People left all sorts of weird stuff - driftwood , shells, bottle caps, lighters, origami etc.

Remember the People Steal billboard, which allowed consumers to literally steal stuff off of the billboard. This campaign is kind of the opposite, innit? Instead of stealing, consumers are adding to the campaign.

All this talk about consumer-generated media has for the most part concentrated on video submissions. How great to see CGM used in an outdoor execution, and with such a smart and creative insight.

Is it any wonder that good guerrilla marketing is invariably a manifestation of experiential marketing? Kudos to you, guys. Keep doing that voodoo that you do so well.

ABSOLUTELY IKEA

Following up on the post about Nike and iPod joining forces into branded brands, Miel from CoolZor pointed me to this execution in NYC's Soho neighborhood.

It's a great example of two brands coming together to execute an unforgetable experience for their shared audience. (It's also more proof that I am totally obsessed with OOH media.)

HOORAY FOR OOH

If the Internet is first, what marketing medium do you think is showing the second-highest growth? Is it mobile technology, like SMS? Certainly not print or radio, right? TV? With the likes of American Idol...maybe.

But in fact, out-of-home is the second-fastest growing medium. Yes, OOH!

According to this post:

Outdoor ad spending rose 11.4 percent in March, making it the fastest growing major ad medium next to the Internet, according to estimates released Wednesday by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.

Why? you may ask.

"Brands are investing more heavily than we anticipated," Freitas explained. "I think we're starting to see an acceleration in ad dollars moving from other traditional media to out-of-home." Asked why this might be so, Freitas mused: "I think there continues to be uncertainty concerning the future vitality of other media formats, and there's a lot of interest in using out-of-home to reach consumers when they're 'on the go.'"

Beth Gray, of Foote, Cone & Belding, said she's seen an uptick in outdoor ad spending too--pointing to the advent of new technologies, including digital billboards, as a way to "cut through the clutter." "I believe it--especially because in some markets people are buying and creating premium outdoor ads, not just regular 30-sheets. You can just look in Times Square--people are really starting to get into LED displays, and it's driven by the desire to create something that's truly impactful."

Some marketers, however, are going a bit overboard with the medium. Witness the latest debacle of the Mission: Impossible III marketing ploy, other than the obvious debacle of having Tom Cruise star in the movie:

A newspaper promotion for Tom Cruise's "Mission: Impossible III" movie was off to an explosive start when a California arson squad blew up a news rack, thinking it contained a bomb.

The confusion: the Los Angeles Times rack was fitted with a digital musical device designed to play the Mission: Impossible theme song when the door was opened. But in some cases, the red plastic boxes with protruding wires were jarred loose and dropped onto the stack of newspapers inside, alarming customers.

Adidas Gets the Street

My colleagues make fun of me for displaying an unhealthy passion for outdoor advertising. I guess this has to do with the fact that I have always been a guerrilla marketer at heart…but one with a robust budget to work with (does that still make me a guerrilla?).

I am enthralled by street media, street art and street culture. Why not? That’s where we live…at least us urban dwellers, who have haunted the sidewalks of NYC, LA, London, Paris, Rio, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Culcutta…you get the picture.

These are the places where trends are born, where creativity is rewarded with untold riches, where “the next big thing” is happening at the clubs, in the basements and in the streets.

So, this is all a long-winded introduction to this campaign from Adidas for its new Adicolor line of shoes.

The entire platform to the line is personalization and the use of a vibrant palette of colors. So what better way to activate such a platform than with graffiti – personalization, creativity and color all in one gorgeous package of guerrilla street art and culture.

But it’s not just enough to co-opt graffiti culture, like Sony did for a recent launch of the P2P player...and failed miserably. Adidas took it to an experiential level.

Even the Wooster Collective is impressed:

Of all the recent street campaigns we've seen lately, this is our favorite one by far. It's extremely clever, but most importantly it fits the brand perfectly. It takes advantage of the street to the fullest. And most of all, it turns the tables in an absolutely brilliant way that is extremely impressive.

First, Adidas put up a series of mostly white flyerposters - branded with the Adidas logo - that subtly encouraged people to tag the billboard and basically fuck it up.

But then, days later, they came back to those same ads and placed another poster over it. The new poster features the Adidas Adicolor shoe, now with the original tags from the previous poster incorporated into the show design.

This is experiential marketing in the outdoor realm. Kudos to the team in Germany who came up with this. I can't wait to see something like this in North America, where modern street art was born.

Hopefully, this campaign will show that merely co-opting a trend is never enough. One must embrace it, and then encourage others to engage in it.

Pretty cool, eh?

POP-UP MOVIES

Hey to all you movie theater chains and operators that continue to gouge us with increasing prices and annoy us with interminable commercials before movie screenings! You may have a reactionary movement on your hands. You see, a guerrilla drive-in phenomenon is sweeping California, and it is making some people notice.

An “organization” called MobMov is using simple projection technology, and a small-radius radio frequency, to turn abandoned building walls into on-the-spot drive in movie theaters.

In explaining the project, the site states that:

“Our name contains far more significance than simply being short for "Mobile Movie". Mob: much like Flashmob and similar movements, the MobMov is organized over the internet, appears for a short time in a random location, and disappears just as quickly as it came. Try that with your parents' drive-in! Movment: we like to think of ourselves as movie mercenaries of sorts - we bring free movies to the community, providing a new, wholesome night-time use for the forgotten areas of town.”

I love it. What a great idea. Please go to MobMov.org for more info. And join in the experience.

OOH EXPERIENCE

All the kids these days have cell phone cameras. Ever since I bought a camera-equipped PDA, I've been snapping the weirdest things I see on the street, family dinners, landscapes from a zooming car, cool bands, a couple of puppies, etc.

And if anyone who has visitied a typical MySpace or Facebook page would immediately notice, kids and young adults have hundreds of snapshots that they post and share every day. We are becoming a very snap-happy marketplace.

So it's so cool to see a bus shelter campaign capitalize on this burgeoning human proclivity. Check this idea out: position yourself in front of the shelter ad -- which is a graphic of a fake magazine cover, for instance -- and take a picture of yourself.

You are now on the cover of a magazine.

Or the winner of a boxing match.

Or in bed with two hotties.

Then send off the pic to your astounded (and disbelieving) friends around the world.

A Norwegian telco called Netcom wants people to snap more pictures with their cell phones and send them off to friends via the handheld's email. And it is giving them an advertising experience that compells them to do so.

This is an incredible example of simple insight taken to the next level, and a prime example of an ubiquitous technology transforming traditional mass media. These outdoor ads, created by BBDO Norway, are uniquely experiential. Kudos to the work. Expect copy cats next week.

Find more great work at Adhunt. Click on the photo to the right for a closer look and explanation.