What is experiential marketing?
Experiential marketing is the brand as a place you can go. A pop-up store, a festival stage, a takeover of a city block, an installation in a flagship window, a screen in Times Square that reacts to the crowd, a product launch staged as a night out. The medium is the experience itself, and the audience is in it rather than in front of it. The work overlaps with event marketing, brand activation and experiential design, and it shares a goal with all of them: make a memory, not an impression.
It has two audiences. The people in the room, who get the full experience, and the far larger number who see it afterward, through the content the experience generates: the film, the photographs, the social posts from the people who were there. Modern experiential work is designed for both from the start, because an experience nobody can see later is a very expensive party.
Why it matters
Why experiential marketing matters
Attention is cheap to buy and hard to hold. A person who spends an hour inside a brand's world remembers it in a way no thirty-second film can match, because the memory is their own: they were there, they touched it, they told someone. That depth is what experiential buys, and it is why luxury houses, sports teams and beauty brands put real money into windows, pop-ups and live moments that reach fewer people than a paid post.
The content multiplies it. A well-designed experience produces film and photography that a brand could never stage in a studio, because the reactions are real, and it produces posts from attendees that carry the credibility of a friend's recommendation. One night in a flagship can feed a brand's channels for a season.
In practice
How experiential marketing works in practice
- 01
The work starts with an idea that only makes sense in person. If the experience could be a video, it should be a video. From there the team designs the space, the journey through it, the moment people will photograph, the thing they will take away and the way it ends. Production brings in set builders, lighting, sound, technology, permits, staffing and safety, and a producer who has run live events, because a live event has no second take.
- 02
The content plan runs alongside. The shoot is scheduled, the key angles are built into the design, the film crew knows where the moment will happen and the social team has the cuts out while the event is still trending. Afterward, the experience is measured on attendance, dwell time, content reach, earned coverage and whatever the brand set out to change, from sales at the pop-up to sentiment in the city. The best experiential programs are repeated, so that the brand's presence in a place becomes something people expect and plan for.
At RIOT
Experiential marketing at RIOT
The screens we made for the Red Bull Kumite in Times Square are experiential at the scale of a city: work built for one corner, one crowd and one event, for Red Bull. The holiday window films for Tiffany & Co. are about the windows people cross the street to see, and the IWC Schaffhausen NYC flagship film is about a store built to be visited. In each case the subject is a place, and the film's job is to make people want to be in it.
Watch out
What people get wrong about experiential marketing
Confusing an event with an experience. Renting a venue, pouring drinks and projecting a logo is an event. An experience has an idea in it, something the brand could only say in person, and a reason for people to tell others they were there.
The other mistake is forgetting the people who were not in the room. Experiential work that is not designed to be filmed and shared reaches its attendees and no one else. The content is not a bonus; it is half the audience.
