These guys are not musicians. They’re Juke Box Heroes TK TK and TK TK (right) promote a videogame.

{And they don’t even know it.} From faux concerts to toilet-paper testing, companies excel at getting you to try their products. Because when you try, you buy. by Courtney Barry p h o t o g r a p h y b y P e t e r Ya n g

M y c a r e e r as a rock star begins one evening last August

at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey. I form a band from random concertgoers waiting to hear Mötley Crüe that night: Brian (drums), Steve (lead guitar), and Barbara (vocals). I will jam on a black-and-white lacquered bass guitar with five colored keys instead of strings. We call ourselves the Smashed Bananas. We’ll play a video game called Rock Band, mimicking an animated version of a real-life rock band on our instruments. 80 | Spirit

The game scores players based on how closely the performance matches the original song. We will compete against 16 battling bands that go by names like Sabotage, 7 a.m., and the Sinners. A panel of judges scores each performance. The winning group gets a text message just as the lead-up band, Papa Roach, comes onstage, telling the wannabe rockers that they have won and to come backstage. Then the amateurs take the stage and play a number on Rock Band to the cheers of thousands of Crüe fans. Spirit | 81

Historic Buy London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 pushed products.

Our song options run from Black Sabbath (“Paranoid”) to Kiss (“Detroit Rock City”) to, of course, Mötley Crüe (“Saints of Los Angeles”). We pick “Dirty Little Secret” by the All-American Rejects. On a temporary stage on a mobile vehicle outside of the amphitheater, my band buddies and I get almost all the way through the song, keying notes, vocals, and drum beats as the video guides us along. Suddenly the TV speaker lets out a loud clang. The animated rockers in the video whom we were supposed to be imitating abruptly stop playing and start yelling at each other, even throwing drumsticks in frustration. We’re dinged. The Sinners get the winners’ text message. Garden State natives Keith Krueger, 23, Kevin Krueger, 21, Mike Kenny, 21, and Mike Martel, 16, gather backstage. “Man, I feel like a rock star!” crows Keith. Around 9 p.m., just before Papa

Roach opens, the Sinners take the stage in their street clothes, playing “When You Were Young” by the Killers. Keith hams it up, playing like a true rock star. Which he is, for one night anyway. The credit—or the blame—for my short performance career goes to Mötley Crüe, the Jack Morton marketing agency, and MTV. The music network publishes Rock Band, and it teamed up with Morton and other partners to promote the video game. MTV came up with the notion of letting Crüe concertgoers compete for the chance to open up for the real band, and Morton designed and executed it. Concertgoers are, after all, the ideal target market for a game that lets you pretend to be a rock star. The idea behind such events—pulling potential customers into contests and other forms of active participation in the name of “try before you buy”— falls under the heading of what Madison Avenue

Mom Was Wrong Videogame practice paid off big-time for the Sinners.

calls experiential marketing. And it’s coming to a bar, mall, or rock concert near you. Several ad agencies specialize in the field, creating experiences ranging from the glam to the, well, not so glam. During the Beijing Olympics, Detroit–based George P. Johnson ran a promotion for the Bank of China where visitors played virtual badminton at kiosks. For the less athletic, other kiosks offered simulated online trading accounts. Gigunda Group of Manchester, New Hampshire, created the grandly named Charmin NYC Restroom Experience, an event that lets consumers field-test Procter and Gamble’s Charmin toilet paper in Times Square bathrooms every Christmas. Some companies design their own experiences. Last summer, Warner Bros. used the technique to promote the latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight. Along with traditional marketing—TV spots, billboards—the studio ran a yearlong viral marketing effort. Promotional websites such as whysoserious.com and citizensforbatman.com offered free Dark Knight tickets to 82 | Spirit

Pulling potential customers into contests and other forms of active participation is what Madison Avenue calls experiential marketing. And it’s coming to a bar, mall, or rock concert near you. users who solved puzzles about the movie. The final event, held last July in Chicago and New York City, included an offline game component where game-players roamed through the cities for clues and fired up the bat signal. The campaigns worked. The Dark Knight garnered record three-day ticket sales of $155 million on its opening weekend. But experiential marketing isn’t only about fun and games. The clothing company Cotton Spirit | 83

Casella Wines last year introduced Yellow Tail Vinyl Bars. There, a visitor might put on headphones and listen to jazz while tasting rosé or tune into ’70s rock while sipping riesling. Industry uses charity to coax college students into trying its wares. The company gets students to donate their old denim and then turns the old jeans and jackets into an insulation material. The insulation helps rebuild areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. What do the students get in return? Free T-shirts from Cotton Industry. Casella Wines used experiential marketing last year to boost the Yellow Tail brand in its native Australia. Working with the Morton

agency, the winemaker placed booths on welltrafficked streets in Sydney, Brisbane, and other cities. Large overhead banners proclaimed, “Hello, I’m Yellow Tail.” Passers-by met the company’s cool ambassadors at the booths and were steered to a nearby Yellow Tail Vinyl Bar. The portable bars poured free glasses of wine paired with specific musical selections. A visitor might put on headphones and listen to jazz while tasting rosé or tune into ’70s rock while sipping riesling. The bars gave potential buyers a chance to try Yellow Tail in a social environment that bore at least some resemblance to the places where they could buy the product. The companies behind these events hope the process doesn’t stop there. If consumers like the product, then they will become ambassadors— the goal of all experiential marketing. “We’re not telling you,” says Daniel Diez of Morton, “your friend is telling you.” W h i l e m u s i c a l wine tastings, bat signals,

and rock concerts make experiential market-

Doll ’Do American Girl stylists create repeat customers.

Cola War Pepsi fought Coke with ’70s-era taste tests.

84 | Spirit

ing sound cutting edge, the concept has been around since at least the 19th century. In the Great Exhibition of 1851, some 13,000 exhibitors from around the world filled London’s massive Crystal Palace. They allowed visitors to try out the latest Industrial Revolution tech, from a coffee roaster to a carriage for invalids. “The Crystal Palace exposed products around the world as mass markets were for the first time being created,” says Joseph Pine, co-author of The Experience Economy. That was a critical task as the world economy shifted away from agriculture and to industry. With the advent of radio, experiential marketing created the personal testimonial. “If you look back at the way that marketing took place before the Internet, before television, celebrities were saying, ‘Look what I have, do you want to try it? Do you want to buy it? My experience with this is that this is a great product, and I could

not live without it,’” says Martha Russell, associate director of Media X at Stanford University, a program that promotes interdisciplinary business research. “The tradition of testimonials and product trial are some of the forerunners of what we call experiential marketing now.” Still, these precursors to today’s cool ambassadors did not put products into buyers’ hands. That came with the rise of test drives, door-todoor salesmen, and the Pepsi Challenge. Tim Hayden—CEO of the Austin, Texas–based experiential marketing agency GamePlan—believes that the blind taste tests pitting perennial also-ran Pepsi with Coca-Cola showed a more aggressive side to experiential marketing. Those who didn’t actually compare the colas in malls and state fairs across America saw the TV commercials of consumers happily voting for Pepsi with their taste buds. Coke’s market share took a considerable hit. Spirit | 85

Experiential marketing these days is much more sophisticated than a booth with soda in plastic cups and a hidden camera. Even classic techniques like the test drive keep evolving. Hyundai let customers try out its new Genesis model on a course designed to simulate real-world driving conditions. At last year’s State Fair of Texas, potential car buyers got behind the wheel of several new-model GM cars. Their kids mimicked Mom and Dad by zipping around in battery-powered toy cars at an adjacent track. Of course, not all experiential marketing campaigns succeed. In 2002, a company called Interference hired actors to pretend to be tourists who asked people to take pictures of them on their new Sony Ericsson camera phones. The actors wouldn’t reveal that they were working for Sony unless directly asked. The controversial marketing effort eventually wound up on 60 Minutes. Two years later, Bluetooth Special Interest Group, which licenses Bluetooth

Marketing on the Cheap

GamePlan founders Tim Hayden and Keith Dudley estimate that corporate experiential marketing budgets can run anywhere from $50,000 to more than $20 million. Don’t have that kind of money? Then try these inexpensive ways to get your product into potential customers’ hands. Get mysterious

Hire college students

Print business cards with distinct but intriguing information, such as a question or a clue about your company. (Remember the Bluetooth campaign?) Pass the cards around at events, especially where people you know that need your company get together.

Professional brand ambassadors often have college degrees, a second or third language, and nice salaries, according to Bacardi brand master apprentice Aaron Rodonis. But you can get college students to tell a minimum of five people about your product and where to buy it for about $50 a day. That’s cheap.

products, had much better luck with a similar campaign. The wireless communication technology company lacked a million-dollar budget but needed to

Host a Tupperware part y

Ditch the Tupperware, and bring your product. Gather people in a house or attract them on the street to a Yellow Tail–style booth to sample your goods. Provide good food and libations to keep the party fun.

make a splash with potential buyers at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Bluetooth hired GamePlan to create a three-day experiential market-

ing campaign. The result was Operation Blue Shock. “We hired 300 models, 150 men and 150 women, and dressed them up in tuxedos and cocktail dresses,” says GamePlan vice president Keith Dudley. “The models wore sunglasses, and they weren’t allowed to speak to anybody.” Dudley’s emissaries handed out business cards printed in seven different languages. A card might say, “Walk through walls” in Chinese. The Bluetooth logo—minus the name of the company—appeared on the other side. The models left after an hour, only to do the same thing later that day. All of this mystery—“What is this?”—generated the buzz Bluetooth needed. The next day, the models delivered bouquets of flowers with yet another message to the 93 Bluetooth exhibitors at the show: “Thank you for making the connection in 2003. Good luck in 2004.” The models later walked the floor, whispering messages about Bluetooth and then leading consumers to various booths to try out the new Bluetooth keyboards and other products. That’s experiential marketing. Dudley says GamePlan gauged the success of the campaign by a huge spike in the Bluetooth website traffic: an increase of 30,000 visitors over the course of the three-day campaign. Bluetooth might well owe its existence today to experiential marketing. T h e e x pe r t s think the future of expe-

riential marketing lies in an acceleration of current trends. More games. More charity drives. More sunglasses-wearing entourages. But marketers are looking for more outrageous ways to get consumers to try their products. And one of the most outrageous approaches comes from the world of dolls. American Girl started out selling Molly, Kirsten, and Samantha—although the company will soon phase out the latter girl—and other dolls to appeal to every culture and age group. Books, accessories, (doll) body care, and DVDs followed. Nothing special there. But

then the Mattel–owned company began opening American Girl stores in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, Minneapolis, Boston, and Chicago. Inside, unsuspecting parents and kids enter a world of experiential marketing. Girls can dine with their dolls, and take home photographs of themselves and their dolls that look like cover shots on American Girl magazine. The dinner and the glamour shots particularly impress Pine: “Inside of that store, you find a photo shoot with prices ranging from $23 to $35, and you find a café that charges 20-something dollars for lunch.” You may not have even bought the actual doll yet, which costs between $42 and $95. American Girl has pulled off the neat trick of getting customers to pay for their own marketing. Stanford’s Russell expects even the more innovative manifestations of the technique to become just another tool in marketers’ tool kits: “One of the things that experiential marketing is

Get the Goods

Admit it: All this talk of Batman adventures, free pinot noir, and Rock Band revelry makes you want to join in the fun. But where can you go to get this swag? The insiders tell all. Pay attention

just Show up

Befriend a ‘Mad man ’

Many companies that want to roll out big new products use events promoted by radio, newspaper, and TV ads. Jot these down and go. If you’re lucky, your goodie bags will more than make up for the effort.

Many concerts, opening acts, or new theater promotions use experiential marketing to increase publicity. Head out to the venue before showtime—whether you have tickets or not—and see what you can score. A pleasant smile and friendly banter can go a long way.

Go to experiential marketing events and trade business cards with the promoters. Ask them if their upcoming events need “extras.” Then clear your calendar to get the goods.

especially good for is telling a story that is difficult to communicate in traditional advertising.” That’s why she expects the try-before-you-buy method increasingly to supplement—not to replace—more traditional marketing methods. Going forward, Pine expects more synergy of marketing technology. Games,

for example, will become more mediaenhanced. Potential buyers will get to play promotional games on the media of their choice—PCs, mobile phones, and iPods—and at any stage in the game. In other words, you won’t have to be in Chicago on a certain day to fire up the bat signal.

“People will be walking around with a mobile phone displaying a virtual landscape,” Pine says. “Perhaps there will be a medieval castle and a dragon in front of it that you have to slay in order to win a prize.” Though companies like Hewlett-Packard are only now developing the technology needed to support this rich marketing, you can already try out some intriguing elements. “There’s an application you can download onto your Apple iTouch that makes it sound like a light saber from Star Wars,” Pine says. “And the iPhone has an accelerometer in it now so you can tell which direction it’s facing.” Though observers can only guess at the ways experiential marketing will change in the coming years, they agree on one thing: We can’t go back. “New technology has shattered traditional media,” says GamePlan’s Hayden. In today’s marketplace, buyers have the control. “American consumers live in a world where they wake up in the morning listening to satellite radio that’s commercial-free,” he says. “They go to their office, they have a pop-up blocker, a spam blocker, and caller ID. They leave and go to a gym and listen to a playlist that they created. They get home to a DVR that allows them to watch what they want when they want to watch it, and to skip or delete anything they don’t want to watch.” That’s why companies can no longer just place ads in traditional media— print, radio, TV, and even the Web—and expect someone to see them. Ultimately, ad agencies and companies must build marketing campaigns to reach consumers on their own terms and on their own turf. Experiential marketing does that, using games, cool ambassadors, and dinners with dolls to get consumers to try before they buy. That might sound like an old idea. But it’s anything but when you’re on a stage in Jersey living a rock-and-roll fantasy. Jam session, anyone? Freelance writer Courtney Barry plots out her next career as a rock star in Austin, Texas.