NEW YORK — There was a time, not so long ago, when the phrase "experiential marketing" conjured images of branded tents at music festivals and sampling programs in grocery store parking lots. Now, apparently, it is supposed to save us from the robots.
That was more or less the message at a session during Advertising Week New York last week, where Gary Vaynerchuk, the chairman of the independent agency VaynerX, introduced what his firm calls the "relevance barbell" — the idea that marketers must simultaneously master artificial intelligence and old-fashioned physical gatherings, with nothing much in the middle.
"We think that there will be many things commoditized by AI over the next decade," Mr. Vaynerchuk said, adding that the technology "is laughing at our hypocritical opinions, grounded in our own financial self-interest, and will continue to evolve."
The solution, according to the panelists, is to reconceive branded events not as ends in themselves but as elaborate production days for social media content. Carla Hassan, the chief marketing officer of JPMorgan Chase, described how the bank is using its more than 5,000 branches and events like Chase Sapphire's Dinner on the Court at Madison Square Garden to generate material for digital channels. Target, meanwhile, staged a two-day presentation at the New Museum during New York Fashion Week in September to extend a campaign about its design heritage.
"You're giving something incremental to people that they want to take forward and tell the story of their experience in their words," said Michelle Mesenburg, the senior vice president and chief brand officer at Target.
Mr. Vaynerchuk, who has never been accused of understatement, went on to call principal ad buying by holding companies "a form of fraud" and suggested that the rise of in-housing reflects agencies' failure to serve clients adequately. He also offered some advice on television advertising.
"No normal human being on Earth watches a 30-second commercial," he said, though he made an exception for the Super Bowl, which he called "grossly underpriced."
(One imagines the networks will be grateful for the endorsement.)
Original story published in Marketing Dive: "How marketers can fuel social, discoverability with experiences"