Someone recently posted this question to the Experiential Marketing Forum (which if you are not a part of, shame on you!):
Just wondering what people would consider to be the most common criticisms of experiential marketing?
What's the anti-experiential marketing case people hear most often?
I thought my response may be helpful to those not on the forum. So here it is verbatim. I also would have credited the asker of the question but they did not credit themselves
RESPONSE
"Very good question.
Since my marketing tends to focus more on live experiences, I will relay the 2 criticisms (and my responses to such) that I hear most.
1. It is too expensive! - While creating live experiences can be costly, if you look at it on a cost per touch basis, I think that there is a strong argument to it in regards to the quality, duration, lasting impact, WOM and social qualities of the event. Take something like the Charmin Holiday Bathrooms (which we did not do so I am not shilling here). It was a great experience, it was by no means cheap. But it had the people who experienced it interacting with the brand, in an extremely positive way, in a manner that goes so much deeper than any of their commercials or print ads could have done. It was also an experience that consumers wanted to share with others, whether through word of mouth, or their online social networks. And because it was such a bad-ass experience, it also got a lot of press and recognition across various groups, extending the value of it. So while it was a costly execution, in the end, it paid back in a huge way.
2. The second biggest criticism I hear is about scalability. That experiences are much harder to do across multiple markets. This is somewhat true, yet also very shortsighted. Let's say your average commercial costs 1mm to produce and then you spend 20MM on the media buy. If you took 10% of that. 3MM and put it into experiential executions, you could have a great experience in 10-20 of the largest DMAs in the country. Literally millions of people touched, educated and potentially converted over to your brand. Yes, you have to be willing to deal with creating the experiences in all of these markets and the logistics are more challenging than simply buying another TV spot, but if we are in the business of engagement, then we need to focus some of our spend on engaging, creative media. Do not be afraid to go big with it and as well you can target based on specific events, locations, psycho-graphic markers and all kinds of other filtering that you do not get with traditional media.
I hope this helps.
Best
Sam"
- I would love to know the On The Ground Looking Up readers' thoughts on this as well. Shoot me an email or DM me on Twitter: SamEwen
