Partner Perspective

Our mission in 2010 is to expose you to as many industry perspectives as possible, in an effort to help you reboot your event marketing portfolio. As such, in mid-December we executed the absolutely enormous task of assembling more than 30 top event agencies for a roundtable discussion on trends, market shifts and best practices.

Truth is, agency expertise isn't as tapped as it should be. These folks are in the field and living your experiences from the start to the finish. And so we decided there is great value in bringing them all together, having a conversation and then reporting back on what we heard. By all accounts, 2010 looks to be on track to be better than 2009. Helping the revival are a few main market indicators, including a heavier push on ROI, a gigantic move to unite live events with digital technology and an overall thrust to just make the best better.

SECTION 1: TRENDS AND CHANGES
EM: HOW WAS YOUR 2009 AND WHAT'S YOUR FOCUS FOR 2010?
CASSIE HUGHES, Grow Marketing: We found ourselves in a position of having clients need our counsel more than at any other time before, and inviting us into some strategic discussions that were at a much higher level than they had been. One of our changes as an agency was recognizing our ability to offer strategic solutions in marketing when clients really needed it—being more a part of their team and less the agency that’s just executing this one particular program.

STEVE WOODS, emg3: For us, 2009 was less about specific tactical, intrinsic elements of the business than it was about the economic climate. We were equal parts psychologist and experiential marketers. Now it feels to me like there’s less fear because there’s more that’s known. But there’s going to be a long-lasting effect for our business. We’ve invested in infrastructure, we’ve invested in the top-quality people, capabilities and resources. So we’ve said to our clients, “You have to be prudent and you have to be smart, but this is a good opportunity to invest, to look forward.”

BILL CARTER, Fuse: Steve used the word fear, and we’ve seen that very clearly. It’s fear by the properties who are afraid to lose sponsors, so they’re coming at that relationship from a position of fear instead of one of partnership. It’s also fear by the brands to take any risk, to do anything that hasn’t shown in the past to be a tried-and-true way of doing things. Basically, fear of making a mistake. I think now things have turned and fear is being used as an excuse—clients might say, “I can’t pay you that margin, because look at the economy.” Or “I won’t approve that breakthrough idea because the sky is falling.” So even though by a lot of measures the economy is improving, I think brand marketers are sort of hiding behind the fear.

JEB BLATT, Jack Morton: Clients have had everything change. And they’re now willing to look at who is going to make them look great and who is going to help them succeed. So that’s been a really exciting development. I also think 2009 was the year that experience as a pseudonym for event went out the window. Let’s call things what they are; if we’re talking about the brand experience it’s much broader than an event. And it’s also the year when we started to think about what we’re doing as helping our clients become “experience brands.” So for our clients, we want to put the experience that their customers, consumers and shoppers have with the brand at the fore.

CHIP MARTELLA, OgilvyAction: The issue that’s driving conversations for us in the past few months has been analytics—the ability to measure live experiences is huge, but especially as it relates to retail. In pitch meetings a year or two years ago, we would have an analytics guy in the room, maybe, if it made sense from a casting perspective. Now we don’t leave home without him.

DAN HIRSCH, OnBoard Entertainment: The changes in 2009 were with our clients. We’re dealing with much more junior people now. We’re losing staff on the client side, which is causing us to have more things fall on our plate. There is less direction. In many cases we’re working with a third to half of the budget that we had before for programs that were ongoing.

DENNIS BOYLE, TBA Global: The biggest change for 2009 for us has been investment in strategy. That’s a slippery slope: You have to assume that clients are going to want to hear strategy from people in our industry, and then you have to be able to make the investment in the kind of people who are going to get you there.

LARRY DEUTSCH, Jack Morton: Clients come to us because they have a preconceived notion of what our agency brands stand for and how we compartmentalize ourselves. We’re starting to see those silos break down. So instead of saying, “Here’s your meeting idea,” or “Here’s your employee engagement idea,” our focus is, “Here’s a transformational idea that goes beyond that.” We’ll address the brief but go beyond it. Having that strategic point of view is really the starting point. Clients are getting really serious about acting globally. I’ve had more conversations in the past year about global than in the 26 years before that. Clients are recognizing that they leave a lot of money on the table with their regional structures and silos, and they’re starting to break down those barriers and think about fewer, deeper relationships with folks who can really deliver globally.

ANDRE GACCETTA, George P. Johnson: The paradigm has changed. From a fabrication standpoint, we are having very different conversations with our automotive clients about the type of architecture they’re looking at—they don’t want something that’s going to take 16 trucks to move from Detroit or Nashville to Los Angeles, and they’re asking how can we use lightweight materials, more graphics and just be smart about it, while still trying to create the same end result. The onset of the digital world is happening so fast, it’s dizzying. As marketers, we’re trying to keep up with all of this and provide all of our clients the appropriate solutions. We have to be able to consult with our clients in a very smart fashion to help direct them, at least from an event perspective, on how these digital media apply in an integrated marketing approach.

JUSTIN HERSH, Group Delphi: We’re primarily a b-to-b company, so we saw that companies were pulling back on sales meetings. Anything that was internally facing was very easy to cut. We’re hearing that a lot of them either didn’t do a meeting or they did it in the digital space and were unsatisfied with the results—that even with virtual events, they just didn’t feel like they accomplished what they wanted. In general, most of our customers are telling us they want to come back and do something in the event space in 2010. Clearly they are not going to spend the way they did in 2007 and 2008, but they feel like they have to get in front of their internal stakeholders and get that message to them. In general everybody is telling us that they think their spend will go up a little bit this year. Our sense is that what clients have figured out is that in this downturn there is way too much oversupply on our side of the table and that they have tremendous pricing pressure with all of us on the agency side. Many of them are being very nice about it, but they certainly have not lost sight of the fact that they have a big hammer to use this year.

PETER OFFICE, Momentum: As we look forward, we’re focusing on nontraditional revenue streams. We’re looking at intellectual properties that we can own so we can create revenue that’s not hourly based. And then we can develop ideas that we can deliver to our clients that may be unique and different.

MIKE HERSOM, Ignition: I think it was a little bit scary to a lot of our clients at first when we said, “We’ve hired a sustainability manager and we want to take you through the sustainability framework we’ve created.” In 2009, everyone was saying, “Green is the next thing,” but as budgets shrank, they weren’t sure. But it doesn’t cost any more to do things more sustainably.

ERIK HAUSER, Euro RSCG 4D Impact: Moving ahead, I see many of us keeping one foot firmly planted in the physical space and one foot firmly planted in the digital space. The ability to build fully integrated programs is what’s going to be the differentiator between the smart agencies and the agencies that are going to perish.

VINCE PARRINELLO, Legacy Marketing Partners: In certain instances, we’re being selected as lead agency for an initiative. Fifteen years ago, we were so far down on the food chain that you would be happy just to be in the room. I think we’re going to continue to be perceived more as people that can help steer a brand and not just for executing a small tactical component of it.

ERIK PETERSON, Vivid Marketing: People still don’t really know what experiential means. Is that digital? Retail? Event? Everything is about a brand experience now. But in our industry, we’ve always talked to consumers directly. We’ve had direct access to the consumer. That was the space we owned—that handshake. We could reciprocate with the consumer; we could get feedback. But now we’re at a point where it’s really about personalization— not customization, but personalization. It’s personalized solutions. Nothing off the shelf. We have to be offering solutions, not services.

CORRIN ARASA, E2 Marketing: In 2009 we saw some of the smartest campaigns we’ve seen in a while because brands were forced to cut excess and they had to show that their marketing could move the needle. I think that’s going to continue in 2010, with all of the measurement tools we have and the tools we have to generate word of mouth.

EM: HOW ARE YOUR CLIENTS’ NEEDS CHANGING? WILL THE EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS THAT COME OUT OF YOUR AGENCY IN 2010 LOOK AND FEEL DIFFERENT FROM THOSE OF A FEW YEARS AGO AS A RESULT?
PAOLO ZEPPA, Immersa Marketing: Our clients have always asked us to help them innovate; the type of innovation they’re looking for has changed. When business was good, clients tended to focus on directional innovation. They know where they want to go and they want an agency to bring in the best practices for a certain type of program. Now it’s no longer about being best in class. Clients are asking us to be more exploratory with them, to help them think completely out of the box. If that’s what clients want us to do, two things are going to happen: one is we can’t have a bunch of experts with the same skill sets as part of our agency and have that be the core. Two is that we have to surround ourselves with the best of the best, whether it’s agencies or people who have completely different perspectives, so we can come up with new ideas.

KERRY LANGE, Ammo Marketing: One of the biggest things we’re asked for nowadays is validation. Everything we do has to either drive sales or lead generation, and we just have to prove that what we’re doing is actually doing something. Secondly, there has been a major influx of clients looking for expertise around social media. It’s amazing to me how few clients really get it and really understand how to use social media in a truly effective manner—getting beyond just constantly pushing messages.

KATJA ASARO, Henry V: We’ve always felt like the ugly stepchild to the traditional advertising agencies. In 2009, the roles were reversed. Clients came to us and said, “I’m sick and tired of getting measurements in eyeballs seeing my ads; I want real results.” So all of the experiential programs we’ve been asked to do have had retail drivers. The clients are figuring out how much it’s going to cost them per impression for an experience versus an ad. There’s a huge amount of education that still has to happen there, because when you look at the numbers it doesn’t seem fair. Across the board with all of our clients, they’re very excited about experiential and they feel like it’s the direction they want to go.

HERSH: There is certainly a push with customers to be more strategic and they’re pushing us for more strategic answers. We’re still seeing that a lot of the customers want to buy strategy but pay for execution, so there is a disconnect there.

HUGHES: Clients just want as close to a guarantee as you can give them about their programs—they want to know how they’re going to not risk their jobs on something that might be considered below the line. The other thing we’re seeing a lot, especially with the larger companies that have multiple brands, is that they want a lot more collaboration. The RFPs we’re getting for 2010 are asking us to focus on our core discipline. They want us to just tell them what we’re really good at and give them testimonials that show we’re a good collaborator with other agencies.

RUSS JONES, PGW Experience: The main difference is the need to integrate all of the tools in the toolbox. Two years ago, the campaign would’ve been one-dimensional, two-dimensional, threedimensional at best, meaning, “Here’s the campaign, here’s a website to follow the campaign, here’s the TV crew that showed up at the campaign to cover it on the local news. For campaigns now, where’s the Facebook? Where’s the iPhone app? Where’s the hyper-syndication of the content you create? Where are the influencers? Where’s the push to gossip press? Where’s the in-store? Where’s the network? There are so many elements that can be plugged into the old event marketing model. I think what we saw in 2009 versus, say, 2007 or 2005, is event marketing growing from a singular platform into a multi-level platform that allows all different types of brand equity and capabilities in marketing. It’s taking the events and turning them into an opportunity to create content, or an opportunity to create a look for a brand. And then it’s taking that one step further, into the viral world and using social media and the different technologies that are out there now.

HOWARD GIVNER, Global Events Group: We’re seeing an incredible focus on value. For a long time you had clients whose jobs were to manage and own specific event properties, but who never evaluated whether those events made sense. As everything came on the chopping block over the last two years, you had people trying to preserve these events that didn’t make sense for the company. But now I think it’s tattooed on everybody’s forehead that if an event doesn’t achieve certain goals, the event’s gone, they’re gone or their department’s gone. Championing value is not the same thing as cutting costs. In some cases you may need to spend a little more money to make sure that you achieve your goals. But you have to have a conversation about what those goals are and how you’re going to measure and define them. Now that clients and agencies both understand the urgency, there’s a lot more clarity to the entire process than there was two years ago.

CAROLYN DEIGHAN, Tadpole: When I first started Tadpole, we were approaching the work from a strategic level and creating experiences for the consumer to form a deep affinity toward the product or the brand. Then it shifted to, “Forget about the experience; just get the metrics.” And now it’s back to, “Let’s go into these events strategically, make sure there’s an experience, make sure there’s an affinity there, and make sure there’s buzz before, during and after the event.” Two years ago, a lot of companies were throwing money at a lot of things because they had it and because they could. Now people are bringing it back down again to that clear messaging point.

KRISTIN CARROLL, The Active Network: You still need to have a creative idea and you need to have a strong platform, but with the convergence of media it has changed from clients being enamored with that big idea to them asking, “How does that idea get executed across multiple channels?”

EM: HOW ARE CHANGES IN YOUR CLIENTS’ BUSINESS IMPACTING YOUR APPROACH?
CARROLL: In some cases we’re seeing that budgets are bigger because they’re less fragmented. A client will put a budget into one cohesive plan instead of putting it across 10 or 15 different avenues, and that one cohesive plan will have a big idea, an engagement mechanism and paid media, social media, event activation and everything in between. In 2005 or 2007, we were talking about the value of engagement, and now that value is understood. However, the prerequisite is that there’s a higher reach and high engagement along with the interaction with the consumer. We need to communicate to folks before, during and after an event, and that’s what technology does for us. The other piece we’re seeing is that event marketing is almost being measured as media. So we’re having to put CPMs against engagement and reach numbers and we’re having very different conversations.

BRAD BRYEN, G2: Almost everything I’m dealing with seems to end with a discussion about retail. If the effort doesn’t impact the customer on the journey to the shelf or at the shelf, our clients are not as interested as they were a couple of years ago.

LANGE: I don’t think anybody would disagree that social media is pretty much the biggest change our entire industry has faced in the past couple of years. Number one, it created scalability where it didn’t exist. Number two, it gives us the ability to reach people wherever they are, and it allows us to give a voice to our consumers far better than we ever have been able to.

ASARO: The biggest change for us last year was that because our larger clients’ budgets have shrunk, they’re lumping their budgets together, which gives projects multiple different objectives that sometimes conflict. Recently we did what was supposed to be a retail-driving event, but it turned into a heavy p.r., branding and marketing event, with a budget that was half the size of the last time we did it.

HERSH: One thing we’re seeing is there are a lot fewer sacred cows. Customers are coming in and talking about projects they’ve done for 15 or 20 years. Now they’re getting the senior level of management asking, “What happens if we spend less money here? Where else could we move that money?” We’re also seeing that no customer is doing a project without really high expectations. There was a time when they’d say, “We can do 100 projects a year and 75 of them are kind of important, 20 are pretty important and five are really important.” But now, the events are either really important or not happening. They won’t do anything that doesn’t deliver results.

ZEPPA: We are doing a lot more portfolio planning. So before we get into the actual program and help the client build the program, we’re working with business units to really understand what their mix should be. We focus in on the experiential marketing, but we also collaborate with all the different tiers from a marcom standpoint.

JEFF SYMON, The AIM Agency: We’re seeing an emphasis on proving it out, not just with CPM but even with business modeling. We have a guerrilla street team program and the client asked us to performance- base the whole thing. They told us they’d pay based on converting people to customers. We’re seeing a lot more of that.

DAVID KASS, House Party: The biggest change for us is seeing how word of mouth has evolved from being a tactic to more of a desired outcome. In 2008, everybody wanted word of mouth. Now they understand that that’s just one outcome, but the real focus is on the engagement and the length of the engagement, as well as all the other ways that you can activate the consumers. There’s also more understanding that smaller-scale events with many, many thousands of people overall, versus one or two big events in big cities, is a way to engage and activate consumers.

DEIGHAN: One of the trends we saw in 2009 is that there are a lot of 24-year-olds in brand management positions who maybe don’t have the experience. So clients bring us in almost as an extension of themselves to kind of take over that brand management position. There are a lot of companies that, after layoffs, still want to have the same amount of work and still want to see the same results, but they have no one to execute it.

CARTER: I’m very optimistic about what seems to be a greater stability among the people on the brand side. Since the recession started, over 10 million people in this country have lost their jobs and I’m obviously not minimizing that. But in marketing, I think a lot of that is already in the rearview mirror. Now we’re seeing a greater care for the legacy— and that’s a word we’re using at our agency now that we weren’t using a couple of years ago. It’s the legacy of what we’re leaving behind after an event activation or event marketing program. One example is Gatorade’s launch into action sports, which we’ve been working on for the past 18 months. They’re asking us to create things that can be left behind at a skate park or snowboard park—what we’re calling legacy pieces. It’s a better mentality. It’s showing that the brand-side people are saying, “Actually, I do care what happens with this program and with the consumers who I’m in touch with well beyond the time that I’m going to be here.”

BLATT: We’re seeing a lot more that you can win with creative but you can only retain with ROI. You can get a client to buy an idea and it sounds great and they’re exuberant about it. But if you want to do it the second year, you’d better measure the [heck] out of it because somebody in the organization is going to start paying attention to what that’s delivering for them. They need to see the results.

BOYLE: One way in which I see the industry changing is that we’re looking for where our clients’ particular pain points are. Say we’re talking about beer, wine and spirits: We can beat our heads against the wall for on-premise programs or we can look at where their concerns are, which are communications through their distribution force. So that’s something we’ve tried to work on, regardless of whether it turns out to be a live event or digital or content gathering. That’s a change from three years ago, and I think our industry is right on the edge of being the most valuable partner a client can have.

JEFF STELMACH, Mosaic Experiential Marketing: Two or three years ago, the cost of entry to be an experiential marketing agency was execution. [The main focus] was the last 10 feet, and making sure you delivered the right experience. So everyone developed an ability to be very quick at execution. From there it went to strategy, and that was a cost of entry. You had to bring really insightful ideas and expand the brand’s position. Next, if you didn’t have a real ROI model and you couldn’t prove that you were going to be successful, then you didn’t have the cost of entry. So every year the cost of entry was more and more advanced. So, while we’re experiential marketers or event marketers, the fact is that we are transitional marketers. We’re finding new needs and new ways to communicate with our clients and consumers, and in doing that we are constantly on the cutting edge.

DEUTSCH: We’re shifting the focus from thinking about audiences in a ballroom, or audiences at a mobile marketing event to thinking about communities, and there’s a big distinction. Communities engage with each other, and communities inspire each other. That’s why digital and social media are so effective. When we think that way, it allows us to identify the client’s pain points and where we should focus. As a result, our work has become more visible and more elevated. We’re doing work that is part of ceos’ change agendas or cmos’ brand leadership. It’s not just work that is at the behest of the head of event marketing. That’s an exciting thing, and I’m excited to see that transform our people, elevate their careers and elevate our standing.

MATT PENSINGER, Relay Worldwide: Prior to 2009 I had never seen an experience idea at the core of something that the advertising agency, the digital agency and others were asked to develop their own executions against. I think we always romanticized about that moment but it really was here last year and I’m excited to see more of that this year. It puts us in a position to go wider with the client, when we have the right idea.

OFFICE: An event cannot just be an event. It has to have a life for all of the audiences that come. For events we run for the U.S. Army, when you arrive on site and register, the audience includes parents, influencers, the kids who are ready to sign. We’re creating experiences based on what the individual’s unique need is. We’re then feeding that information back to the client and saying, “John spent extra time in aviation and didn’t do so well on physical fitness. So when you have the conversation with John you might want to touch on these kinds of things. And Mom has very different concerns. She spent a lot of time in education, so you want to communicate all of the education benefits of the Army.” It’s all in the same footprint, but it’s three very different experiences, and the data is delivered to the client in very different ways.

HAUSER: I think 2010 is going to be the year when people understand that experiential is more than just a word. Experiential marketing is a methodology. It’s customer-centric as opposed to product-centric.

EM: WHAT SERVICES AND CAPABILITIES IS YOUR AGENCY OFFERING CLIENTS NOW THAT YOU WEREN’T JUST A FEW YEARS AGO?
BRYEN: We’re very much looking at what the client’s needs are and then what the solutions are. More and more, those solutions are retail- or shopper- focused. We’re doing a very large program now at hardware stores across the country, and it’s all about retail—retail merchandising, retail demos, sales support in market. We didn’t start with a focus on a retail field force but the retail field force became the right solution as we got into the problem solving.

GIVNER: Virtual meetings. There are a lot more clients that need to present that as an option now, and we’re starting to think about applications for virtual meetings that the initial developers didn’t even think about. In addition, we’re trying to give clients ideas that can be used on multiple fronts. For example, if we create a man-on-the-street video, we think of other places the client can use it, whether it’s on a website, in a kiosk or at an awards banquet. It’s a way to get other internal stakeholders excited about the same idea.

HUGHES: We do a lot of highly specialized outreach with influencers, and our clients are asking us to be a little bit more efficient and to find scalability. So as an agency that’s how we want to work: Take what we do, still make it very specialized, but scale it even more than we have in the past.

EM: SEVEN OR EIGHT YEARS AGO, EVERY AGENCY TOUTED ITS ABILITY TO PROVIDE CLIENTS WITH “FLAWLESS EXECUTION.” NOW, WE NEVER HEAR THAT PHRASE— EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT THEIR STRATEGIC CHOPS INSTEAD. IS FLAWLESS EXECUTION NOW TAKEN FOR GRANTED? IS IT STILL AS IMPORTANT?
GACCETTA: There is so much detail work that goes behind the scenes that I don’t think that we can ever take execution for granted. There’s a lot to be said for flawless delivery, but when you actually go to the events, because we’ve all been doing it so long, we’re all going to find the 15 things that went wrong. Whether our clients see those 15 things or not is up to the client.

WOODS: Maybe it’s just a natural evolution of this discipline. I can talk about DOT compliance and 24-hour call centers and chain-of-custody protocols and I get blank stares because they don’t have ways to measure the value of those things. We’ll go through the gee-whiz idea, but then I’ll also say, “But there’s also a 400-page operations guide that we’re prepared to talk about.” And they’ll say, “Nah, we don’t really want to talk about that. That idea really looked cool.” But it’s all important. I just think the execution part is a given, but it’s what differentiates the real agencies from the wedding planners that morph into this space because they can book a band and do the catering.

GIVNER: To a large extent, the execution is largely assumed. But it’s only assumed until somebody screws it up because they tried to do it on the cheap. You can come up with a great strategy, but how many times have you seen street teams who look like they couldn’t care less, like they’re barely interested in being there? How’d you like to be an executive at one of those companies that paid a half million dollars for a street team event and you walk by and see them like that? So execution has to be done right and it has to match the strategy.

ARASA: Execution is still a talking point. But people are less focused on that now and more focused on strategy. But people are focused on efficient execution and sustainable execution.

THOMAS SERRANO, Euro RSCG Luxe Events: Clients do think that execution is very important now. And even more so for the luxury clients, because in those couple of minutes they have [with a customer], they want to sell a watch for $25,000 to $100,000, and they have to be sure that the execution is absolutely perfect. If the strategy is amazing but inside the store the execution is bad, you just ruined the entire event.

BRYEN: In this age of social networking, execution is so much more important because every consumer has a megaphone, every consumer is public. Execution is king in that environment. Brand equity is on the line in everything that we do. Our performance, our systems, our management, our training, our follow-up has to be first class every single time across all those thousands of events that we execute. That’s what separates the great agencies in our business from those that are just trying—the ability to do that again and again and again.

PENSINGER: As an industry, we got a little sloppy the last few years. The barriers to entry for somebody to start an experiential marketing agency were quite low, as we all know. So there were agencies that were coming up with the flashy idea and selling it to a client, and then just moving on. But I think there was a bit of a reset this year. Everyone has reemphasized the real value of execution and the value of having really rock solid capability in that regard. Where it’s creating a bit of a conflict for clients is because of the role of procurement departments. Our clients know their cost for a brand ambassador for the last 50 programs they did, but at times we find ourselves really duking it out with them. We want them to invest in more time for staff training; they want to compress the timeline and they don’t want to make that investment. Or we want them to pay a premium for the right people to be on the ground—people who can deliver a more complex brand message. But when you get into these pricing games, it can be really dangerous.

DEUTSCH: One reason execution is more important than ever is the heightened visibility for the work we do. It’s on the c-suite’s radar. The other reason is that the global bar is being raised. Executing at a global scale and orchestrating a consistent experience across regions is further raising that bar.

BOYLE: I don’t think that it’s a question of a deemphasis on execution. It’s the transition we’ve gone through as an industry from event people to experiential marketers or whatever you want to call us. It’s the difference between the events and marketing. This group certainly has evolved to that place at the table with the traditional marketing agencies.

EM: IN 2010, IS YOUR WORK BEING DESIGNED TO REACH MORE PEOPLE, FEWER TARGETED PEOPLE OR SOMETHING DIFFERENT? HOW IS THE SIZE AND SHAPE OF YOUR TARGET AUDIENCES CHANGING?
HERSH: In the past, clients would have simply said, “Hey, it’s a show. Whatever audience is there, that’s the audience.” Now they’re asking if there’s a better venue for them. So we’re looking at which events are the right ones. Do we need to be doing events on the mall in Washington, DC, because what we really need is to get the public sector to move?

HUGHES: The larger companies, because their spending has been cut, are running the numbers and realizing if they talk to the right core group of people, they’re going to get some traction and they don’t need to own the whole world anymore.

ZEPPA: In b-to-b, what we’re seeing is that our clients are focusing on their top 20 or top 30 clients.

BRAD BACK, 361º Experiential: We’re trying to reach the right people; it’s not about the masses. With our client Blue Cross Blue Shield, we wash the data we collect so we create two groups: those we’re not going to deal with anymore and the target we want to focus our attention and dollars against. It’s all because we have to get the most efficient use of spend. One thing that demonstrates the sophistication clients are looking for in what we do is where events and experiential work play into the lifetime value of a customer. They’re also looking at the importance of programs that will cross-sell across brands or divisions. That can be a challenge but it also can be an opportunity.

PENSINGER: There is some dynamic tension with clients about this. Those clients that are seeing the bigger opportunity are more comfortable with not trying to put something in the hands of everybody that walks by, and instead having better quality engagements with less people. Not everyone’s there yet, but more people are getting there.

STELMACH: I’m having clients also push back, saying that if we’re going to focus on fewer people and spend a little more time with them, they want to see a higher conversion rate.

ARASA: We’re seeing more and more clients who are focused on bringing the experience to smaller influencer groups, as opposed to the big-deal concepts. The events are smaller, more intimate and more authentic, and they’re a more direct engagement. It’s also more measurable and less expensive.

GIVNER: It’s less about “big group” versus “small group” than it is about putting money toward existing clients versus trying to take on new ones. Part of the reason is that it’s much more expensive to land a new client—particularly on the b-to-b side. But if you go to the higher end of like the luxury sector, for example, Bentley spends almost all of its marketing dollars on existing clients and their invited guests. Their mentality is to encourage greater word of mouth because they’re not wasting money on random people.

CARROLL: One phrase we’ve used a lot that we never used before was share of voice. Whether our client is looking at a large-scale audience or a hypertargeted audience, it’s about how significant your share of voice can be within that target.

JONES: The passion points are a lot more defined now, and that does a lot to unite groups of people. If people like a certain type of music, brands now are starting to identify that and realizing they can attach themselves to it and affect the word of mouth. People within that realm are connected by spending time on the same blogs and chat rooms, watching the same programming and going to the same type of events. As a brand you can connect yourself to those passion points.

SECTION 2: SOCIAL MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY
EM: LET’S TALK SOCIAL MEDIA. WE CAN ALL AGREE THAT IT’S PERVASIVE IN EVENT MARKETING, BUT DO BRANDS ACTUALLY GET IT, OR DO THEY JUST HAVE THE SENSE THEY SHOULD BE DOING SOMETHING IN THE SPACE BECAUSE IT’S THE BRIGHT, SHINY OBJECT?
BOYLE: To some extent it is the current glittery object. That doesn’t in any way diminish its importance. It’s OK if it’s used as a way to open the conversation but I think we have to be very careful, once there, to say to a client, “This may not be the right strategy for you.”

OFFICE: The consumer doesn’t just experience things live or digitally. They’re back and forth all the time when they’re making a purchase decision. If somebody’s going to go buy a camera, they’re going to go online; then they’re going to go to the store and put it in their hands; then they’re going to go back online and look at blogs. So the journey is no longer just a straight line; it’s a circle. So we can’t just play in one space anymore. We’re not in the digital space or the physical space. We’re in the phygital space. So everything we do has to touch both of those places.

STELMACH: It’s a double-edged sword. You have some marketers from the social media realm saying, “Every brand needs an app.” But if you look at where consumers are, the most impactful voice in all of marketing is the consumer who is like “me.” Those consumers now have a voice that they’ve never had before and they express opinions about your brand. In fact, they’ll own your brand’s message to some degree. So being able to talk to them in a relevant fashion in that environment is absolutely critical, [but] it’s also important that it’s a conversation, that you’re listening as much as you’re talking.

PENSINGER: The great part for consumers and their relationship with brands is that it’s so easy now for consumers to self-select the brands that they want to have relationships with. They can choose to follow a brand if they’re inclined to do so, they can engage with it, comment on it and feel more ownership in the discussion. The great part for us is the ease and the efficiency with which it allows us to extend the conversation. But do consumers want to get 10 messages from all these different brands on Twitter about things that half the time they don’t really care about? Some of those things are going to fall away. But the beauty of what our industry can provide is making those interactions meaningful. Consumers will tell us if they want to participate and they want to extend the conversation, but we’re going to make it really easy to do so and at the core the experiences are the reason why.

DEUTSCH: Brands have to make it a two-way dialogue and commit to their community. They have to recognize that employees are on Facebook and on LinkedIn and Twitter, and social media isn’t just for the consumer of Rock Band or Guitar Hero, or the person who wants a recipe from Kraft’s kitchen.

PARRINELLO: The key with social media is to think about your environment. Make it a positive experience. Make it something that they’ll want to engage with. Make it relevant and let them walk away having simply a positive experience with their friend. Make the brand part of the conversation, not disruptive.

GIVNER: We’re seeing smart brands create event programs where the people who are at the event are the tip of the iceberg—or they’re half the iceberg. But they’re certainly not the whole iceberg. The mentality is no longer, “Let’s build a great event to really make these 1,000 people do what we want.” Now it’s, “We’ve gotten them to do what we want but now get them to tell another 100,000 people.” That completely changes the mindset.

BRYEN: Too often brands will be too brandcentric and the event element that they expect the consumer to embrace and pass along can be too self serving, as opposed to being a true value or providing some social currency, uniqueness or new news to the consumer. It’s our job to make sure we’re helping the brand see that.

ARASA: Part of the reason live marketing and social media are inextricably linked is that social media is a word-of-mouth engine. But what fuels that engine is passion and excitement, something genuine and authentic. And that’s what live events deliver.

SERRANO: I would say that the luxury brands are catching up in this area. Three or four years ago they were not really into digital. Now they are, for many reasons. One, it’s cost efficient. Also, sometimes it’s a good excuse to say that they are more eco-friendly. But with all of this content and creativity, the question is how you use it and how clever you are in using those tools. That’s the key.

WOODS: Digital communication, for us, is a supporting tactic as opposed to a core tactic. We just try to focus on the live interaction. But I do think it’s dynamic, it’s fresh, it’s interesting, it gives you results, it gives you numbers to look at. Looking ahead 10 years from now, it’ll become so precise that you’ll be able to do targeted communication to left-handed people who like chocolate. But I still think for event marketing and experiential marketing, it’ll be supportive, supplemental.

GARY COLEN, AMP Agency: In experiential marketing, we look at how you create an experience that consumers take with them. And as technology changes, we have to adapt. Social media is much broader than a tactic. But it’s a struggle right now, because there is no consistency in it. Most companies we work with don’t have a clear-cut proposition for digital, so it’s difficult to figure out what they value or how much investment they want to put into it.

CARTER: At its best, social media allows the brand to create something new or evolve something it’s already doing. Gatorade has been the sponsor of a grassroots amateur skateboard tour called the Free Flow Tour. There was so much digital conversation about that property among the participants. So out of that grew what is now the Gatorade Winter Free Flow Tour, which will be essentially the same type of event but at resorts around the country this winter. Without that communication among the participants and without social media, there’s no opportunity for them to have that type of discussion.

KASS: Clients are now willing to give consumers the megaphone. They’re more willing to accept that the message is going to be pushed out in a variety of different ways. Whereas two years ago, they wanted to control the message, and there was that concern that consumers might say the “wrong thing.” Now brands understand that these are people who have a passion and they’re going to say good things the majority of the time.

LANGE: An interesting thing about social media is that is it gives us a place at the table with more people on the client side—we can now talk to their customer service person, a sales person, or their p.r. or corporate communications group, because social media involves all of those things. So we’re getting a lot more buy-in from different people within the organization and getting a comprehensive experience with our clients, and getting them to commit to longer engagements.

HERSH: I think the inundation of social media and all kinds of other electronic media is going to make the face-to-face experience more important, not less. Our clients and their clients are so inundated by information that it’s really hard for people to have any kind of meaningful filters. The beauty of an event is that you have to make a different kind of commitment than you make to social media.

ZEPPA: Fundamentally, the issue is how communities are forming today, and how the dialogue model is changing. It used to be one-to-one, then it was one-to-many and now with social media, it’s manyto- many. People now rely on a group of people they don’t know. For purchase decisions, they trust them more than they trust the brand.

ASARO: I think we’ve seen clients misusing social media to the point that it actually hurt their brands. They’re overcommunicating; they’re bombarding their consumers with stuff that is not relevant to them. We’ve spent time trying to de-emphasize it unless there’s a clear strategy. For our 2010 programs, there is a clear communication goal and there are rules and regulations for how many times you can ping anybody.

LIZ VAN VOORHIS, Triple Point Interactions: We’re also seeing social media trickle down to the brand ambassadors. We’re more frequently being asked to have staffers tweet, blog or post related info to Facebook— clients are using their own event staffers to create chatter and buzz that may start at the event, but continue long after it.

EM: BUT WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF APPLIED SOCIAL MEDIA? CLEARLY IT ALLOWS US TO EXTEND THE LIVE EVENT. BUT ARE WE STARTING TO TALK ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA DRIVING EVENT MARKETING? OR ARE THEY DIFFERENT PISTONS FIRING AT THE SAME TIME?
BOYLE: The reason these programs can live on in social media isn’t that people will find it fascinating to Twitter about toilet bowl cleaner; it’s that we in experiential marketing are uniquely able to create meaningful content.

JONES: It really amplifies the message. In our world, one can’t live without the other at this point. People are connected, but they still need something to talk about. We create something for them to talk about and then we think of strategic, intelligent ways to integrate it into the messaging. I think we were seen as the interruption, but it’s our job to be the integration. It’s our job to be the relevant conversation, not the interrupting text message that comes in when you don’t want it.

SYMON: We had one program where we had 1,200 people working full time for an extended period of time and there was an industry blogger who picked it up. He knew stuff before our client did and before we did, and he would post to his blog and they would read it. It took us about three weeks to get that all organized. So social media does affect your field execution. Your client can learn about something from a blogger before they learn about it from a field staff.

CARROLL: The one thing social media gives us is a two-way dialogue. And that dialogue needs to be used in a way that supports consumers and people in their lifestyle and activities. A videogame company could use social media to release extras or game codes or things like that. The running shoe manufacturer could give people race entries that allow them to participate in more events. Brands can actually help support consumers versus just messaging at them through social media.

SECTION 3: BEST PRACTICES AND ADVICE
EM: “CREATING EXPERIENCES” IS OFTEN THE GLAMOROUS PART OF WHAT YOU DO, BUT MORE AND MORE, CLIENTS ARE PUTTING PRESSURE ON EVENT CAMPAIGNS TO DRIVE SALES. IS THE IMPACT OF EVENT MARKETING MOVING DOWN THE PURCHASE FUNNEL IN 2010? WHAT’S MORE IMPORTANT—MAKING MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES OR MAKING THE REGISTERS RING?
BACK: It’s relevance versus awareness. Awareness is part of the marketing equation. There’s no question about it. But the key is relevance. And the message is not going to get passed along the way that you want it to be unless there’s a degree of relevance to the brand. That’s where we have to elevate our objectives.

BOYLE: Clients drove us to a more ROI-driven model. You can talk till you’re blue in the face about the number of live engagements and the client always has some really smart guy in accounting who goes “Really, the cost per engagement is X.” So I think we got forced into becoming more strategic, to have better metrics and to expand into digital primarily so we could make those numbers look better. You know, if we do a touring event in 25 cities and we can add a touring event in the digital space, we can go from hundreds of thousands of impressions to tens of millions of impressions. There is a danger that our industry is going to move away from what made us unique, and that was the ability to deliver an experience in the real world in a way that’s meaningful and relevant. I think we have to move away from what we all were doing five years ago, which was the massages or whatever, to something that helps brands facilitate meaningful conversations among consumers. And we have to make sure that the stories that we help brands craft are not their stories but are relevant stories that consumers want to talk about and are powered in some way by the brand.

PENSINGER: I would say mass awareness is gone, or at least not something that we’re spending much time on. Awareness to a specific community is still important, but I think our focus is more in that mid-funnel range. In most cases, we’re not directly generating sales; we’re linking things back to our clients and their infrastructure and their ability to convert those sales. The pieces we put in place to connect that process have to be a lot stronger now. So I don’t think mass awareness is really a focal point at all.

DEUTSCH: I think there’s a danger in compartmentalizing us by where we sit in the purchase funnel. Because that happens, and clients think, “I’ll call you guys when I need X.” And we’re better than that. What we can affect is how that brand engages with our most important constituents. We don’t do it in isolation; we need advertising, p.r. and all the pistons firing. But when we think of ourselves that way, we can be in various places in the funnel without losing our soul and our identity. In that context, we’re as relevant for a new product launch as we are for rejuvenating a mature brand and everything in between.

MARTELLA: I think it’s almost the reverse of what you asked—about the experience being a dirty word. I don’t think experiential is going away—it’s just becoming bigger. You still need the brand experience and you have to make sure you have touchpoints that are going to be relevant to the consumer, drive the idea and, ultimately, drive sales.

GIVNER: Our responses may be different depending on whether we’re at an independent company or part of an Omnicom or Interpublic. The conglomerates have sliced and diced the marketing pie to provide great specialization to clients. And it’s had great results. But if you’re blurring the lines and you’re using social media to drive somebody to an event [and vice versa], different parts of the company can lead the charge.

BLATT: It’s less that we’re pushing it farther down the funnel and more that we’ve moved from heart to head. It’s not enough anymore to say, “These people are going to love the brand.” We’re saying, “They’re going to love the brand and here’s how we can prove it. Here’s how we’re going to show you that we have an effect.”

GACCETTA: Conversion is a big word. It’s about point of purchase, it’s about end-aisles, it’s about getting retail buyers excited about a promotion and getting them to buy X more palettes. So at the end of the day, for some beverage companies and lots of CPG companies it is about conversion.

ZEPPA: It depends on the business you’re going after. You need to look at what the buying cycle really looks like within that organization and whether it’s driving them to the register or to the next step you’ve identified toward driving that sale.

HUGHES: For the smaller brands we work with, everything obviously goes to sales. Obviously everything we do has to drive their business, but I think they’re willing to take a step away from the register and say, “OK, how do we get to be the preferred product?”

LANGE: There is more pressure to drive sales, but we’ve never said that we should replace general awareness. You definitely need to still have p.r., you still need to have broad advertising. I think it creates some ownership when people get a sneak peek of a product before it comes out and then all of a sudden they start seeing ads for it or they see that a celebrity has picked it up at Sundance. We’re starting to think more holistically about all of those things and how p.r. can be a part of it. Even though we may not do p.r., we need to know that what we’re doing experientially is going to drive p.r., marketing and advertising.

CARROLL: The conversations we’re having now are all about eliminating dollars that don’t have a specific action tied to them. In some cases it’s important to have an emotional connection, increased brand awareness or purchase intent— those types of things that are less retail-specific— but understanding the goal and then showing that we met or exceeded the goal, or didn’t, is critically important. So three years ago we were focused on storyboards and focus groups and testimonials, and now we have clients that are focused on dashboards.

SYMON: I’m hearing the conversation shift from the creative side of the program to the results side. So instead of talking about what a clever campaign, they’re saying, “Oh, that program delivered this result.” Also, consumers have changed. They have a different level of power now. The new customer journey is no longer from awareness to consideration, familiarity to purchase. It doesn’t work that way anymore. You can enter a brand in 30 seconds just because you were at a party and someone told you that they got a certain product and it was a great experience. I think that’s affecting the entire industry, and it has equalized marketing.

KASS: There are so many different ways to monitor the conversation beyond just tracking and sale. You have all of these social media tools to see the immediate results of our work. So the sale may come but if all of a sudden people are tweeting or they’re posting to Facebook or starting conversations on blogs, you know that the work is leading you on the right path.

EM: BRANDS ARE AT LEAST TALKING THE TALK WHEN IT COMES TO MEASUREMENT AND ROI BUT HAVE THEY ACTUALLY STEPPED IT UP? ARE THEY MEASURING THE RIGHT THINGS?
WOODS : Clients can make a lot of missteps with ROI. Many of them are just not that aware of the value of building the brand through relationships. You can do research, you can do with interviews, you can do focus groups, but really smart marketers realize that some percentage of the value is in building the relationship and building the brand through meaningful contact, and it’s not just about this number or that number.

PENSINGER: A few years ago everyone was talking about how to gather all of this data that’s out there. A lot of us invested in tools and processes to do it. But now we’re sitting here with terabytes of data and asking what to do with it. Which data points are the ones that really matter? Which are the red herrings that you shouldn’t focus on? And how do you sift through all of it in a meaningful way to actually come back with that powerful insight that comes from an experience? That’s a big theme for 2010. I don’t think we necessarily need more data—we need better ways to synthesize it and make it more powerful for what we’re doing for clients.

ASARO: The big thing for us is that clients are willing to pay for measurement now, where in the past it was something we built in. Clients are understanding the value of measurement and what it means to their bottom line. They’re also open to more detailed measurement. Everything we do, we record on video and we get testimonials, which are soft measurements. But we also analyze them and find out the nuances that we couldn’t count quantitatively in the event, so we discover how early adopters or influencers are registering with the experience and how they’re taking it with them.

HUGHES: We build in measurement up front because we think it’s important for the internal team to have buy-in at the client level, and so that if there are multiple people involved, everyone knows whether the priority is press or the number of people we’re engaging. That’s been really important.

HIRSCH: I think our biggest challenge is when we are talking to the c-level executives, because they’re used to getting millions of impressions through a television spot versus only 50,000 or 100,000 direct hits from one of our programs, and it’s a question of measuring the quality of that interaction versus the quantity of impressions. That’s where I’m trying to focus all our measurement efforts, because we’re going numbers for numbers, and we’re losing.

HAUSER: One of the things that’s important for ROI measurement is educating the client on how to do events as a mass channel. They’ll do an event here and an event there, and it’ll be hyper-fragmented. But if they build one event program and keep it going the whole year long, they’ll get the efficiencies of scale because they’re truly using it as a mass channel, not as a one-off. Live events is one of the most effective channels to use, and we’ve identified it as a mass channel, which gets their costs per touch way down where it can compete with television and radio.

EM: DO CLIENTS UNDERSTAND THAT THE RETURN ON AN INVESTMENT MAY, FOR SOME BRANDS, BE 36 MONTHS AWAY? OR IS THERE A DISCONNECT BETWEEN OBJECTIVES AND EXPECTATIONS?
DEIGHAN: I think that they do get it but it’s in the back of their brains. I think that they want to see the quality quantitative results immediately. They understand it may take them a year and they’re going to have to not only engage with them at that event, but also engage with them at several other events, online and through broadcast and all the different channels. The clients I’ve been working with understand that we have to fill these little goals first in order to get the consumer to convert.

JONES: It’s our responsibility to have a very clear reporting system so the client can show their bosses, and so their bosses can show their board members. That’s certainly something that has become much more available. We no longer have field managers turning in Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Everyone has a video camera, everyone has sound bites and sales results every day, in real time. That’s helping drive this forward, prove success for the industry and setting benchmarks for every campaign we do.

EM: HOW YOU ARE GETTING SMARTER ABOUT EXECUTION? HOW ARE YOU GETTING SMARTER IN THE FIELD?
HIRSCH: Last year there was research that found that brand marketers actually consider execution as one of the less important ways they’re rating their agencies. And I think that’s really wrong. The reality is that the experience these people have through our communications is everything. The idea can be fantastic and on target and strategic, but if they show up to the event and have a poor interaction, whether it’s through a lousy brand ambassador or not enough bathrooms, that’s it. You’ve just killed your experience and that’s going to generate negative word of mouth, and ultimately, that’s what people are going to remember.

VAN VOORHIS: I agree, and we’re certainly seeing both an emphasis on a quality brand ambassador, as well as training that person to be a true extension of a brand. We’re also seeing clients tying into the trend of “narrow-casting,” more specific requests— our agency clients asking us for, say dieticians, rather than just “fitness-minded” staffers. We’re just seeing an overall upgrade when it comes to the arms and legs of a program.

LANGE: I do think good execution is just assumed. I have a client who wanted us to create the exact same experience for about $200,000 less. So we did it—we busted our asses and we made it happen. Was it the best experience it could have been? There were a few things missing that would have been great to have. Will we work with that client again? Probably not, because at the end of the day, we can’t continue to do that kind of work. Our reputation is on the line and a subpar event is not going to work anymore.

HERSH: All of us are probably experiencing the influence of purchasing in the decision-making process. Frankly our customer is pressing us harder on pricing. One of the things we’re trying to do is work more strategically with our partners to figure out how to provide more for less. We’re not browbeating our vendors; we’re not trying to just make them do something for nothing. But we are asking them to create greater efficiencies for us that translate into greater efficiencies for our customer. As agencies, we do a lot of things, but we don’t do everything, and we look to those partners to be more sophisticated about helping us deliver better results. We may win a project on strategy, but we can certainly lose them on execution.

ASARO: Strategy has always been our lead for bringing in new business. Execution has always been the lead for keeping the business. So now we have two arms within our company, the strategy side and the execution side. They’re two separate brands now. That has also allowed us to go out and sell strategy only. We have clients that just want the big idea and they want to figure out how to execute it on their own budgets. And we can just sell execution, which makes us really good partners for advertising agencies that are trying to get into our space or clients that already have the big idea and don’t need help on the strategy side.

HUGHES: You can’t compromise on execution. You have to help your client make tough decisions about what they’re going to take off the list. They’re going to push as hard as they can, but we need to know our limits. Sometimes we have passed on programs because we couldn’t go as low as the client wanted us to, and a lot of those programs have been written about negatively or they didn’t have the right impact. In a difficult economy it’s tough to do, but we’ve done it we’ve never regretted it.

SYMON: The biggest thing for us was the technology investment we made. We made everything realtime, online and web-based. We created a module for profiling and hiring people for the field, all the way to how to deploy them around the country and getting feedback. Because everything else is so immediate, and because of social media, clients need to have information all the way down to the point of purchase. The other change is getting RFPs and having to be able to execute by next week with quality people in Houston, Dallas and San Francisco. So our biggest thing is leveraging technology.

WOODS: Technology is a huge element in execution now in terms of information, communication and reporting. It used to be you’d send somebody out with a point-and-shoot camera and have them send back a couple of jpegs and a little field report, and now that’s getting more sophisticated, as it should. Environmental issues, which we really haven’t spoken to, are a compelling element that intersects with what every company’s doing. Three years from now, that could be its own dominant conversation, like digital is now. How brands come alive and what that means in terms of use of materials and recycled materials, or use of green energy. A certain percent of every corporate budget now is allocated to environment and green, but the technology is lagging behind the behavioral imperative. So in our execution, we’re trying to get out in front of that. I think it’s something that needs to be considered in every execution, whether it’s staff clothing, or diesel instead of gas or recycling. The brand person we interact with may not care about it, but somebody in the organization does and that’s another potential budget source. So when we add something environmentally friendly, we tell clients, “We think this is the right thing to do. You may want to check with your company’s environmental task force and ask if they want to subsidize this new activation element.”

EM: HOW WELL ARE BRANDS INTEGRATING THEIR AGENCIES? IS IT GETTING EASIER TO WORK WITH YOUR CLIENTS’ OTHER AGENCIES?
BRYEN: The other agencies certainly know what experiential is now whereas a couple of years ago they didn’t. As long as everybody understands that we’re here for the brand and we need to play nice, it goes just fine.

ARASA: Just as experiential agencies are looking at things holistically, planning social media and helping drive the client’s strategy, agencies [from other disciplines] are doing that as well—traditional media agencies are looking for experiential ideas. So it goes both ways.

GIVNER: It’s still tricky. A couple of years ago we were brought into a situation where a p.r. firm had promised the client a bus tour that was going to kick off from New York right outside Grand Central after a press conference inside the train station in Vanderbilt Hall, during the middle of a weekday. They had promised it to the client, and almost everything made sense. But it was a little awkward when we pointed out that they were going to have all this media gathered to see the bus off and the bus was going to start its engine, go six feet and stop in traffic on 42nd Street, and that wasn’t the photo op that they wanted. We suggested how to rework the idea and we ended up with something everyone was happy with. So the best scenarios are when everyone agrees on what everybody’s expertise is, and there’s discussion among the agencies before ideas are presented to the client.

EM: UNTIL A FEW YEARS AGO, EXPERIENTIAL AGENCIES WERE ALL COMPETING WITH AD AGENCIES AND P.R. COMPANIES THAT WERE TRYING TO BREAK INTO EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING. TODAY, EXPERIENTIAL AGENCIES ARE STARTING TO OFFER ALL OF THOSE OTHER SERVICES. AN INTERESTING EVOLUTION, EH?
BRYEN: We’re in the leadership role, a lot more now than we ever were before. We also have to be careful and not try to do everything. We need to do what we’re good at, and we need to let other agencies do what they’re good at. Clients expect that from us.

SERRANO: It’s a matter of timing. When you get the first meeting and you’re there when the client defines the mission, it makes it easier. The problem is when we come in to rescue the p.r. agency that has no clue about the execution but is telling the client how to run the event. But I would say that overall clients are more used to dealing with two, three, four agencies in the same project and I think they are getting better at it.

MARTELLA: I work with a large CPG client who spent about 18 months devising a system for coming up with integrated marketing ideas. It takes them about nine or 10 months to get from brief to end result. And it’s an absolute nightmare getting there. Unless the client gets it—understands how to harness the people at the table, draw the line, be the referee and put one of the agency partners in the lead, which they often don’t in my experience— you’re going to have problems.

GIVNER: I’m also seeing that after all of the layoffs, the client’s decision makers seem to be getting younger. So someone with less experience than the agency leaders around the table is making these calls. In some ways that’s good for us because they need more agency support. But they also are less likely to have the perspective to be able to say who takes the lead on a project.

EM: AS WE DIVE INTO 2010, WHAT ARE YOUR CLIENTS’ PAIN POINTS, AND HOW ARE YOU DEALING WITH THEM?
SERRANO: Clients are more willing to challenge themselves now. They are ready to listen more—if we come up with a new solution. So they’re listening more to what we have to say, and to what other clients have to say.

GIVNER: They’re looking for ROI for themselves, for their job. Was this event good for them? Was it something that they can take ownership over? How can they help sell this to management? ROI for many years was something you’d talk about over a beer and it was a nice-to-have luxury. Now it’s a survival strategy. You can’t keep your program and your job without selling it internally.

BRYEN: Our clients want to see metrics that prove that their investment is worthy of the dollars being put against it. So we’re developing predictive models to show clients how their programs are going to perform. When we put numbers against the forecast and can show clients that their investment makes sense because this is what’s going to happen, we can help them get past that pain point. But that’s the barrier to investment.

MARTELLA: Clients need us a lot more—they can’t afford to manage a lot of the things they’re doing internally, so they’re looking to us to be a partner and make those things happen. We’ve always talked about being partners with our clients and perhaps this is the time when, out of necessity, it truly happens.

EM: WHAT’S YOUR BEST PIECE OF ADVICE FOR CLIENTS IN 2010?
COLEN: If I was in the client’s shoes I’d be making sure I was squeezing every ounce of potential from the people I choose to work with. If I like what they bring to the table for a certain capability, then perhaps they have other skills I may be unaware of that I can leverage.

GACCETTA: I look back at 2009 and it was really fascinating to watch how people did more with less. There were a lot of partnerships that happened that were just barter deals, not big cash outlays, that seemed to make sense for all parties. I think 2009 taught a lot of people that there are great possibilities if you really get creative. So we’ll probably see a lot more of that in 2010.

BOYLE: My one piece of advice to clients is talk to us. Give us more information. Even if it’s not a formalized process. Frankly, I prefer an hour’s worth of meaningful conversation with a client than a 40- page RFP.

PENSINGER: Help reconcile the time-compression issue—their budgeting process has gotten pushed back and that’s probably time we’ll never get back. But to deliver the quality of thinking and execution that we’re really talking about requires us to be in that conversation earlier. Even if you don’t have the plan fully baked, start having some dialogue. Give us a little bit more transparency and opportunity to be in that dialogue so that we can put together the high impact events that people want.

STELMACH: Ask your agency to make you feel uncomfortable. I think that sometimes they want a safe solution—and that can always be part of the mix—but ask your agency to stretch you. There’s so many dynamic new marketing directions out there.

HAUSER: Understand the consumer journey from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed. Regardless of what you do, you have to make sure you’re enhancing their day-to-day and you’re not interfering. It’s really about having a greater understanding of your audience and delivering a positive brand experience where they’ll be most receptive to it because that’s going to get you the most for your money.

PARRINELLO: Recognize the value of experiential marketing and include it in developing the overarching brand strategy. The earlier you bring it in, the greater the impact will be.

HERSOM: Don’t be afraid of integrating sustainability into your programs. We are the most environmentally unfriendly industry of all of them. We create a very large footprint. We have to come up with ways to lower our impact. And companies need to be committed to building sustainability into all of their experiential plans.

PETERSON: Real simple: My advice to clients is bigger, better, fewer. When something’s working, stick with it. Just stick with it. I struggle with it because we’re constantly reinventing ourselves, looking for a new idea, and the shelf life of that idea can be, if you’re lucky, a couple of years. I also would tell you that I’m going to continue to align myself to things that just make the world a better place. Experiential married with products and services that make the world a better place— that’s the ultimate in ROI and brand building. I’m going to be inspired to align myself with companies like that, because I’m tired of doing the pushing and schlepping for products and services that aren’t making this world a better place.

OFFICE: Let’s have fun again. We are intellectual people, brand builders; we understand what we have to accomplish, but lighten up. We’re not doing brain surgery here, clients. This is a fun business. We know how to engage clients. Let us have some fun here and enjoy. EM

And, we’re just getting started! Trust us, we had enough roundtable content to fill the entire magazine. So what you’re reading in here is the topline. For a full 32- page roundup of all the action go ahead and download the “widescreen edition” here.