On the Record

Six months down,
             six months to go. 
       Just breathe, baby. 
                      Breathe. 
               You can do this.

You have now reached the halfway point of 2010. And things are starting to pick up: Spending. Approvals. Momentum. Take a look around and you’ll see increased activity across the country. And early indicators are strong for a healthy fourth quarter. In an effort to keep you up to speed, we present another editorial roundtable, sponsored by George P. Johnson, which brought together a handful of event folks to talk about the state of the market, the trends they’re embracing and the challenges they’re dealing with. Roll tape.

Carter Angus
Dir.-Events and Sponsorships
Virgin Mobile

Bonnie Campbell
Mgr.-Trade Shows & Events
Boston Scientific

Tara Higgins
Senior VP/General Mgr.
George P. Johnson

Andy Holtzman
Dir.-Global Marketing Services
Citi

Penny Humphrey
Dir.-Experiential Marketing
Electronic Arts

Kim Myhre
Senior VP/Managing Dir.
George P. Johnson

Jen Mojo
Dir.-Experiential Marketing
Microsoft

Anne Stubington
Senior Mgr.-Events
Research In Motion

EM: The past 18 months have been unlike any other time in our business. How did your team survive? What are the most important things you’re working on now?

PENNY HUMPHREY, ELECTRONIC ARTS: I work in the U.K. and I head up experiential and retail marketing there. From an experiential point of view, we’re quite lucky—my budget increased this year. We have a couple of programs that we run year-round. So our challenges are just to make those work harder. We have a very strict ROI model, which is great. But my challenge is to understand how experiential makes people feel and thereby how it affects their behavior. So my big thing for this year is that I’ve commissioned a large market research program that will take over a year. I’m hoping to determine if we have a five-minute conversation with someone or a mobile phone call, and then I follow it up with some CRM, how do they behave, how does it change their propensity to buy and how do they feel about our brand as opposed to if I have a 20-minute conversation? It’s all about trying to find out that optimal time that we need to speak to people and how often we need to follow up. The ultimate goal is to make them brand friendly and get them to buy loads and loads of product.

CARTER ANGUS, VIRGIN MOBILE: Last year was a really interesting year for us. We were bought by Sprint at the end of the fourth quarter. So we’ve had a number of challenges of integrating multiple teams into one, and of working on four different brands, including Boost Mobile, which used to be a huge competitor of ours. With that comes figuring out what different demographics we go after for each brand, and which different events we continue to produce and which ones we drop. But you couldn’t ask for two cooler, experiential brands. So we’re really excited about 2011 and the different properties and programs we get to work on.

JEN MOJO, MICROSOFT: I’ve helped form an experiential marketing team, and we are building the next generation of what Microsoft’s going to do in terms of business-to-consumer programs. We have a new gaming product called Kinect that launched at E3. It has face recognition and Netflix and things like that. So if you want to watch a movie, you just use your hands to scroll through your library of movies and music. It’s the most revolutionary thing I’ve seen come out of Microsoft since I’ve been there. But in order to describe it, you have to play it, right? So we have to go experiential. We also have two mobile platforms coming out. We also have Windows Phone 7, which is launching this holiday. Usually in phones, it’s all about the device, but this is less about the device; it’s about the experience on the device. So it’s really an experiential kind of phone. And we’ve come out with a phone geared toward the demo whose whole life is Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and that type of thing. It’s very heavy on the experiential front.

My biggest challenge is, how are we going to measure this? How do we come up with almost a power index, to show how experiential maps to other disciplines and how we pull through and have our own internal metric for it that helps us understand what we’re delivering? Because right now everything is either not measured internally or, if it is measured, it’s measured from a p.r. perspective. And we’re never going to compete on eyeballs. Our people rely on surveys, but they’re not always asking the right questions. At Microsoft, metrics and measurement are especially important, as you can imagine. I’m a low-tech gal in a high-tech world, so for me to be able to speak to [my colleagues], I’ve got to speak their language. That’s my challenge this year.

KIM MYHRE, GEORGE P. JOHNSON: Last year was a real questioning of the tried-and-true kinds of marketing and looking for new, breakthrough ways of doing things. There has been a lot more integration of live and online activity and trying to figure out how to do that well. And how to use the experience medium to get a dialogue going and really benefiting from that. It’s the stuff you can’t buy that’s way more valuable, in many ways, than what you can buy. That’s what we’ve been doing—looking at what experience marketing is, what the touchpoints are. Is it episodic, is it just the campaign, or is it how a company behaves throughout all of their activities? How does that linkage happen and how do you organize internally to manage it? That’s what we’ve been working on with our customers.

ANDY HOLTZMAN, CITI: I work for global transaction services, which is a very, very successful unit of Citi. My role as a central marketer is a new one for global transaction services. There were a lot of areas around the world where our brand message was the same but looked different. The challenge was, how do we show ourselves as one Citi around the world? How do we go for strategy that’s global? How do we go for synergy that’s global?

We do an extraordinary number of proprietary events where we speak to our clients and they speak to us, so we really need to be at the top of our game in terms of not only what our products are but how we present them and how we look. So we’re deploying something that we’re calling “event in a box,” which is for our small- and medium-sized shows. It contains the same types of components that can create a trade-show booth—an innovation showcase, a staging backdrop. And it’s both a physical component as well as a consistent graphic look and verbiage that works around the world.

BONNIE CAMPBELL, BOSTON SCIENTIFIC: Boston Scientific has business units that all work independently. But we have this corporate branding model that we have to follow, which is challenging.

I came into this company and, coming from the entertainment world, where everything’s kind of over-the-top, I said, “Gee, I think we can do things a little bit differently here.” Boston Scientific never had entry and exit music from our symposium. And I played the Black Eyed Peas. I thought, just because we’re in the medical device industry does not mean that we don’t get to have a sense of humor or get to have fun. The company was of the mentality that we had to present ourselves as very boxed-in, very corporate and very professional. I had to work within very strong parameters but I found a way to pull a little creativity into it and to help us to look like a professional organization. It took a lot of convincing for the company to understand that if we don’t want to look like a high school science fair we need to really step it up a bit.

Plus we’re highly regulated by the FDA. So we can no longer even give away a pen at a trade show. So it’s very restricted. With dinners and events, when they’re associated with our trade shows, we can only spend $100 per person, inclusive of tax and tip. But we have to make it look like a million bucks. So I love what I do, but it’s a very challenging environment.

ANNE STUBINGTON, RESEARCH IN MOTION: I’ve been with BlackBerry for 10 years—when I started, our event portfolio was trade shows. That’s all I did for the first five or six years. Since then we’ve branched into experiential. We started with a proprietary BlackBerry tour where we took mascots out across the country and did pop-up events at baseball games and concerts and all sorts of things. We rolled from there straight into U2, which was a bit of a shock—we had never done entertainment before. Now we’re sponsoring the Black Eyed Peas’ global tour, which is a ton of fun. Amidst all of that, we’re still doing a lot of trade shows, a lot of proprietary seminars, especially in Latin America, where we’re on a huge growth curve. And a lot of developer and b-to-b events.

EM: What have been the biggest changes in your events, in terms of either strategy or their look and feel?

TARA HIGGINS, GEORGE P. JOHNSON: The biggest challenge clients face is finding the right mix, regardless of the year and the financial situation. In the past few years, we had the perfect storm—with environmental reasons and the economy—and everyone felt they had to move to virtual events. But what did that mean to a pharmaceutical company versus a finance company versus a high-tech company? Fundamentally, the ways they engage with the audience are different.

We saw that trend coming two years ago when we said we were [leveraging] the virtual world. But people are essentially tribal and want to connect with one another, so how do you still find that right balance? What we’re seeing this year is the combining of face-to-face and virtual.

ANGUS: The best example I can give is the Virgin Mobile Music Festival. We produce it; this will be our fifth year. It’s about 30,000 to 35,000 people per day. We host it in Baltimore. Five years ago, it was really more about being there and experiencing the brand more than anything. Now in 2010, one of our major goals is to tie back to retail and to create that connection between the event and what happens in the store.

EM: And for the record, when it started, how much were tickets?

ANGUS: Two hundred bucks. But because of the bad economy, back in early ’09 we thought we could change it up a little bit and differentiate ourselves from all of the other major music festivals. We came up with the idea to throw it for free and we got rid of Virgin Mobile Festival. It became Virgin Mobile Freefest. We relied heavily on partners. We gave away 35,000 tickets in under 30 minutes.
 
HOLTZMAN: For Citi it’s really about making sure that our voice is perceived to be strong on a global level. We’ve all weathered a storm and now the sun is beginning to show through the clouds. So we want to be smart about the ways we show our strengths, remind people of our strengths and add to our product line. It’s finding ways not to be bigger, necessarily, but to be smarter.

To Tara’s point about virtual events, we’re less virtual but much more Internet-driven. We do a lot of webinars and things that are interactive. The clients really do appreciate that, and we see those numbers growing. So when we do meet them face- to-face, we’ve already laid a foundation that we didn’t feel we needed to do before. Now, smarter is better than bigger.

MYHRE: In 2009 there were so many factors that changed the game for all of us. For the first time, because of the financial situation, people started questioning what they were doing. They started asking if they really needed all of the events they were doing; whether they had the right mix of events.

The other realization was that consumers have really changed, whether they’re business-to-business or business-to-consumer. They’re not interested in being talked to; they want to participate in the brand. They want to have a two-way conversation. So when you have that kind of situation and you have all of this new technology and social media, you really need to re-look at what you do. Understanding your customers is the key to that, really. You know, it’s not about just doing social media for social media’s sake. It’s about creating the appropriate experience for your target audience to drive them to feel that they can know your brand and do what you need to achieve your goals.

Marketing is a guest in the house of sales, so ultimately you are in the business of trying to convert customers and retain customers, build advocates who are out there recommending our products and telling their friends. And that’s really powerful. And it takes a lot more integration. Architecting that in terms of how it relates to the brand and the target audience is going to be a learning experience—something we’re really going to have to focus on.

ANGUS: At Virgin Mobile, we’re not just a cell phone company or cell phone service provider. We’re a communications company. And if we approach it from that angle, then we can offer our customers a lot more than just a phone and a plan. We can bring them social media, we can bring them events, we can bring them the Virgin ethos, we can bring them all of these different things that help them communicate. So we are doing a decent job as a small company by looking beyond the horizon.

MOJO: How are you guys paying your agencies? Is it a retainer model, on a project basis, a combination?

HUMPHREY: We use a retainer. We have a few very cool agencies and an experiential agency. We’re a very small team so we need our agencies to be extensions of us. We’re very open with our agencies because I believe you have to be to get the best out of them.

ANGUS: For years, we have gone project by project, and all of the legal and finance was just taking up way too much time. So we’ve re-examined our relationship with our agencies and finally come to an agreement where we’re using them and their skills for the entire year. It’s helping us plan our budgets and our projects, and figuring out what we’re doing for an entire 12-month period. It’s very refreshing.

HOLTZMAN: That’s very similar to what we’re doing. It’s not a retainer. There are procurement issues, and it just takes a lot longer to do—it’s a full-time job. But that one-year [relationship] has really helped us and the agency. They’re going to be much fairer with what they’re charging us because they can see the horizon. I would prefer the retainer. I’d prefer having that trust. But this is a viable interim step.

MYHRE: We’re seeing that a lot. We’re involved with a lot of procurement organizations these days. There’s no question that lots of companies are looking at rationalizing event spends and experiential marketing spends, and looking at ways of consolidating to a group of approved agencies that offer various kinds of skills. It’s been our experience that if you can get into a place where you know each other very well, you really understand where you can add value and a longer-term relationship does work, versus a project relationship. But having said that, the incumbent agency can’t be complacent. You have to keep reinventing yourself, adding new value to the relationship. That’s part of the obligation.

HIGGINS: But agencies are challenged; we’re keeping services at a certain price point because budgets aren’t increasing. And so how do we as an agency think differently to be able to respond to the existing work but be able to go into the next [phase]? We find ourselves in a very exciting place, trying to look at next trends, next best practices and, you know, what is the right mix.

EM: The turnaround times on what you all do for a living seems astounding. Is the speed of this business twice as fast as it used to be? How fast is the planning cycle now?

HOLTZMAN: This is a trend that’s been going on for a long time and technology is speeding it up. When I worked at Discovery Networks, we had five years to launch TLC, The Learning Channel. And that seemed short. And then Animal Planet came along, and we had six months. So, yeah, the world is spinning faster and faster and we have to keep up.  Also, we’re being asked to do a lot more with a lot less—not just with budgets, because you can be smart about that—but with the people and the know-how to actually get it done. And that’s a big challenge.

EM: Are you getting more aggressive about measurement? Are you wrapping your arms around it now?

HUMPHREY: Absolutely. We research our programs after the fact and before the fact. But obviously that only gives you a snapshot right there and then. We also need to know the value of the conversation. But when we talk about ROI… we’re not particularly good at garnering lifelong evangelists, I don’t think. A 20-minute experience with us might mean that that person is an evangelist for the next five years. So I can spend a lot more money on that person because I know I’m going to get it back twenty-fold, fifty-fold or a hundred-fold over the next five years. I think that’s a really interesting place for us to go.

EM: Are you doing a better job of communicating internally? Is everyone integrating your work with other departments within the company, or with other regions around the world?

ANGUS: For better or worse we’re getting to know the other departments within our brand now more than ever. Sales, advertising, HR and all of the different groups are involved in what we do. Ultimately that’s better for the company. So we’re trying not only to meet our goals but to meet their goals, too.

MOJO: We’re pretty fragmented. The regions like to do what they want in experiential. But when budgets put pressure on people, they’re more apt to listen and look for resources. So we’ll be a font for best practices and a couple of global initiatives.

HOLTZMAN: Citi was smart; they felt the need for a centralized marketing person who would build bridges with the regions. They don’t want to be perceived as a U.S.-based company. That’s really important to the regions. So it’s think global, act regional.
Once my team and I were able to get some street cred, by doing some things that resonated with them, the bridges solidified. And that really helped us become partners. They’re always going to want to do their own thing to a certain degree, but they are really appreciative that now we’re a team. I think the way to do it is to humanize it.

EM: A few years ago, a common topic of discussion in our industry was that upper management didn’t give experiential marketing the value it deserved compared with the other parts of the marketing mix. We don’t hear that a lot anymore. Is your work getting the respect it deserves internally?

MOJO: There’s evidence that they’re putting a value on it. My manager reports to the president of the organization. And I think it’s because, at the end of the day, the Black Eyed Peas or a golf tournament is high profile. These are things that executives actually attend, whether it’s as a keynote speaker or because of their personal interests. So we’re fortunate because, by the very nature of what we do, our work does get recognition. It’s one of those shiny things in the marketing world.

STUBINGTON: Now, the sponsorships are coming from above and being pushed down to us, so there’s visibility all the way through. And it’s advertising, it’s the event, it’s sponsorship, it’s social media, the whole thing. So we’ve got the Black Eyed Peas on a Facebook page and microsites. It’s a fully integrated program.

CAMPBELL: They’re finally looking at us as valuable entities within their organizations rather than just order takers or people who just make sure that the trade-show booth looks pretty. Personally, I have been more integrated into the organization, and my opinion and what I bring to the table are much more valued than they were a few years ago.

ANGUS: I’d go back to the end of 2009 when Virgin Mobile was barely advertising in magazines or on TV, and then we sponsored Britney Spears’ Circus tour. To your point, that allowed us to push all of our needs—whether it was advertising or p.r. or experiential. It had the entire package. And it proved itself valuable enough that the company wanted to do it again. 

HOLTZMAN: I think that there is a newfound respect. I used to say that if there’s a successful event, sales succeeded, and if it’s a failure, marketing blew it. But I don’t feel that as much any more. I feel that sales and marketing are on a more equal plane now.

Obviously ROI is what drives a lot of the events that we do, whether it’s long-term ROI from a proprietary event or it’s a trade show where we’re signing contracts. But there is more of an understanding [among senior management] that there’s a lot going on behind that curtain. The programs we’re asked to put together are so much more layered and structured and we connect more with sales than we ever used to. So that partnership has raised our level of appreciation in the eyes of the ceos.

EM: Five or six years ago, event marketers were often brought to the planning table to discuss how events could be layered onto a brand campaign that the rest of the marketing organization had already planned. Now, we’re often hearing that things are happening the other way around—the event team sets up a sponsorship or event and gets everyone else to talk about how to leverage it. Have you seen the relationship flip?

STUBINGTON: It completely depends on the program and where things are coming from. We’ve done campus tours where we’ve had marketing managers say they’ve got a certain budget and they need to go to X number of schools. And they basically hand it over and we’re in the driver’s seat, telling them what they need to do and who they need to integrate with. For things like a U2, it’s exactly the reverse. That came from the very top and filtered down and we executed our piece. But certainly we have a seat at that table to say, “If we’re going to do it, we need to do it this way for these reasons.”

HUMPHREY: I’ve probably been a bit more lucky than some others. Ours was a new department at EA in the U.K. And maybe because we’re a bit of a smaller team and we only have four core agencies. So everyone gets briefed at the same time and everyone comes back and responds to that brief.

EM: What’s at the top of your to-do list as you start thinking about 2011? What’s keeping you up at night or what’s getting you excited about next year?

HUMPHREY: My research makes me very excited. And I’m into the technology—the RFID, the touchscreen technology, and being able to map the consumer journey and tailor everything. It’s all getting very, very personal, and that’s what’s exciting to me. You can go to an event and touch 10,000 people, but know that each one of those people has had their own special journey. I think that’s really exciting.

STUBINGTON: I honestly have no idea what’s coming down the pike. But we’re just trying to be smart about resources. We’ve got a great group of suppliers and we’ve made a real attempt within my group to knit them together. So if we’ve got a U2 or a Black Eyed Peas, we can just bring everybody in, put them around a table, start hashing things out and have clearly defined responsibilities.

CAMPBELL: At the top of my list is to make our events and trade shows more technology-based. The bulk of my work is trade shows, so we definitely want to bring in smart technology and help the folks I work with open their minds to see that it’s essential. And we need to just keep raising that bar on our presence at shows and the perception of our company. We have to stop being reactionary and help our customers understand that there’s value in choosing our product over our competitors’.

HOLTZMAN: For me it’s making the event in a box successful this year so we can do event in a box 2.0 next. If we don’t do it right, it won’t be used by the regions. We’re already looking at ways we can improve and enhance it for 2011. We could add things like webcams—we have an internal social network so we can do client interviews and executive interviews on site, and we can feed it all back to our global network. It’s exciting to grow a program that you’ve launched and to keep it vital, make it endure and make it stronger next year.

At the end of the year, once we’ve road tested event in a box, we’ll be doing a cost-benefit analysis, so we can tell our people, “When you’re budgeting, if you’re looking for a 10-by-10 or a three-by-three meter component, it’ll cost you this much in Asia, this much in EMEA, this much in North America,” and they can budget accordingly. We’ll make budgeting for events smarter and more accurate so people who don’t do it for a living every day still can make budgets for events.

CAMPBELL: One of the things we’re trying to do is create toolkits and tool sets for our stakeholders so they can execute smaller events on their own. We have a portal set up with our trade-show house where you can essentially order anything, up to a 20-by-20 booth, online. If it’s something a little more complicated, of course, you can come to the event team. But for a lot of our shake-and-bake events, as we call them, we just tell them, here’s the brand, here’s the stuff, here’s the order form.

HOLTZMAN: That’s really smart. It’s not quite as cut and dry as that, but it can be really helpful. It’s not to control people—it’s to help them.

MYHRE: We’re really excited about where everything in the marketplace is going. The truth is that experience marketing is becoming higher profile within our client organizations, or in most of them. Our biggest challenge is making sure that we’re getting the right talent and the right people in place to be able to do the things we really want to do.

I don’t think we’re going back to the good old days, and we don’t want to, either. The new days—with better, tighter integration of digital and live experiences; with better integration with other mediums within the organization; with better planning and better metrics—all of those things are fantastic for our industry.

ANGUS: It’s all about finding the right mix of technology and brand goals and sales goals, but still keeping it cool. We’re an irreverent brand and people expect that of us, so we have to be able to see what’s out there and then be able to act on it. It’s knowing what your brand’s about and finding the right programs to activate on.   EM