B-to-C Events

Events can be the stuff of great stories, and rather than closing the book when it’s time to pack up and move on, some marketers are taking the next chapter online, on movie and TV screens and even onto JumboTrons where footage captured on-site continues to engage audiences. Following are four examples of events, from cooking to cybercrime, cranberries to cars, that live on the airwaves and video screens long after the lights have gone out on the physical event and the last attendee has gone home.

GMC is back on tour promoting its vehicles and its Home Life experiential marketing platform at Home & Garden and Boat shows around the country. Its first stop this year was the Atlanta Boat Show, which took place in mid-January. Next up is Cleveland at the Great Big Home and Garden Show on Feb. 2. GMC's Home Life tour will make 11 stops this year.

Coming off the success of a six-month, 11,000-mile tour that began in July 2012, Duck Tape will once again hit the road, relaunching the Duck Tape Rolls Across America tour this month. The tour, which packages the creative product interactions that happen at the yearly Avon Heritage Duct Tape Festival in Avon, OH, home of the Duck Tape brand, features an interactive bus loaded with activities designed to inspire and educate consumers about the fun and practical uses of the tape.

Walgreens will take its Up Market: Fresh mobile tour to Super Bowl Boulevard, the four-day experience leading up to the big game on Feb. 3 in New Orleans, where it will engage football fans with interactive games and a taste of its new fresh-made juices, smoothies, low-fat frozen yogurt and coffees. The stop is the latest in the mobile tour, which launched in Chicago in October and is designed to raise awareness of the store’s fresh food offerings as it seeks to expand beyond its traditional drugstore format with convenient and healthy options for shoppers.

In the first 10 minutes on the high street in Sturgis, SD, for the 72nd Annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Aug. 6 to 12, I met a man from Ohio, who had ridden across more than 1,000 miles to be there. We strolled together into the Loud American Roadhouse, ordered a whisky for him and a beer for me, and we talked for a while. He was in his late 30s, divorced and fairly new to motorcycling. He got his first bike about 10 years ago, he said. It turned out that he’d recently sold a profitable carpentry business, and was about to start a high-end custom cabinetry shop.