10 Experiential Marketing Tactics to Supercharge Your Growth with Jonathan Yaffe, AnyRoad

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Nike is a brand that's all about movement. It's all about sports. It's all about energy. Even their logo is a dunk, right? Nike decided to start turning its stores into basketball courts. Why? Because they don't really care if you walk out with a new pair of Jordans. They want you to try on a pair of Jordans and play basketball in the store against a Nike employee. And then you can go and buy them later on your phone. Because it's not about moving product, it's about creating immersive experiences. I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

Hey, what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over a hundred thousand people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more.

All right, my name is Jonathan Yaffe. I'm the CEO and co founder of Any Road. I'm going to tell you about the 10 experiential tactics to supercharge revenue and growth. I got my start at a little company you may have heard of called Red Bull. I was one of the first marketing hires when Red Bull first came to the United States and we were spending billions of dollars a year on experiences. We believed even back then that digital marketing was completely over saturated. But you bring your best friends to this crazy Red Bull event and there are people jumping out of airplanes, going down mountains on tricycles, DJs are playing, people are dancing, everyone's having an amazing time, and somebody comes up to you and hands you an ice cold Red Bull. This creates an emotional bond that not only changes your perspective of the brand, but but also changes your purchase behavior going forward. I believe we're in the middle of a massive cultural and economic shift from a things economy to an experience economy. And we See this in every facet of the economy. But what we're not seeing yet is marketing. Catch up with this. So we started with print. Great way to tell a story. But it's static. We moved into tv. Now we have sound. Now we have moving pictures. Much better way to tell a story. Then we moved into social and digital. Why? Because you don't want Campbell's to tell you how amazing their soup is. You want your cousin to tell you how amazing his minestrone is himself. And finally, we're past this. We're into the world of branded experiences. Because the end all, be all is you learning with Chef Boyardee how to make your own soup. So we're going to jump in now. Number one, if your brand was an experience, what would it be? This is a great exercise for everybody to do. Let's take Nike as a great example. Nike is a brand that's all about movement. It's all about sports, it's all about energy. Even their logo is a dunk. Right? It's all about movement. So let's build Nike experience, the perfect experience that Nike could build. You're going to get a pair of these anti gravity Nike boots and you're going to start running. You're going to run through your favorite cities in the world, underground, around corners, day and night. You're going to keep running and then you're going to find a hoverboard and you're going to jump on the hoverboard with your anti gravity boots and you're going to just soar all around and run into Michael Jordan. And Michael Jordan is going to be hanging out there with his friend Justin Bieber. And they're going to challenge you to a game of basketball. And you're going to start playing basketball in your anti gravity Nike boots against Michael Jordan. And you're going to jump up to dunk, but you're going to go a little bit too high and end up on the moon playing basketball with Michael Jordan on the moon. Now, this would be the most amazing Nike experience. But unfortunately, due to supply chain issues, we don't have enough Nike anti gravity boots. So what are we going to do? So Nike can now take a step back and say, how do we actually do this at a larger level? So Nike decided to start turning its stores into basketball courts. Why? Because they don't really care if you walk out with a new pair of Jordans. They want you to try on a pair of Jordans and play basketball and in the store against a Nike employee. And then you can go and buy them later on your phone. They started to build basketball camps for kids because they want to get people started young, associating Nike with movement and sports and energy. And they have the Nike Running Club. When you're in Vancouver or Cape Town or Tokyo or anywhere in the world, you can start running with the Nike Running Club for free to discover new cities, even if you don't have Nikes. Because it's not about moving product, it's about. It's about creating immersive experiences. Number two, find your target audience. They are not building these experiences for everybody. They are building these to engage the running community. If you are Michael's art stores that does a million art classes per year, you don't want to engage everybody. You want to find the kids who love art and love crafts and engage them. So find your community. Number three, test and then do it at scale. When I talk about experiences, I talk about things that must trigger at least three senses. There's a simple test. If it doesn't trigger at least three senses, it's not an experience. Therefore, YouTube is not an experience. The Metaverse, sadly, yet, is not an experience. An immersive experience triggers at least three senses. We say, great, it's an experience. And we see the data to back that up. So let's see what a couple brands are doing to actually build out their own branded experiences. Sprite started putting showers on the beach so you could literally immerse yourself in them. Lowe's and Home Depot spend billions of dollars a year on classes, workshops, diy, not just to get you in the store, but to actually get you working. Because that's what they want. The association right down the street, our neighbor here in Vancouver, Lululemon, which is ridiculous, spends $300 million per year on free yoga classes. Why do they do this? Because they believe that people who take these classes have a higher brand perception, love Lululemon more, and spend more money at Lululemon. Is this true? They have no idea. Also, if you have friends who work at Lululemon, please text them now. I'm free for coffee tomorrow. I would love to talk to them and tell them this to their face. Thank you. So what else do we have? We have Sur La Table. Sur La Table is a company that sells spatulas, but they also sell amazing cooking classes, which actually end up moving more spatulas. You have brands like Tabasco that have amazing hot sauce experiences down in Louisiana. They get the craziest hot sauce freaks coming to visit there from all over the world. Look at these people, like, going out of their way from around the world to take a picture with a massive Tabasco bottle. This is like their mecca. This is amazing. Okay, Think about your favorite winery, your favorite distillery, your favorite brewery. It's not about the liquid. It's about the experience. It's about the way it makes you feel. And, of course, Red Bull. We did this at such a massive scale. We didn't know what was working at the time. But Red Bull has by far, number one, market share. Clearly, in retrospect, it worked. Number four, create seamless ops. It's not enough to just do the creative aspects of this. We need to make sure this goes off without a hitch. We need to make sure we're staffed up correctly. We need to have great operations for all of our experiences. Number five, stop counting smiles. We used to have this joke in the experiential marketing industry, which is not really a joke. And it's a little bit sad that the way we know whether these things work is because a lot of people are smiling. And then we took this a step further and said, well, maybe we don't count smiles. Maybe we just put people with clipboards asking people, joanne, did you have a good time? What's your age? Where are you from? This is a technology conference. We know that this is dumb, right? So at Red Bull, we had this exact same problem. Here's the data that we had. Our objective was to engage Pinos. Pinot is people in need of energy. You cannot make this up. The cost of these experiences were around $14 million each at scale, right? And they would bring in around 80,000 consumers, and we would give out about 60,000 Red Bulls, and we would say, oh, we saw about 5 million media impressions and lots of smiles, but really, we had no data other than that. And this drove me absolutely bat crazy. What is the ROI of these things? We had no idea. But these things cannot be measured. People say, IRL cannot be measured, and I believe that's bull. So, number six, eschew vanity metrics. We here in the tech industry have this bad idea that the most important things are likes, views, and smiles. Likes, views and smiles are not worth anything. Okay? When I talk to CEOs and CMOs of Fortune 2000 companies, I asked them the following question. Would you rather have 1000 of these or 100 unique moments? Would you rather have 1000 of these or. Or 100 true interaction points? And the answer is that you always want the things on the right side. If you are in an organization looking for more Clicks, likes and smiles, you are going down the wrong path. Number seven, use data to optimize. So my background's in science and I like to think about this as a scientist. And in fact the data proves that this works. Nike's not just doing this for YouTube views and Instagram likes. They actually know that by rolling out these experiential touch points and incredible experiences at scale that this actually boosts people's loyalty, people's lifetime value and people's perception of the Nike brand because they're using real time data to do that. And so we developed at anyroad what we call the experiential data framework, which is a lot like the scientific method. Number one, we're gonna baseline, we're gonna take in a ton of data from all of these experiences at scale to really understand what's working and what's not. Number two, we're gonna benchmark this so if you are a CPG brand, you can benchmark this data real time against every other CPG brand in the world to figure out what's working, what's not. And is this good? Number three, segmentation. Because the same experiences that work for 20 year old women in Southern California probably do not work exactly the same way for people in their 80s in Nova Scotia. Right? So understanding segmentation is extremely important. When we get to real life experiences, then we can a B test so we can actually a B test experiences the same way that we would a B test ads. Right. Run different kinds of experiences by changing a couple variables and set them on to the same group of people and, and we can actually see which ones perform better. And lastly predictive, and this is my favorite, so once we have a ton and ton of data on all of these global experiential programs, we can then predict that people of a certain demographic and user behavior after participating in X number of experiences will actually change their spending behavior and their brand loyalty in specific ways. And we're doing this at a large scale, right? And some of the data points we're pulling in, we pull in thousands of data points. We're looking at channel segmentation, we're looking at purchase behavior, NPS score, loyalty reviews, a bit of social posting, geolocation and merchandise sales. And we're basically mashing this all together specifically for in real life experiences. And beyond that we use natural language processing not to figure out the what, because that's the quantitative data, but to figure out the why. And this is fascinating because it's not just saying these experiences were great Red Bull experiences. Were super cool. We want to actually figure out why Red Bull experiences worked on me, but not my parents. Right. Or why lululemon experiences work on some people but not other people. And we can actually get down into it and figure out literally what factors in these experiences are driving this LTV growth and this brand engagement and. And which ones are destroying it. Because just like digital marketing, there are also experiences that are bad. Number eight, compete against all other forms of marketing. Obviously, I'm the experience guy. I believe that experiential has about 25x the ROI of anything digital, and we have the data to back that up. So once you know that, let's just go and compete against other forms of marketing. We see 14,000 advertisements a day, and trust me, we are all numb to them. When you see a billboard by the side of the road, when you click on an Instagram link, when you see a Facebook ad, these do not change our behavior at all. And in fact, experiential is already the fifth largest marketing spend in the world. It's 7.5% of all marketing budgets. Yet it's the only category in the top 10 that until we came along, had no digital tools, no ROI and no data. My belief is that when we can bring the level and rigor of statistics and data to the experiential world, it's actually going to end up in the top three and be able to compete head to head with digital. Number nine, focus on LTV Lifetime value, not conversion. If you want to sell one additional pair of yoga pants, put them on Instagram. If you want to actually change my buying behavior for the rest of my life, experiences are the best way to do that. So what we see is we see makeup brands that are doing makeup workshops and they're not doing this to just sell one additional tube of lipstick. They're doing this because the people who come to these makeup workshops ending up being loyal and buying a pair of lipstick every single month for the rest of their lives. This is lifetime value. And we know who that is and we know why we see brands doing online classes. Right? I know I said all about in real life, but because of COVID we have online classes too. We see brands and online classes not just to pull new consumers into the brand, but to actually activate existing consumers and increase that lifetime value. And I know I talk a lot of about influencers on social media, but we see influencers. The second you take these social media posts and you make this a live interaction, ideally live in person, is engagement skyrocket. It's not that influencers are bad, it's that influencers putting a post doesn't do anything at scale, but you suddenly are able to create experiences that affect three of your senses and engagement skyrockets. Number 10 is the last one. Transform your business to experiential then profit. This is a great picture. If you don't know this picture, it's an organization called Meow Wolf. Think about Legoland built by Banksy on acid. That's basically what Meow Wolf is. They've built incredible immersive experiences in Denver, Santa Fe and Vegas and they're continuing to expand their footprint. And what we're seeing is that some of the best brands in the world are moving away from products and actually becoming experienced first brands. At Red Bull, this worked. And we were not an energy drink company. We were an experienced company that happened to sell cans. And not only did it work, but we built a massive organization around the entire world. And if it can work for Red Bull, it can work for you. So thank you very much. I hope we can build some experiences together.

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