Successful Meetings - December 2008 - (Page 25)

Sales & Marketing DEEP IMPACT Event marketers move beyond the experiential to immersive strategies By Corrie Dosh corrie.dosh@nielsen.com If you happ en e d to Tim last March, yo es u mig S ht ha ve c qua aug re sight of something ht odd eve n for N .Y.C. Teams of marketing agency professionals were running around the city, pretending to be young women helping a 20-somethingyear-old friend, late for a party and needing a spectacular new outfit, Twittering to friends on Facebook about their progress, and, oh yes, thrilled about how a new Dove lotion kept their skin soft. It wasn’t mass psychosis—it was an emerging form of event-based marketing, an immersion event, that put attendees in the shoes of the target demographic. Paint The Town Red (PTTR), a New York Citybased event marketing company, won acclaim and a 2008 International Special Events Society Esprit Award for best meeting or conference program with a budget of under $75,000 for the event to educate Unilever marketing executives and their brand agency on new Dove-brand products. The format of an immersion event was the extra-special touch that the company needed to make the product education memorable and unique, says Howard Givner, founder of PTTR and now CEO for North America after the company was acquired by international event production company Global Events in June. “An experiential event is SUCCESSFUL MEETINGS DECEMBER 2008 be in attendee guest or e th e her tever is being gw ith wha h in et cts w ra m so inte ner says. or shown,” Giv strated emon d “We think of an immersion event as taking that to the next level, and really letting the client do a deep dive into what it’s like to be the target demographic.” GIRL POWER The goal of the Unilever planning meeting was for the marketing executives to learn more about the target demographic—women in their 20s—and to come up with nontraditional strategies to market Dove products with emerging media like social networking sites. “Rather than a demo, we created a story line,” Givner says. “It was about five or six girlfriends in their mid-20s that all went to school together. They were getting together that night for one girl’s birthday party, who was named Sarah.” The teams were given an envelope, which contained a printout of an e-mail from one of the characters asking for a favor. The girl had spilled coffee on her dress and needed her friend to swing by clothing outlet H&M to pick out a new party dress and to e-mail a photo back for approval. Once a team sent off the required picture, they received a new text asking for the character to successfulmeetings.com 25 http://www.successfulmeetings.com

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Successful Meetings - December 2008 Contents Editor's Note Corporate Events On the Record Calendar Research Planner Spotlight Personal Success Technology Talk Food & Beverage Professional Development Quick Tip Tools of the Trade On Site: Retire Those Tired Power-Point Slides On Site: 12 Tips for Thriving on a South African Safari Deep Impact Recession-Friendly Speakers Showing Off Hawaii Insert Places & Spaces Mississippi Gulf Coast Fort Worth South Florida Beijing Gurus

Successful Meetings - December 2008

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