The just-wrapped Experiential Marketing Summit gathered more than 1,000 members of the event marketing community in Las Vegas last week to share insights, marketing tactics and community-building strategies amid a post-pandemic climate. Event Marketer has the story.

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Bringing to life an experience based on the iconic IP from the classic film “Grease” had to be authentic first and foremost. Event Marketer explores how Paramount+ and media partner POPSUGAR marketed the streamer’s original musical series, “Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies,” by expertly striking the balance between catering to superfans and newcomers to the iconic franchise.

The post How Paramount+ Recreated the Frosty Palace Diner From ‘Grease’ to Promote Its New Series appeared first on Chief Marketer.

CM sister pub Event Marketer conducted a survey of AI in events during the month of March, and 86 percent of respondents said they were not using AI intentionally right now. However, 75 percent do believe that AI will change the course of events. Explore these insights and others in EM‘s latest Pulse Survey.

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The nation’s fastest-growing sport—pickleball—has attracted a growing number of brand sponsorships of late at tournaments, tours and festivals across the country. If you foresee your brand getting involved, check out these tips from Event Marketer on how to engage a crowd of “picklers”—from keeping it active to hosting standalone events to pickling with purpose.

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The Nutrabolt-owned C4 Smart Energy drink rebranded this week, armed with six new flavors, revamped packaging and an updated formula with new ingredients—including a plant-based caffeine source and citicoline, a supplement that promotes focus and attention—all to support its move into the “functional” energy drink category and brand repositioning as the “fuel” to achieve greatness.

The launch kicked off with a brand experience for attendees and Austin residents at SXSW 2023 last month, which highlighted its “4 Moments Of” campaign and drove a sampling effort across the city. The latter was, and continues to be, an important part of the campaign, according to Robert Zajac, Chief Marketing Officer at Nutrabolt. And with SXSW being an engine for creative minds, it made sense to start there.

We talked through the launch strategy with Zajic, who joined the company in late 2022, as well as his overall growth strategy for Nutrabolt’s brands; the importance of establishing “clarity of proposition” within that process; lessons learned from previous roles at Abercrombie & Fitch, ESPN and Nike; how experiential factors into his growth strategy; and his approach to working with influencers and talent.

CM: How are you getting the message of the C4 Energy rebrand out there to consumers?

Robert Zajac, Chief Marketing Officer at Nutrabolt: It all kicked off at South By. We have a multi-year partnership to be the official energy drink partner of the festival, and we thought there’s no better place than South By to launch this. It’s the home of this consumer, this mindset. South By exists to help creatives accomplish their goals.

We sampled over a hundred thousand cans around Austin and created an experience that brought all of that creative energy of South By together into one place, and then we fueled it with the product. A lot of the UGC that was created as part of the Smart House experience is going to become an out-of-home takeover in Austin. It’s just people—the faces of consumers that came by [the activation].

CM: What’s entailed in the broader campaign?

RZ: In the next couple months, there’ll be a broader campaign push that’s focused on a new messaging platform that we created with Wilco Agency that’s about staying focused on the moments that matter most—the idea of fueling your good to make you great. It gets unlocked through these smaller moments. We have short films featuring real people: a cutting-edge chef, a young designer, an Austin-based band about to break through, a powerhouse working mother.

And then we’ll have product-focused communications on the benefits. We have some exciting talent partners that are coming on board. It’ll go across retail and new platforms, and we also have a new LinkedIn strategy. If you’re going to fuel the next generation of creators, entrepreneurs, dreamers, doers and achievers, that’s a great place to do it.

CM: What is your overall strategy for growth for the brands that you oversee, which also includes Cellucor and Xtend?

RZ: The first part is clarity of proposition. So, clarity of message, clarity of brand, and evolving our overall mindset to be brand-driven and consumer-led. That sounds very basic, but we have gone through a bit of a reset, from our industry segmentation to in-depth interviews and qualitative studies to resetting how we track our brands, our KPIs and the return on those investments, to implementing a commercial mix modeling system. We’ve reset the table when it comes to how we want to approach data, insights and inputs, and how we separate out the different products and make sure that they’re targeted all the way through from the internal decks through consumer communications and execution.

CM: And this will be applied to all the brands?

RZ: Smart Energy is the first example of that. Some of the first work we did when I got here was asking, what is this product really about? Who is this product for? Why are we doing what we’re doing? And all of that led to South by Southwest as the perfect place to do it.

We’re doing that across all the brands in the portfolio. At the end of the day, we’re still a company in hyper-growth mode. We just need scale. We need people to understand what our products are, what our propositions are.

The other big piece is building out the right infrastructure, teams and processes, and then creating a more commercially-minded brand and marketing organization. You’re pushing the big ideas and you’re creating energy with one hand, and you’re measuring those ideas and sitting on the side of the commercial team with the other hand, in a way where they’re both working together.

CM: Previously, you worked at Abercrombie & Fitch, ESPN and Nike. What marketing lessons did you take from those roles?

RZ: They’re very different companies, but one thing that holds them together is that winning is a team sport. That’s obviously rooted in a sports mentality, but even at Abercrombie, teaming up was port-of-call in almost every meeting. If everybody wants to win, and everybody knows what winning looks like, it does so many amazing things. It checks your egos at the door, and it genuinely opens up discussion and collaboration. There’s a lot of simplicity in that. It builds stronger teams.

The other piece that’s followed me through is the notion that at the end of the day, ideas win. When we’re trying to drive a business, a channel, a retail partner or a new marketplace… there’s a genuine desire to embrace them and take calculated risks, and then watch them pay off and learn from them.

CM: How important is experiential marketing to your growth strategy for Nutrabolt brands?

RZ: Getting those products out into the hands of the right consumers in the right places at the right time is a huge part our strategy. It’s bringing together our activation team, experiential team and our field marketing team. We sampled over a hundred thousand cans at South by Southwest, and we immediately saw the business impact just within the city of Austin. Once people had it and experienced it—not just the brand, but the product and the flavor and the benefit—they started to buy it. Part of our strategy moving forward… is finding partners and then activating in the right way and scaling it.

CM: You have some upcoming partnerships with talent, and you worked with dozens of artists at SXSW. Do you have a specific approach to working with influencers and talent?

RZ: A lot of our strategies on the marketing side, but also on the sales/products/operational side, stem from our corporate culture. We have an entrepreneurial spirit; we have a CEO founder, and we’ve been around for 20 years, which is not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things. There’s an internal push that says, “Hey, this was us 15-20 years ago.” So how do we, as an organization, support the next generation of people who are trying to create the next great product, band or restaurant?

That goes into our talent strategy as well. First, we want to work with people who genuinely like the product, and that goes from very big [talent] all the way to what’s next—the next talent, the next athlete, the next artist, the next musician. We want to get to a place where we can help them and they can help us. That’s how you build longstanding relationships versus just transactional. We’ve found more genuine connections when it starts before there’s a transaction, and then goes beyond that.

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adidas was a leading partner of the FIFA Men’s World Cup, but when the tournament’s final matches approached, the brand opted to highlight female athletes with a trio of 121-foot by 95-foot murals carved in sand. It unveiled the portraits on the shores of Doha in Quatar, dubbed the “Beach Club Billboard,” to highlight its commitment to equity for female athletes and remind fans there’s “another half” to the sport. Event Marketer has the story.

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A plethora of brands once again engaged attendees at the SXSW conference and festival this year, which included 10 days of content, activities and events geared toward professionals in the tech, music and film industries. And Event Marketer staffers were on the ground from March 13-18 to take in the experiential activations firsthand. Check out this photo gallery of 18 brand engagements, from AppleTV’s retro Tetris experience to Peacock’s roaming nun activation to C4 Energy’s DIY creator lab for graffiti-style streetwear.

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Now one of the largest auto shows in the world, CES saw several automotive brands—including BMW, Caterpillar and Volkswagen—leverage gamification, augmented reality and cutting-edge lighting techniques to highlighting the future of mobility. Event Marketer has the story.

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KFC Canada built the first-ever winterized basketball court to capitalize on the sport’s growing popularity within the country—complete with pre-warmed basketballs, a nonslip-fabric court and regulation-size replicas of the brand’s iconic chicken buckets. Check out how the experience went down, according to coverage in Event Marketer.

The post How KFC Canada Courted Basketball Fans With a Winter-Friendly Activation appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Recently, we brought you a conversation with HBO Marketing VP Emily Giannusa on the network’s new apocalyptic series “The Last of Us,” whose two-year-long experiential strategy, among other things, helped garner an impressive number of eyeballs for the premiere. And that number is climbing as the show continues.

Here we explore a key stop along the series’ experiential journey—six screenings at New York City’s Angelika Film Center—where VIP influencers and fans entered an immersive, in-world experience resembling an outpost for the show’s revolutionary militia group, the Fireflies. Read up on all the creepy details here.

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