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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In the metaverse marketing space, first-mover Absolut has seen value in experimenting with Web3 activations, despite some marketers’ mixed feelings about investing such experiences. In an article for PRNEWS, VP of Marketing Matt Foley discusses the brand’s metaverse strategy, approach to measurement and the company’s plans for the future

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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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TurboTax is perceived by most consumers as a do-it-yourself tax service, while its live full-service product, which enlists experts to assist users with doing their taxes, is less familiar to the public. Associating TurboTax with the latter is the brand’s primary marketing focus this year, and it’s amplifying that message through campaigns timed to tentpole events during tax season, including the Super Bowl and, most recently, the NCAA March Madness tournaments.

For new filers who are also student athletes—some of whom profited off of the NCAA’s updated “Name, Image and Likeness” policy—the brand has a new pitch. “This is the first full year that student athletes can make money off of their name, image and likeness,” Cathleen Ryan, SVP of Marketing at Intuit TurboTax, told Chief Marketer this week. “It’s a new reality for them. It just didn’t exist before.”

“Some of them are making a whole lot of money, and some of them are making a few hundred dollars here and there,” she added. “But either way, those NIL deals create tax implications. And it’s not just for the students. In many cases, the parents need to rethink their tax strategy as well.” Following is our conversation with Ryan about TurboTax’s March Madness campaign, how the brand is reaching Gen Z audiences on colleges campuses and through social media, new market opportunities, and more.

Chief Marketer: How is the messaging of the NCAA campaign different from previous years?

Cathleen Ryan, SVP of Marketing, Intuit TurboTax: We’ve been an advertiser in and around March Madness for years, but this is the first time we’re taking a collective approach to college athletes and students, inclusive of the NCAA partnership. But much beyond that, we’re going bigger with activating in new spaces, specifically where Gen Z and college students are natively, both physically and digitally.

Our entire program is rooted in education and empowering young adults who are just figuring out how to do life on their own, and providing them with the tools and resources they need to file their taxes with confidence, and know that they’re getting every possible dollar they deserve on their return. The NCAA sponsorship is a part of that, but we have college ambassador programs, a really big activation, and working with Influencer the platform that supports young student athletes.

CM: How are you incorporating the NCAA’s Name, Image, Likeness policy? That’s new for you, right?

CR: This is the first full year that student athletes can make money off of their name, image and likeness. Some of them are making a whole lot of money, and some of them are making a few hundred dollars here and there. But either way, those NIL deals create tax implications. And not just for the students, but for the parents. The big reason we’re so active in this space is that they need to be educated on what it means for their taxes and where to get help. And in many cases the parents need to rethink their tax strategy as well.

Student athletes are especially busy, given classes, practices and games. The last thing they want to talk or think about is doing their taxes. For us, it’s all about bringing help and resources directly to them, whether that’s on campus, working in partnership with the NCAA or with influencers. And then we have five or so individual university relationships where we’re reaching out through athletic departments, through student groups, et cetera, to ensure that the help and support is there. NIL is a new reality for student athletes. It just didn’t exist before. We want to make sure that they have the education and tools available to them so they’re not surprised at tax time.

 

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CM: Beyond the messaging of this campaign, what are the strategic marketing goals?

CR: We are looking to market full funnel through this effort, so everything from awareness, consideration, trial and purchase, ideally. We’ve experimented with a number of on-campus activations where students and student athletes can engage with our tax experts, ask questions and get expert answers. We’re providing a ton of content and resources for NIL athletes who need to do things like estimate their expenses, learn how to track expenses, things like that. It’s both awareness and consideration, but also engagement and education.

CM: Beyond this campaign, what are the other ways are you marketing to Gen Z?

CR: In addition to the NIL and influencer campaigns, we’re very active in the media channels and spaces with high Gen Z concentration. So, lots of TikTok, Twitter and social media in general. Media consumption has changed, so there’s streaming, OTT, Netflix. We were one of the first partners to sign on with Netflix ad-supported. We’re thinking about all the places and spaces where Gen Z spends their time, and where we can have a conversation, engage and hopefully entertain, too.

CM: In your research, have you noticed anything different about how younger consumers approach finance and taxes today?

CR: We have done some unique research around Gen Z—and they’re even less likely to want to talk about money and finances than previous generations. Unfortunately, it’s just a part of our culture. But where we can really make a difference is allowing people access to experts and tools, where they can find answers that they’re maybe not comfortable getting from friends or family.

One of the interesting things that we’ve seen with Gen Z in particular is a new way of working and living your life that is different than previous generations. You see a lot of side hustles or side jobs, and an entrepreneurial spirit. And that has tax implications. So it’s important for us, as TurboTax, to ensure that this generation understands the opportunities in and the implications of how they’re making a living, which does look materially different than previous generations.

CM: Where are you looking for growth and new markets this year?

CR: Ultimately, we want people to understand that TurboTax has a full suite of offerings. We have calcified brand perceptions of TurboTax as a DIY software product. But the reality is we are so much more than that. We have a growing full service business, where in a few easy clicks you can share your documents with a tax expert and they will prepare and file your return for you. We have an assisted product where you prepare your taxes with the help of an expert and it even includes a final review of your return, if you want that extra level of confidence before you hit the file button.

When you think about who that applies to, it applies to everyone. There is a huge opportunity, certainly for new-to-the-category filers such as student athletes, but also people that are overpaying a legacy tax pro who maybe doesn’t have the breadth of experience that TurboTax has. As an example, we prepare hundreds of thousands of returns with crypto expenses, gains and losses in them every year. Your local person down the street maybe has seen one of those. We’ve seen it all, and the expertise that comes with that ensures you get your best outcome. That’s the piece that we’re trying to get out in market this year: Come to TurboTax and don’t do your taxes. Let one of our experts do them for you. We are so much more than DIY and have been for years, but we need to get that message out there.

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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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The results of Chief Marketer’s latest Pulse survey on staffing are in: Twenty-seven percent of marketing departments surveyed were impacted by recent layoffs. And the areas of marketing that experienced the most cuts were events, followed by data and analytics. Here’s our infographic featuring the results of the survey. And look out for our next survey topic—AI in marketing—arriving in your inboxes next week.

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