Devouring the Event Sandwich
It was billed as a event marketing “boot camp” and a deli broke out. A deli of ideas. Event Marketer Magazine Editor and Publisher Dan Hanover launched the Event Marketer Summit by talking about the “Event Sandwich.” The idea being that the time prior to and following an event was as important as the event itself. Then he broke it down into fifteen different segments:
Embracing Scale – Find new ways to meet people.
Tactic Agnostic – Plan your sponsorship around your goals and your objectives, not just a tactic.
Reconnect – Continue the conversation.
Hyper-Target – Break up your target customer into groups. According to Dan, Xbox breaks up the 12-24 year old age group into 16 categories by genres they buy and interests.
Finding the Friction – How can the brand be the problem solver?
Episodic Planning – Making each link in the chain work together.
Digital – You can’t push someone to a generic web page and extend the life of the conversation, you need to build context.
Word of Mouth – Get to the right people and have them tell your story in their words.
Shades of Green – Everyone is trying to find ways to make their events more environmentally friendly.
Data Mining – Find out as much as you can about your customer and treat the data as an asset.
Trial Focused – Get people to try the product, don’t just hand out a bunch of paper coupons (see “Shades of Green”).
User-Generated Content – Let the user define the communication.
Conversion – Convert people into buyers.
Experience Profiling – Show the customer what they will buy and don’t show them items they won’t buy.
Schedule Slow Down – A week in four markets might be better than two days in fifteen markets.
So my thought is that mobile is the plate that serves the sandwich to the marketer and the customer. In fact, allows you to add all sorts of sides. It showed where integrating the mobile device into marketing is not a silo or a tactic but a necessity. Nothing embraces scale, is as tactically agnostic or reconnects as well post event than mobile.
Using 5th Finger’s Mobility Planning, we can build the campaign that serves a hyper-targeted audience, finds their needs and fills them and builds the chain. It struck me that our work, particularly for the movie Coraline and the LG Action tour gave context to the conversation through digital and even extended the conversation.
Want to go green? Sending invites, coupons and other items to the device totally eliminates printing. Our campaigns have built rich data bases that facilitate user generated content, convert people into buyers, get the customer to the product they want and can serve the five event or fifteen event marketing tour.
So, while I like Dan’s Event Sandwich, it can’t be executed correctly without mobile.
