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Quick poll: what does your face do when someone calls you an event planner? (Or worse, the dreaded “party planner.”) Mine does a whole thing.
First, a shout-out to the actual event planners. A party is an event. A wedding is an event. Making sure the food lands, the band shows up and the seating chart survives the cousins? That’s event planning, and it’s hard. Hat tip. Kudos.
That is not what we do.
WE ARE ARCHITECTS OF AWE
We are m*ther-f*cking experiential architects. We transform how people see the world. We make them laugh. We make them cry. We give them goosebumps and moments they never forget. When’s the last time a banner ad did that? A terrible insurance commercial? A billboard on the BQE? Or even an after-work cocktail party? That’s what I thought.
We start with the feeling: how we want people to feel when they walk in, and who we want them to be when they walk out. We build backward from there. And then we do the hardest thing there is: We do it live.
WE CAN’T FIX IT IN POST
The stakes are ridiculous. We’re in an epic battle with the two things nobody controls: a date on the calendar and Mother Nature. TIME and WEATHER. Then we need a whole lot of humans to show up and do exactly what we need them to do, at exactly the right second, so the magic actually happens.
Live is the hardest place in the world to be perfect. Just ask the grass people at Bad Bunny’s halftime show. Or Yung Lean and GENER8ION, who turned their “STORM II” video into a live performance at the VMAs: rows of dancers in British boarding-school uniforms moving in hypnotic sync (choreography by Damien Jalet), with Yung Lean standing in the middle of it all, eating an ice cream cone. (Lots of humans. Zero do-overs.)
But when it works, it changes people. And it stays with them forever.
WHAT WE ACTUALLY DO
We span sports and music and theater and culture and culinary and fashion and beauty and tech. Sometimes the event is the product, and we’re telling a story live. Sometimes the event is in service of another product, and our job is to change what people think about a brand (or finally get them to understand it).
Either way, the thinking that goes into the why, the who, the what, the where, the when and how the eff we’re going to pull it all off… that’s experiential.
And all of it gets built in layers. There’s a physical layer we build like a set. There’s a tech layer, and in my opinion the best technology is invisible. There’s the live layer: the humans who make it all feel seamless and intuitive and flawless, the performers and, in my favorite moments, the audience, who get pulled right into the act. And then there’s the amplification layer, which brings people into the story the moment the invitation lands or the ad shows up in their feed, and keeps the good times rolling long after they go home. The end of the event is just the beginning of the content, if you do it right.
SO, PLEASE STOP CALLING YOURSELF AN EXPERIENTIAL MARKETER
Now my new challenge, and this one’s for my people. If you work in this discipline, please stop calling yourself an experiential marketer. You are experiential. We are experiential.
Even if you sit inside advertising or marketing, take note. Cannes Lions had never had an Experiential Lion. Thanks to the work a lot of us have been doing for the last few years (huge thanks to Jimmy Knowles and Shelley Elkins, among many others), now it does. And look at the name. They didn’t call it the Experiential Marketing Lion. They called it the EXPERIENTIAL LION. So please.
There’s a $3.2 trillion experience economy out there and an entire industry of us building it, across every category. We’re here to learn from each other, get inspired by each other, collaborate with each other and commercialize with each other.
So, magic makers, goosebump creators, architects of awe, say it with me: WE ARE EXPERIENTIAL. We are residents of XP Land. And you really should come join us.
If you’re a senior leader doing this work, come pull up a chair in the XP Council, our private membership for experiential leaders. We swap notes, share ideas (and give credit) and figure out what’s next, together. Your seat is waiting.
