Are You Experiential?

Flashing colored lights, rising Celtic music and a row of pounding feet belonging to an Irish dance troupe lift the audience from its seats. The beat is explosive, mesmerizing and universal. Viewers are riveted.

Suddenly, a surprise shoots audience response through the roof. Two C-level executives emerge from backstage and attempt to keep up with the aerobic activity. The audience explodes in laughter and shouts their approval once they see the familiar faces. After all, who wouldn't enjoy seeing the guys who hold sway over their paychecks subjected to the "Riverdance" treatment for their amusement?

This is a business meeting? Well, yes, and the opening message is, "We've merged brands and we're working together for the common good." The messaging moves on once the dancing is done, and nobody's attention is anywhere but on the execs who deliver the words.

On another event set, public affairs TV show host John McLaughlin holds the audience in his trademark steely control as he engages senior executives about issues of interest to their employees. Sensitive topics, such as outsourcing and compensation, dominate the incisive and animated chatter. Everyone in the audience is mesmerized, especially when McLaughlin demands his answers.

Welcome to the brave new world of experiential marketing for meetings, sometimes referred to as business theater. It's the entertaining and attention-getting way to motivate and message attendees. Organizations that are enlightened about the packaging—notably tech, automotive and pharmaceutical groups—are well into the genre, and now others are eyeing it because it's a technique that gets results.


Why Business Theater?

For the same reasons tour and auto companies partner to deliver the ultimate travel experience that has buyers steering a red Ferrari on winding Italian roadways, users create a meetings experience that appeals to all of the senses.

American Idol draws in 63 million viewers to elect its latest star, thus garnering participation and loyalty. Hotels do theater, too. Las Vegas' Luxor Hotel Casino engages guests from the moment they walk into the lobby with glitzy Egyptian color and design. By the time they recline in their bedchambers, with their slanting walls, guests feel as if they are sleeping inside a pyramid.

Those who seek to create a memorable and effective arrival-to-exit experience at meetings and trade shows are responding to what they know: Event sponsors and organizers must work hard to capture the attention of their intended message recipients.

"We are living amid the most time-impoverished and attention span-battered business culture in history," opines Charles W. Allen, president of The CW Allen Group in Birmingham, Ala., an exhibition and meetings communication consultancy. "Each of us is bombarded daily with 5,000 conscious and unconscious promotional messages from all directions. We get unwanted junk paper mail and spam e-mail, billboard messages, messages on our writing pens, and alligators and horses on our shirts—it's coming from everywhere. But it matters not how wonderful your features and benefits are if nobody hears what you are saying or notices your message."

The new objective with meetings, say Allen and other experts, is to cut through the clutter. Seize and captivate the elusive attention span of those whom you are trying to reach. The directive is to deliver a positive and memorable audience recollection about an experience with your product, service or brand. Hollywood and its entertainment industry allies have been doing it for years, and for better or worse, have shaped the way people receive the message at hand.

Cyril "CB" Wismar, vice president of event marketing for Minneapolis-based Carlson Worldwide, says the attendee must be the focus of the experiential marketing campaign.

"For the past 30 years, there has been focus on top-down control command," Wismar says. "The boss gets up and talks, calls for a little discussion, then everyone goes into smaller groups to talk. Later they go out to eat, maybe get drunk, then go home. The individual attendee has basically been ignored and told what they need to hear. I say it's about time we reversed the model. The individual has great expectations, pain points and issues they want to discuss. If the meeting planner and meeting sponsor are not listening to the attendee, they will not create a meeting people will want to attend."

Jen Swidler, vice president of creative development for New York-based Jack Morton Worldwide, a global experiential communications agency, says planners must acknowledge the experience-driven society of today if they want to message attendees effectively. And that applies particularly to younger audiences, she says.

"You can't go into a store, entertainment venue or vacation environment these days without being submerged in an experience on some level," Swidler says. "So we can't expect people who are constantly connected to their cell phones, Blackberries and laptops to be taken out of the sales field, away from their families and into a classroom-style meeting to pay full attention. The day of the straight keynote speech is pretty much gone. You have to package, brand and make sure everyone buys into that."


Think EPIC

But the content often must work for more than one age group.

Leonard Sweet, a futurist and professor of theology at New Jersey's Drew University, puts a label on what works in today's culture.

"The digital/Internet culture is producing a new way of knowing reality that I call EPIC, an acronym for Experiential, Participatory, Image-rich, and Connective," he says. "The shift is going from rational—written speeches and logical thought—to experiential."

The world comes in two flavors in the EPIC realm, Sweet says.

"Those born before 1962 are immigrants in this new world and 'modern,'" Sweet explains. "They were taught to write speeches and stick to the confines of logical thought. The imagination is to be kept in check by reason. People born after 1962 are natives of this new world—'post-moderns,'" he maintains. "So you have people from both rational and experiential traditions."

The big challenge, he says, is in integrating the two traditions.


Bridging the Demographic Divide

"You'll almost never have a perfect and homogenous demographic environment," Swidler says. "With a mature, seasoned audience, creative may look different than it does for a hip, young sales audience. A significant part of what the event designer must do is understand the audience."

An audience can be divided to take in varying experiences to achieve the same objectives, says Christopher Greenslade, director of marketing and business development for Planning the Globe, a Charleston, S.C.-based global meeting and event production company.

"We've sometimes split a group into a younger group, five-year people and the senior sales force because it was very important for different needs to be met," Greenslade says. "The youngest ones wanted off-road car riding in BMWs to see if they could handle it. Those in their 30s wanted to go for a climbing wall, and the older guys wanted to return to their youth with an indoor basketball game and surround-sound music blasting a soundtrack straight from the NBA finals. There are different ways to instill excitement among employees and potential customers."

One interesting program Greenslade recently held utilized the "secret" Cold War-era bunker at White Sulphur Springs, W.Va.'s The Greenbrier.

Completed in 1962, the 112,544-square-foot facility once included dormitories, a security and communications area, VIP lounges, a medical clinic, a cafeteria, decontamination chambers, and a conference room where the House and Senate could conduct affairs of state, following, say, a nuclear war.

After being outed by an investigative reporter in 1993, the bunker basically was out of commission—apart from tours now and then—until recently, when it was reopened to the public as a museum and a unique event space. Planning the Globe utilized a Mission Impossible theme for the inaugural event there, a BB&T bank function held last April.

"Obviously, building around the Mission Impossible theme, there were teasers that went out alluding that it was going to be some sort of espionage deal," Greenslade says. "When people arrived we arranged for a private check-in, and once they were given their room keys they were taken out to a 'CIA' table where each couple was given a dossier with specific instructions, and they were then ushered into another area where they were given disguises based on the dossier, and told where to meet later on for the evening."

But the surprises didn't end there.

Since the bank gives attendees a special Tiffany-designed pin that includes a diamond for each year they attend the event, the guests were informed when they checked in that they were to meet in the lobby of the hotel to be bused to an off-site location for the evening. The CEO then made an announcement that the pins had been stolen, and everyone had to go to an interrogation room to answer questions.

"There were 'CIA' operatives there in black suits, and then the attendees were taken in groups of 40 up the stairs, where there were living martini bars," Greenslade remembers. "Then they were called in groups of 40 into a room, which was dark with flat LCD screens, in which they were blasted with CO2 gas like they were being decontaminated, and then the doors opened for them to go into the bunker, into a super high-tech environment."

Carlson Worldwide's Wismar agrees that the key to effective experiential events is participation, and that it works with any demographic.

"I can't think of a better way to engage any generation than participation," he says. "It's like you want to cast your personal vote for American Idol. You don't want to be passive. I have yet to see a group who are approaching AARP status that doesn't want to be more like Generation Y. So if you lean toward the hip, energized sector of the group, you'll usually hit a home run."


Selling Your Idea

Bridging generation gaps within experiential event audiences isn't the only common challenge in pulling off an interactive event, according to the experts.

"Meeting planners are often in a confrontational position with upper management," Wismar says. "The intended audience tells them they want something other than what they have always done before, so it's a class-action against the opposition—often the marketing vice president. So I say to planners, get some allies. Poll your people and show the results to the decision-makers."

Greenslade says it might help to remind management of retention problems and challenges in attracting top talent.

"Event designers should be the first names on a company's marketing budget list," he says. "The biggest drain on a company's bottom line is employee retention, so if they can go beyond the standard stuff to show the employee that he is valued, they will shine. The event designer's job is to take the objectives—the canvas—and paint the picture."