Ever wonder what it would feel like to attempt the game-deciding free throw with 80,000 cheering fans (and millions more at home) causing the floor to shake and your heart to pound?
Or maybe you dream about what you’d ask a world-renowned brewmaster from your favorite iconic beer company if you had the opportunity to chat one-on-one with them?
By enhancing these in-person experiences with digital technology, we were able to make these dreams and more a reality, creating immersive environments that put consumers right in the middle of the action.
Experiential marketing creates a special buzz at events because of its unique ability to create a personal, emotional connection between a brand and a consumer. When done right, an experiential activation immerses consumers in a unique brand story without directly selling a product or service. Marketers able to leverage an experience and inspire consumers to share it are rewarded with brand enthusiasts and more overall brand awareness.
Combining engaging physical environments with advanced camera technology, IoT biometric devices, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and more, our team has helped create experiential activations that forged incredibly strong emotional connections between the brand and their customers. For example:
Giving Passionate Fans an Unforgettable Immersive Experience
Working with one of the nation’s largest cellular networks, we gave fans a taste of the pressure college basketball athletes feel when they’re taking a last-second shot in front of thousands of cheering fans. With a custom-built room, 10-second shot clock, and audio, visual, and haptic disruptions to fans’ free-throw attempts, we used a heart-rate monitor and multiple cameras to record the action. Our team developed a custom framework to integrate real-time heart-rate statistics and automate camera assets and wrote a program to package the footage for immediate social sharing.
With only 22% of participants able to overcome the pressure, we brought the highly memorable challenge of a high-stakes free throw into fans’ realm of comprehension, creating a greater connection to the players, the game, and — most importantly — our client.
Bridging the Gap Between Brewers and Beer Lovers
Our client, one of the oldest and largest beer producers in the world, wanted to create a one-of-a-kind experience to better connect its brewers with its customers. Working with our strategic marketing partners, our teams developed and constructed a custom, branded phone booth and installed it on a heavily trafficked Chicago sidewalk. We created a web-based app — featuring UX and visual designs that honored our client’s historic brand elements — that allowed a passerby to speak face-to-face with one of the company’s overseas brewmasters. It a unique and memorable experience to talk with the world’s top brewmasters, and consumers felt more personally connected to the beer brand than ever.
Helping Football Fans Escape the Ordinary Tailgate Experience
Between the set-up, the food, and the tech, tailgating gets more intense every football season. With that in mind, our client wanted to create a completely unique memory for tailgaters. Using a shipping container, we created a custom escape room designed to look like a classic sports-themed man cave, full of wood paneling and old-school knickknacks.
Event attendees went into the escape room and foraged for clues that would get them out of the room before the buzzer went off. Integrating with IoT, VR, and AR, we crafted a unique brand story into the overall experience, educating consumers about the company, but more importantly, creating several share-worthy brand interactions.
Photo by Luis Salazar on Unsplash
