How AI is bringing performance marketing to experiential strategies

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being incorporated into events, with sports championships such as the Masters and brands including Michael Kors utilizing the technology in experiences, and it's creating opportunities to make experiential campaigns more than exercises in brand building into drivers of performance marketing. “The experiential industry has never been great in strategy,” said Geoff Renaud, chief marketing officer and co-founder of ad agency Invisible North. “So much of it is focused on brand building and earned media. A lot of the people in experiential are coming from less of a strategic marketing background and more of a physical production background. It’s lagged behind some of the other areas where there's much more tangible evidence of conversion, customer acquisition; that sort of thing.” Recent news: Top 5 AI marketing activations Invisible North and other ad agencies are starting to collect on-site visitor data and track eventgoers' sentiment using facial recognition and brainwave tracking technologies in clients’ experiential campaigns in ways that never existed before, allowing marketers to use in-person experiences for much more than splashy brand awareness plays. All of the technology that’s going to be critical in taking these campaigns to a performance level is not ready to be implemented just yet, but Renaud said tech giants including Adobe and Autodesk are starting to develop the tools. AI marketing blog How brands are using ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 and other tools Read more here “That'll help expedite better results,” Renaud said. “It is still so early when it comes to how AI will be used at live events. While we can see a future where festival-goers walk into a Bacardi activation at Coachella and get pinged with personalized drink recommendations, the platforms needed for a seamless execution like that aren't ready yet but the applications are being built now.” More news: Autodesk's CMO on brand building How advertisers are using AI to enhance experiences Some brands and agencies are beginning to use AI to collect data on eventgoers and track their sentiment toward activations to enhance experiences in real time and better understand their visitors. Ad agency Technology, Humans And Taste has used AI to get a deeper understanding of how people engage with experiences for brands including Walmart and Sam's Club, Mattel and Michael Kors, said co-founder Nathan Phillips. For Michael Kors, Technology, Humans And Taste designed its “Walkbox” Shanghai activation that made guests the stars of their own brand fashion film by using a 50-foot LED-lined walkway shot with three cameras and featuring an AI editor that created more than 300 fully-finished films in one evening. Creating those films without AI would have required a large team of editors. The films generated millions of engagements across socials from celebrity and influencer posts. “With AI, we aren't limited to measuring throughput, views or ticket sales,” Phillips said. “We challenge ourselves to craft an ROE (return on experience) for anything we create. This metric or series of metrics aims to better understand the emotional and marketing value of an intelligent experience. And unlike more traditional experiences, we always make adjustments as both the machine and our team learn more about how humans interact.” Creative tech and experience design shop Deeplocal, which has created experiences for clients ranging from Google to psychedelic rock band The Flaming Lips (frontman Wayne Coyne is actually an experience designer at the agency), uses its SaaS platform, Gumband, to collect data on event visitors and evaluate which experiences people are engaging with most. For one of Deeplocal’s retail clients, Gumband collected and analyzed data from in-store pop-ups and then passed that data onto corporate to be aggregated with other retail data including foot traffic and sales. The agency said currently the data can only be captured once a guest starts to interact with an activation but it’s working on expanding capabilities to include insights from onlookers, as well as which exhibits attract crowds and which people are ignoring. Deeplocal expects to release its latest product to use in experiential marketing in June: A cameraless sensor that can gain these types of insights in real-time. All of the data being collected by Gumband is anonymous in order to protect people’s privacy and stay compliant with GDPR and CCPA regulations. More on agencies: How PR agencies are using AI Tracking technology has recently gotten some flack for seeming to infringe on people’s rights. MSG Entertainment, the owner of New York’s Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall, was criticized when it was reported late last year that it was using facial recognition technology to identify and turn away lawyers who represent people suing the company. Deeplocal Creative Technologist and Chief Innovation Officer Patrick Miller said all of the data Gumband collects is for the purpose of enhancing the experience for the brand and visitors; the agency is careful not to infringe on people’s privacy while doing so. He said Gumband never collects information on specific individuals; it won’t say: “Oh that's Patrick Miller and we know everything that he's looked at today; we can sell more stuff to him.” “We have to be willing participants of it otherwise it quickly crosses the line to creepy,” Miller said. “People want their privacy so there needs to be some value exchange. If I'm at an event and the event wants to know who I am, the experience that's being created should be much more valuable to me as a user going through the experience.” IBM has been experimenting with AI for years but recently found particular success using it within sports and entertainment. “There's just a number of different things that we've done really over the last 10 years in this space and it's just getting more refined and becoming more open and more visible,” said IBM’s Erin McElroy, program director, executive programs and event experience, noting that AI is a great tool for providing highlights and broadcasting to sporting events across all the channels where viewers are tuning in to watch including via apps. For example, IBM leveraged AI in a few new ways for the Masters, one of four major professional men’s golf championships, earlier this year. IBM has been providing tech and services to The Masters for 25 years, but this year was the first it used AI-generated commentary on the tournament within the Masters app. Noah Syken, VP of sports and entertainment partnerships at IBM, said the AI-powered commentary “produced detailed golf narration for more than 20,000 video clips by using large language models like the ones that power ChatGPT.” Syken said using AI in this way allowed IBM and the Masters to “offer unparalleled access and in-depth insights into every moment of the tournament.” IBM has also partnered with ESPN Fantasy Football to create AI models that make fantasy football data more predictive. And it used AI to help monitor the Wimbledon Championships, another longtime partner of the tech company, to ensure the safety and security of the in-person tennis tournament. Read about IBM's ‘What if?’ campaign Experiential in IRL and virtual worlds Renaud said Invisible North has started using AI tools to help develop renderings of physical environments for the creation of virtual worlds. The agency recently invested in Atlas, a 3D metaverse building platform for virtual environments “because we believe so greatly in the convergence of the physical and digital,” he said. Invisible North is also looking to hire solutions architects and other talent who will experiment with using new AI tools for clients. More news: How agencies' AI practices are working with clients The blending of virtual and physical worlds is everywhere now and AI can help in creating more seamless and cost-efficient experiences, Renaud said. Renaud pointed to Jacquemus' recent marketing stunt in which it sent 3D renderings of giant car-like versions of its purses down the streets of Paris. (Invisible North did not create the stunt.) He said if the brand really created those purse-like cars and sent them down Parisian streets, it would be a seven-figure expense. “I don't know the budget on that, but it's quarters of the magnitude less,” Renaud said. Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival recently wrapped up its back-to-back weekend extravaganza in April, as well as its “Coachella Island” virtual experience that existed alongside the physical event. “Coachella Island” was done in partnership with Fortnite, presenting a metaverse desert experience with dance competitions, art installations and music soundtracked by Porter Robinson, a DJ who also played the festival. “There were a lot of homages to Coachella,” Sam Schoonover, Coachella’s innovation lead, said. “What we don't want to do is try to recreate the live music experience. Instead, we want to give fans something that feels completely new and really stick to the pillars of what makes Coachella so great, which is being a platform for creatives and artists.” Schoonover said the metaverse world was successful in attracting more international audiences and younger people who are not the core festival goers. “We unfortunately can't share the numbers but we have had a lot of interaction from all around the world, in the millions of people who have attended ‘Coachella Island,’” he said. More festival news: Creators pretend to be at Coachella Deeplocal’s Miller noted that while AI is new and exciting, advertisers should beware of overusing it. He said AI is one of many tools Deeplocal is using to enhance experiences for clients and it’s only used when it can actually be helpful to drive results for a campaign. Miller said advertisers shouldn’t use AI for the sake of using AI otherwise it risks being gimmicky and losing its luster. “When it’s so popular, so top of mind, it's tempting for a lot of experienced creators to rely on it too much,” he said. “But that's going to get old really quickly. The bar continues to be increased on what is remarkable for people. We have to keep making things that are really magical for people. That's our job as experience creators.” See all of Ad Age's 2023 Creativity Award winners here

How AI is bringing performance marketing to experiential strategies

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