Lived experiences create the opportunity to feel a wide range of emotions according to psychologists. Joy, sadness, anger, fear, anxiety, shame, guilt and pride, just to name a few. We see this in any memorable experience, including live sports. And that’s not just for players and fans. It’s fair to say that many of those feelings were present earlier in 2020 when an industry ceased to exist literally overnight. That’s what happened to the sports and experiential marketing spaces as COVID reared it’s ugly head. Creating better experiences became a top priority.
No live sports means no sports marketing, right? Does that mean no live events means no experiences? Not at all!
Wasserman – who connect head and heart to meaningfully grow brands, businesses and careers for 20 years – had to evolve in real-time. Not just pivot, but truly create a new future for their business. This article is about how this back-to-back winner of 2019 and 2020 Sponsorship Marketing of Council Agency of the Year was able to survive and thrive in an entirely new world.
To discuss the next generation of experiential, the future of sports marketing and more, In Partnership With connected with Alan Palmer, Senior Vice President – Canada, and Linsey Ferguson, Vice President, Experience. They share their experiences, evolutions during COVID and optimism that have positioned experience 2.0 as an area to watch in 2021.
Live Sports Experiences Went Dark Overnight
The evening of March 11, 2020 marked the NBA postponing its season with the majority of all other professional sports league taking action the following day. An industry estimated to be worth $500 billion was paused and put on the sidelines in a matter of 24 hours leaving the brands, properties and athletes unclear of their futures and what this meant for their seasons. For Wasserman, 2020 was primed to be another banner year of growth. New clients were being on-boarded at a quick pace. Existing clients were investing in their activation and experience programs to maximize their return on existing partnerships.
Understanding where clients are committed is the first thing the Wasserman leadership team did. How could the agency help them navigate through the uncertainty? It was also a matter of working with what they now had access to in this new world.
Wasserman needed to deliver new ways for clients to achieve marketing impact on a vastly revised asset mix.
In parallel to evaluating and supporting on their client’s businesses, Wasserman needed to look inside themselves. They had to determine how to stay viable with new restrictions. Plus, there was the undeniable reality there was no clear return to fan-based events. How do you stay viable in this space? How to move forward under the new restrictions?
Thankfully, this thought process is core to Wasserman. Its purpose is “The Unrelenting Pursuit of Better” and is a real commitment. It pushes employees, communities and clients to be a little better every day. Wasserman knows that open hearts and minds help to address industry uncertainty and temporary paralyzation. Fortunately, this quickly led to the identification of some compelling opportunities for innovation.
A New Dawn for Better Experiences
Historically, experiential is always one of the last teams to join the table. More recently, experiences have become more closely associated with business impact. This makes them more defendable in the ROI mix as an important piece of an integrated approach. Sadly, some still cling to this outdated thinking:
Three Experiential Myths:
1. Experiences must be in a live, physical space
2. They must have a 1 to 1 consumer interaction
3. Experiences are simply a tactic in the marketing mix
Better experiences mean having multi-sensorial, emotional engagements, combined to create one holistic experience.
Better Experiences as a Philosophy
Wasserman believes that experiential is the best approach to foster connections with consumers. Experiential delivers via any medium to answer consumer needs.
The digital world provides an experiential opportunity to make a connection with the customer. Even today, most brands and marketers are battling for the same thing that they’ve always been – consumer attention. The winners are thinking about the entire brand experience and leveraging data effectively. Wasserman is unique in this sense. It comes from a data-driven and insight-led foundation based on 20+ years of consulting in the sports and entertainment industry.
Wasserman’s research shows that 88% of Gen Z are looking for multi-touch experiences. Marketers need to continually think about every single touch point from digital drivers to the store shelf. It continues to what consumers experience when they’re unboxing and then going online for content they’re consuming as a follow-up.
An industry that could be investing more right now to create better experiences is CPG.
We know that most consumers did some big pantry loading at the various waves of the pandemic. Many CPG companies have had some of their largest quarters ever. But now that we all have those products at home, how are we actually using them? Can we create experiences as we’re looking for things to do at home with our friends, our family, our children? Let’s start putting those products into part of an overall experience. Better experiences don’t necessarily need to be produced by the brand. Rather, they may be inspired by the brand for consumer uptake.
Guidance for Better Experiences
Everyone’s trying to figure out what’s next. To help, Wasserman launched a new thought leadership series titled Insights & Actions during the summer of 2020. This includes a chapter on the next generation of experiential. Three tips that came out of this chapter include:
Diagnose Now – Use this time to analyze current marketing campaigns and make sure they are sensitive, relevant and effective. Consumer connections during this time are critical and brand messages require the right tone and play.
Develop Next – Revisit insights to identify appropriate timings, opportunities and evolved mediums to engage or re-engage audiences with a brand experience.
Deliver Later – A brand-specific consumer connection plan to engage new and current communities with a clear view on objectives and success metrics.
From Now to What’s Next
Wasserman is starting to see a return of traditional sampling. Not in mass events, but more on a guerrilla, “hit the street” standpoint with social media augments. Labatt has launched a human vending machine where it offers a touchless experience. However, there is still physical connectivity which then gets amplified across social and then enjoys earned media pickups.
You’re not seeing brands be able to leverage the NBA or NHL playoffs for this season in arenas. However, some brands have sponsorship rights and partnerships. Brands are even invited into consumer’s homes by leveraging innovative activations. We see this with Pepsi creating a tailgate party on front lawns.
Brands are engaging fans in a unique way from a content standpoint by understanding who the fans are that should be rewarded.
While you’re not able to have fans in mass events, brands are finding ways to be able to bring events to consumers to drive efficient ROI on a cost per head standpoint.
This approach becomes very difficult to support if you look at it in a traditional, isolated sense. However, consider the total experience investment with impact measured across all mediums. It starts to become a defendable strategy.
Brands who don’t have the opportunity to bring their experiences directly to consumers are moving into the virtual world. As part of the PGA Tour restart, the RBC Heritage 2020 was hosted with no fans or traditional hospitality options. However, Wasserman got all Team RBC players to participate within the bubble to provide exclusive content that was available to RBC’s community. Getting creative to create better experiences simply isn’t an option anymore.
We’re in a Social Recession… for Now
We haven’t yet been able to connect back to the emotional connectivity of live sports that gives us so much purpose, excitement and joy. There’s a lot of longing for that. Once we can get to a place of safety, once we know without a shadow of a doubt that once we can all collect in large groups again, we will.
The way that we can come together today has a unique filter. Clearly, that new filter is on health and safety. And that’s just the way it should be until we can gather again to experience live sports that make us cheer, cry and above all, create a connection with others.
In Partnership With
Founded in 2002, Wasserman is a global sports, entertainment marketing and management company with expertise in media rights, corporate consulting, athlete management and partnerships. Alan Palmer, Senior Vice President – Canada is inspired by people with the passion to do great things and the potential that ignites when people do it together with purpose. Linsey Ferguson, Vice President, Experience, delivers on a personal mandate to drive collaboration in all areas of business to generate and sustain success.
Tim Bishop, CM is a multi-disciplined executive with a proven record of optimizing strategic efforts to expand the influence of leading organizations, such as the Canadian Marketing Association, Cineplex Entertainment, Lavalife.com, IMI International and Northstar Research Partners. In Partnership With is his latest focus to curate Canadian marketing experts to celebrate the power of strategic partnerships in a perspective-based content series.