The just-wrapped Experiential Marketing Summit gathered more than 1,000 members of the event marketing community in Las Vegas last week to share insights, marketing tactics and community-building strategies amid a post-pandemic climate. Event Marketer has the story.

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Bringing to life an experience based on the iconic IP from the classic film “Grease” had to be authentic first and foremost. Event Marketer explores how Paramount+ and media partner POPSUGAR marketed the streamer’s original musical series, “Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies,” by expertly striking the balance between catering to superfans and newcomers to the iconic franchise.

The post How Paramount+ Recreated the Frosty Palace Diner From ‘Grease’ to Promote Its New Series appeared first on Chief Marketer.

The nation’s fastest-growing sport—pickleball—has attracted a growing number of brand sponsorships of late at tournaments, tours and festivals across the country. If you foresee your brand getting involved, check out these tips from Event Marketer on how to engage a crowd of “picklers”—from keeping it active to hosting standalone events to pickling with purpose.

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The Nutrabolt-owned C4 Smart Energy drink rebranded this week, armed with six new flavors, revamped packaging and an updated formula with new ingredients—including a plant-based caffeine source and citicoline, a supplement that promotes focus and attention—all to support its move into the “functional” energy drink category and brand repositioning as the “fuel” to achieve greatness.

The launch kicked off with a brand experience for attendees and Austin residents at SXSW 2023 last month, which highlighted its “4 Moments Of” campaign and drove a sampling effort across the city. The latter was, and continues to be, an important part of the campaign, according to Robert Zajac, Chief Marketing Officer at Nutrabolt. And with SXSW being an engine for creative minds, it made sense to start there.

We talked through the launch strategy with Zajic, who joined the company in late 2022, as well as his overall growth strategy for Nutrabolt’s brands; the importance of establishing “clarity of proposition” within that process; lessons learned from previous roles at Abercrombie & Fitch, ESPN and Nike; how experiential factors into his growth strategy; and his approach to working with influencers and talent.

CM: How are you getting the message of the C4 Energy rebrand out there to consumers?

Robert Zajac, Chief Marketing Officer at Nutrabolt: It all kicked off at South By. We have a multi-year partnership to be the official energy drink partner of the festival, and we thought there’s no better place than South By to launch this. It’s the home of this consumer, this mindset. South By exists to help creatives accomplish their goals.

We sampled over a hundred thousand cans around Austin and created an experience that brought all of that creative energy of South By together into one place, and then we fueled it with the product. A lot of the UGC that was created as part of the Smart House experience is going to become an out-of-home takeover in Austin. It’s just people—the faces of consumers that came by [the activation].

CM: What’s entailed in the broader campaign?

RZ: In the next couple months, there’ll be a broader campaign push that’s focused on a new messaging platform that we created with Wilco Agency that’s about staying focused on the moments that matter most—the idea of fueling your good to make you great. It gets unlocked through these smaller moments. We have short films featuring real people: a cutting-edge chef, a young designer, an Austin-based band about to break through, a powerhouse working mother.

And then we’ll have product-focused communications on the benefits. We have some exciting talent partners that are coming on board. It’ll go across retail and new platforms, and we also have a new LinkedIn strategy. If you’re going to fuel the next generation of creators, entrepreneurs, dreamers, doers and achievers, that’s a great place to do it.

CM: What is your overall strategy for growth for the brands that you oversee, which also includes Cellucor and Xtend?

RZ: The first part is clarity of proposition. So, clarity of message, clarity of brand, and evolving our overall mindset to be brand-driven and consumer-led. That sounds very basic, but we have gone through a bit of a reset, from our industry segmentation to in-depth interviews and qualitative studies to resetting how we track our brands, our KPIs and the return on those investments, to implementing a commercial mix modeling system. We’ve reset the table when it comes to how we want to approach data, insights and inputs, and how we separate out the different products and make sure that they’re targeted all the way through from the internal decks through consumer communications and execution.

CM: And this will be applied to all the brands?

RZ: Smart Energy is the first example of that. Some of the first work we did when I got here was asking, what is this product really about? Who is this product for? Why are we doing what we’re doing? And all of that led to South by Southwest as the perfect place to do it.

We’re doing that across all the brands in the portfolio. At the end of the day, we’re still a company in hyper-growth mode. We just need scale. We need people to understand what our products are, what our propositions are.

The other big piece is building out the right infrastructure, teams and processes, and then creating a more commercially-minded brand and marketing organization. You’re pushing the big ideas and you’re creating energy with one hand, and you’re measuring those ideas and sitting on the side of the commercial team with the other hand, in a way where they’re both working together.

CM: Previously, you worked at Abercrombie & Fitch, ESPN and Nike. What marketing lessons did you take from those roles?

RZ: They’re very different companies, but one thing that holds them together is that winning is a team sport. That’s obviously rooted in a sports mentality, but even at Abercrombie, teaming up was port-of-call in almost every meeting. If everybody wants to win, and everybody knows what winning looks like, it does so many amazing things. It checks your egos at the door, and it genuinely opens up discussion and collaboration. There’s a lot of simplicity in that. It builds stronger teams.

The other piece that’s followed me through is the notion that at the end of the day, ideas win. When we’re trying to drive a business, a channel, a retail partner or a new marketplace… there’s a genuine desire to embrace them and take calculated risks, and then watch them pay off and learn from them.

CM: How important is experiential marketing to your growth strategy for Nutrabolt brands?

RZ: Getting those products out into the hands of the right consumers in the right places at the right time is a huge part our strategy. It’s bringing together our activation team, experiential team and our field marketing team. We sampled over a hundred thousand cans at South by Southwest, and we immediately saw the business impact just within the city of Austin. Once people had it and experienced it—not just the brand, but the product and the flavor and the benefit—they started to buy it. Part of our strategy moving forward… is finding partners and then activating in the right way and scaling it.

CM: You have some upcoming partnerships with talent, and you worked with dozens of artists at SXSW. Do you have a specific approach to working with influencers and talent?

RZ: A lot of our strategies on the marketing side, but also on the sales/products/operational side, stem from our corporate culture. We have an entrepreneurial spirit; we have a CEO founder, and we’ve been around for 20 years, which is not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things. There’s an internal push that says, “Hey, this was us 15-20 years ago.” So how do we, as an organization, support the next generation of people who are trying to create the next great product, band or restaurant?

That goes into our talent strategy as well. First, we want to work with people who genuinely like the product, and that goes from very big [talent] all the way to what’s next—the next talent, the next athlete, the next artist, the next musician. We want to get to a place where we can help them and they can help us. That’s how you build longstanding relationships versus just transactional. We’ve found more genuine connections when it starts before there’s a transaction, and then goes beyond that.

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adidas was a leading partner of the FIFA Men’s World Cup, but when the tournament’s final matches approached, the brand opted to highlight female athletes with a trio of 121-foot by 95-foot murals carved in sand. It unveiled the portraits on the shores of Doha in Quatar, dubbed the “Beach Club Billboard,” to highlight its commitment to equity for female athletes and remind fans there’s “another half” to the sport. Event Marketer has the story.

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A plethora of brands once again engaged attendees at the SXSW conference and festival this year, which included 10 days of content, activities and events geared toward professionals in the tech, music and film industries. And Event Marketer staffers were on the ground from March 13-18 to take in the experiential activations firsthand. Check out this photo gallery of 18 brand engagements, from AppleTV’s retro Tetris experience to Peacock’s roaming nun activation to C4 Energy’s DIY creator lab for graffiti-style streetwear.

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To launch its new collection of teas designed to inspire mindfulness and self-care, Tetley activated a multisensory pop-up last month in a not-so-peaceful place: a crowded shopping mall. Event Marketer explores how the brand created a moment of Zen amid chaos, with three monochromatic rooms, sensory elements, art installations and self-care-inspired messaging.

The post How Tetley Created a Zen-Like Pop-Up to Launch its ‘Live Tea’ Product Line appeared first on Chief Marketer.

The annual South by Southwest (SXSW) conference and festival tends to attract experiential marketing-focused brands during the “interactive” portion of the 10-day event, when the marketing and tech crowds are in attendance. But for a brand like White Claw, which was “born out of culture,” according to Vice President of Integrated Marketing and Creative, Kevin Brady, activating during the music festival portion was a no-brainer.

“We’ve always focused on social, digital and experiential. That’s how we grew up, so we continue to focus on that,” he told Chief Marketer this week. “Even though we’re a much bigger brand than when we first launched, we are still sticking true to our roots.” We caught up with Brady on the first day of the activation at SXSW on Thursday to discuss the strategy behind the White Claw’s Shore Club experiential platform, how the brand connects to culture and consumers, upcoming marketing initiatives and more.

Chief Marketer: Why did White Claw decide to activate during the music festival at SXSW?

Kevin Brady, Vice President of Integrated Marketing and Creative, White Claw: We’re really centered around the music as part of the festival. Of course, we’ll go check out the technology portion of it and see what it’s all about, but we’re really focused on the user.

White Claw was born out of culture in 2019 and 2020. Everybody was posting about us—memes, videos, showing their love. We actually launched in 2016, but 2019 was the big explosion. We were born out of culture, so now, we’re using the Shore Club as a platform to showcase culture and support culture. And that’s where you see design and music come to life. We look at our social and how we’re amplifying, whether it’s impressions and share a voice, et cetera.

CM: You were recently at Sundance. How did the activation differ?

KB: This is more music and less movies, but every festival has such a different personality. Park City is very intimate. You’ve got the winter culture and winter sports, whereas in Austin, typically it’s a little bit larger. They’re just different cultures, and it’s fun to interact with. We’re going to be at Kentucky Derby coming up and soon we’ll be at Made In America. We’ll be at Life is Beautiful and the Re:SET tour.

We’re taking the Shore Club platform and bringing it to all of these different festivals and uniting under one [idea]. It’s a lounge for our consumers to come and hang out. We unite ourselves with artists and tastemakers that are on the cutting edge of culture that’s emerging. We feel that gives us a unique perspective.

CM: When you first started, your marketing was more grassroots. How has that evolved?

KB: We’ve always focused on social, digital and experiential. That’s how we grew up, and we continue to focus on that. So even though we’re a much bigger brand than when we first launched, we are still sticking true to our roots.

CM: You also run White Claw’s internal creative studio. How do you leverage it to create campaigns?

KB: We do a lot of social and shopper marketing development. We’ve got a wonderful consumer insights team and we use research, like brand lift studies, and a mixed marketing analysis. We have brand health trackers as well as social listening to really put our ear to the ground to draw the insights that lead to compelling campaigns for consumers.

CM: What are some marketing channels and tactics that are working for you?

KB: Instagram and Stories are huge for us. We do a variety, from amplification of the experiential work that we’re doing to posting our own content to amplifying UGC. It feels like the closer we are to what the consumer cares about, the better the results are.

CM: How are you partnering with influencers? Are they all music-focused or do they span other genres?

KB: They’re in and around culture, whether it’s music or water culture. And also we’re starting to dabble in the fashion and design space as well. At Kentucky Derby, there’s a big fashion vertical there and an opportunity. It’s our third year of activating it live, and we’re looking forward to really pulling out some of the fashion aspects of it.

CM: How would you say the festival vibe differs from last year, the first in-person event in three years?

KB: Last year was the first time that everybody was connecting together again. I remember it was touch and go; we weren’t sure. So, last year there was still a little bit of trepidation. The combination of mask or no mask, and how people felt comfortable. [Now] it does feel like there’s a bit more freedom for people to connect and be together again.

Consumers are always looking for new products and innovation as well. So we’re debuting our Vodka + Soda and our vodka, which is brand new this year. That is something that delights and surprises them, and they want to engage with both the brand and our products.

The post Brands on Fire: White Claw Marketing VP on Connecting to Consumers at SXSW appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Grassroots marketing is all about getting “brand in hand, in the context that makes sense,” Mark Kirkham, SVP and CMO of PepsiCo International Beverages, told Chief Marketer this week. But in sports marketing, including the work he’s doing for Gatorade’s 5V5 international girls soccer tournament, there is the potential to create a personalized, formative experience.

“It’s about starting young, working your way up, and providing both education and opportunity along the way,” he says. “Generically, some people just think grassroots is about sampling, or the lowest-level activation. But actually, grassroots should be seen as the base on which you build your funnel. It’s the base in which you create experiences. For some consumers, it’s the first time they interact with your brand or your product. That moment of truth is really important.”

Following is our conversation with Kirkham about recent campaigns for Gatorade and 7UP; the challenges facing global marketers today; how to achieve balance between global scale and local relevance; and the intricacies of restaging an iconic brand—in this case 7UP—through its new visual identity.

Chief Marketer: What are some of the challenges you face as a global marketer specifically?

Mark Kirkham, SVP and CMO of PepsiCo International Beverages: When you work in international, your portfolio is much more diverse. So, how do you build consistent brands that are locally relevant? One of the biggest challenges any global marketer has is finding that perfect balance between globally-scaled brands and locally-relevant brands and locally-relevant culture.

A best practice is putting the consumer at the center of it, and understanding that the consumer is different. There are also our universal truths, and they are what bind brands together, particularly as you think about how we bring the brand tone, expression and ethos to life. You really need to anchor it in something that’s universal. But locally, we’ll have nuances. In the past, there was more of a top-down approach to brand building when it came to global or international. Different cultures are a bit more homogeneous [today] because we have access to learn about different cultures and category dynamics. It requires marketers to think a little bit differently.

It requires us to think about how to be truly be scalable and true to what the brand stands for, but also be authentic and relevant at a local level, whether it’s talent or situation, occasion or cultural behaviors. All of those things have to come into play. You have to be comfortable with the fact that a truly global consumer isn’t one consumer. It’s actually lots of different consumers with a shared belief, a shared need, and ultimately being served by great global brands.

CM: Let’s talk about your Gatorade soccer initiative, 5V5. In 2022, the tournament for 14- to 16-year-olds was tied to the UEFA Women’s Champions League and was all-women for the first time. What was the strategy behind that choice?

MK: It’s been 26 years since Gatorade featured a female soccer player, in a Gatorade ad in 1997 featuring Mia Hamm in a Michael Jordan spot in the U.S. This was way before the momentum that came out of the World Cup in the U.S. around the women’s game. Gatorade was built in the U.S. and has expanded internationally over the last 20 or so years. The sport may be different, but the brand is the same. The focus on athletes is the same. But some of the things the U.S. may have done domestically have become more authentic to the world of sport and the world of brands.

And that is the women’s game. Gatorade 5V5 is an example. Gatorade outside the U.S. has been very focused on soccer for decades, as has been the case with Pepsi and others, because globally soccer is one of the biggest sports in the world, if not the biggest. The success of the U.S. women’s team and the investment being made in women’s football and women’s sports internationally has created this opportunity for brands to celebrate that.

The 5V5 program started out as a male-only program in many markets, but we have taken it to a whole different level. We’ve anchored it in our Champions League partnership, which also includes the Women’s Champions League. The last time we had a large-scale event pre-Covid, we had over 250 kids go to the UCL final and 56,000 kids involved in the program. And half of them were women’s teams. With 5V5, we extend our grassroots football programming and our passion for sport and ensure that we’re reinforcing that it’s an equal game.

CM: What are the other aspects of the campaign that surround the 5V5 tournament itself?

MK: The thing about 5V5, and any grassroots sport program, is that you’re going to have to reach consumers differently. We do a lot with social, particularly now with TikTok, and other platforms like Facebook prior to that. We recruit the players through general messaging, but we also leverage a lot of our sponsored athletes as well as the club partnerships we have. We are using talent and partnerships not just for traditional sponsorship and awareness, but actually recruitment, almost as ambassadors to get people involved in sport. And that’s something we’ve done for years. Brands that play in this space have to use talented athletes not just as ambassadors, but also as advocates and influencers to get people active into sport.

CM: How are you defining a grassroots marketing campaign? Do you have any best practices?

MK: Grassroots as a generic word is all about getting brand in hand, and in the context where it makes sense. So whether you’re sampling potato chips or soft drinks, or actually in our case Gatorade, trying to bring the benefits of a Gatorade for hydration and athletic performance onto a pitch or a sideline, the base principle is you’ve got to find a way to authentically and relevantly put your product into their hands. When you think about formative experience in sport, it’s a very different thing. It’s about starting young, working your way up, and providing both education and opportunity along the way. So for marketers thinking about grassroots, generically some people just think it’s about sampling, or the lowest-level activation.

But actually, grassroots should be seen as the base on which you build your funnel. It’s the base on which you create experiences. For some consumers, it’s the first time they interact with your brand or your product. That moment of truth is really important. And if you do it in a super authentic way, tied to something someone’s passionate about, you can actually create a fan for life. Grassroots is about branding and sampling—all of those table stakes—but it’s actually about the experience. And in sport, the experience is everything.

Grassroots is in many ways about a personal experience. It’s about a chance to try something new in some cases, but it’s also a chance for brands to reaffirm their role in a consumer’s life, or in the case of sport, it’s almost part of that formative experience, from being a young athlete to ultimately being a competitive and maybe a professional athlete in some cases.

CM: That’s a great point. Personally, my first memories of Gatorade were from when I played soccer as a kid.

MK: I’ll just build on that: I grew up in the U.S., and when I was a kid, if I didn’t show up on the pitch or on the sidelines or at practice with a Gatorade, I felt like I wasn’t like wearing my cleats, or I wasn’t prepared for the game. In other parts of the world, that behavior that was endemic to the sports drink market in the U.S. didn’t exist. So at the same time, we also have to educate people about the importance of hydration and the role that products like Gatorade play. That’s why we use the GSSI, the Gatorade Sports Science Institute. We actually bring some of our GSSI scientists and PhDs to our 5V5 program to help them understand the importance of nutrition and hydration.

So not only are they there to participate in a tournament, but they’re actually [learning] valuable lessons on young athletes. It’s different for sport; it’s all about the experience. And like you said, when you first experience certain brands at certain times in your life, it actually leaves a mark. And our goal is to leave a mark that has meaning.

CM: Switching gears a bit, let’s talk about the 7UP rebrand you just launched, which is the first in seven years.

MK: We operate 7UP in about a hundred markets around the world, and this is an iconic brand for so many people. So when you restage your brand, you’ve got to be really thoughtful. I’d go as far as to say careful. Because it’s not just about design and aesthetic and packaging. It’s about what a visual identity means to an individual and how they’ve grown up with it.

For 7UP, this was a really important moment, because brands that have stature and really rich, deep roots with their fans as well as in culture need to have certain things that stay the same—but you also need to grow and evolve. This rebrand was about upliftment, so we spent a lot of time and thought about what makes 7UP great. You can talk about product characteristics, like bubbles and amazing lemon-lime flavor, but actually it’s that feeling of, physically and emotionally, being uplifted when you have a refreshing drink.

Then we worked with our design team and took inspiration from the existing category, but also looking other categories. What are the visual cues that can take you to an uplifted place? We’ve done that through design aesthetic, through color, through broader imagery. If you look at the packaging itself, it feels more modern. It brings to life movement, upward motion and ultimately upliftment visually. But at the same time, it’s still got that iconic 7 and that red UP, which will let anyone—old or young—look at that and say, that’s their 7UP.

In our category, it’s about bringing new users in and also making the existing users feel really excited about what we’re doing with the brand. That’s at the core. The more iconic the brand, the more important it is to actually look at your consumer and understand its role in different markets—and not lose the essence.

CM: How are you communicating the rebrand to the public?

MK: We’re going to continue to leverage digital as a major channel. We’re using our visual identity to refresh the visual experience. Sometimes over time, your packaging, graphics, identity—people just get used to it, and it becomes commonplace. And the moment you bring something new and different, it actually changes perception. So, bringing that visual identity through life, through digital, through out-of-home home, through campaigns, is going to be really important. And then the tone and the manner in which that will come across. We’re going to be in over 76 markets this year with this rebrand, and that’s going to come to life in locally-relevant ways, and moments where you’re uplifted amongst friends and family.

CM: In terms of marketing trends, what are you keeping an eye on this year? What should other marketers be paying attention to?

MK: First and foremost, you should always be looking at your consumer. I would warn all of us not to get too focused on shiny objects, and this includes technologies and other trends like that. That being said, if you can see how our consumers are evolving through new technologies and new tools, you [can] make sure you’re relevant. The role of technology, the role of Web3, the role of AI—it matters. The bigger question is, what do you do with it? The role of technology is enabling more personalized relationships with consumers where they’re having an impact on your brand and guiding you on how to tell your story and how to bring them into it.

I’m not a big fan of the word metaverse, because I don’t think anyone can really tell you what it is. I am a fan of how people embracing the technology will change how brands engage consumers. So whether it’s putting your brand into a gaming environment or a ROBLOX environment or a streaming environment that’s got augmented reality, it’s the evolution of the media that we had 20, 30 years ago, but in an entirely new context. Ultimately, it’s just a new way of marketing. It gives you data and it gives you the ability to do transactions of commerce.

And I think that at the end of the day, AI can make us smarter. It can make us more creative and it can make us challenge ourselves, because data is now at the point where it can help us almost predict or respond to things that are happening in real life. And as marketers, we need to see that as just one other input into the creative process. The risk is that people see it as the creative process. You’ve seen examples of brands who have used ChatGPT to tell their own stories. It’s amazing. But what that technology can’t do is bring the emotive heart, soul and the overall purpose of a brand to life.

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Now one of the largest auto shows in the world, CES saw several automotive brands—including BMW, Caterpillar and Volkswagen—leverage gamification, augmented reality and cutting-edge lighting techniques to highlighting the future of mobility. Event Marketer has the story.

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