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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We shared a preview of San Diego Comic-Con’s most impressive brand activations back in July—and now the full-fledged field report from CM sister pub Event Marketer has arrived. Check out how AMC, Apple TV+, HBO, Netflix and many others showed up for superfans during the first IRL Comic-Con in three years.

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Walmart has launched its first-ever innovation incubator, dubbed Blue Labs, with the goal of developing experiential technology, retail innovation and collaboration with startups. CM sister pub Event Marketer spoke with the think tank’s creator, Head of Innovation at Walmart Canada Lee Jeyes, about the unveiling at its 2022 Collision conference in Toronto, the role Blue Labs plays in Walmart Canada’s ecosystem, the brand’s broader retail strategy, and more.

Photo credit: Carlos Osorio/Collision

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In a normal year (ah, to dream of such things!), the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which attracts thousands of attendees to the Côte d’Azur each June, might draw criticism for being too much boondoggle and not enough substance.

But in 2022, after a three-year hiatus, the air of celebration pulsing through the event felt well-deserved. “It’s a very long time coming,” Julie Hogan, VP, Global Experiential & Industry Marketing at Meta told us as we toured the brand’s activation. “There’s an energy and a desire to gather. It’s very optimistic and gracious, and people are just excited to be back in the industry and learning and experiencing.”

Meta Beach, for instance, was rich in interactive touchpoints, from a Reels creator lab to a VR-driven beach-themed metaverse designed specifically for the Cannes Lions audience. The design of the layout itself leaned into open spaces for gathering. “The stage is a huge focal point,” Hogan told us. “It takes up a good portion of the beach space, and that’s very intentional to be able to create that community and bring people closer together.”

Indeed, celebration of creativity is the point, as the festival’s name indicates. But this year that vibe was reflected—to a heightened degree—in the event’s experiential strategies.

Spotify, whose oversized build occupied a sizeable portion of the beach per usual, focused less on closed-door sales meetings than in years’ prior. Designing open spaces to hold conversations and congregate together was deliberate, according to Spotify’s Keyana Kashfi, Global Senior Director, Experiential & Content Production. And signage with CTAs like “We’re Back” and “Let’s Play” reinforced the message.

Nowhere was this more evident than Spotify’s choice to beef up its entertainment—typically the guestlist to get on—during the evenings. “We doubled down on evening performances and podcast conversations… to celebrate the most creative thing on our platform, which is either podcasts or music,” Kashfi says. “How best to bring that to life than an amazing lineup?”

And then there was Pinterest Beach, whose build echoed that positivity, too. The platform brought to life its annual trend report, Pinterest Predicts, through myriad activities, from Nailscape manicures to micro tattoos to aura photography, positioning itself as both a tranquil oasis apart from the hustle and bustle of Cannes and, metaphorically, a welcome reprieve from the anxiety-inducing toxicity of the internet.

So, grab a beach chair and embark on a tour of the most engagement-rich activations we experienced on the ground, in partnership with CM sister pub Event Marketer, as the industry gathered together once again, at long last, to learn, discuss, create, experience and celebrate.

Photo credit: Luke Hayes

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After a three-year hiatus, big tech brands once again erected sprawling beach activations at the 2022 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, designed to entertain, educate and inspire advertisers, marketers and creatives attending the week-long event. One such standout was Meta, sporting a (relatively) new name, several immersive, metaverse-inspired activations, a vivid, colorfully-designed footprint and a fresh outlook as a fully experiential brand.

“We’ve had some pretty big changes over the last year,” said Julie Hogan, Meta’s VP of Global Experiential & Industry Marketing. “Our experiences make up a huge component of how we represent Meta and how we want people to engage with our products and services.”

At this year’s festival, which took place from June 20-24, those experiences included a Reels SuperStudio, a Horizon Worlds experience via Meta Quest headsets; VR-driven immersive learning; a Ray-Ban Stories demo; and, for the first time, a showcase of WhatsApp’s features for businesses. Check out what Meta Beach had to offer in Event Marketer’s festival coverage.

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True to form, Reddit’s activation at the 2022 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which ran live and in person, June 20-24, was as playful and irreverent as it was informative.

The overarching takeaway, according to Will Cady, global director at Reddit’s in-house creative house, Karma Lab, who led press on a spirited tour of the space, was that Reddit is: “The first to major cultural trends.” It boils down to this: You likely Reddit here first.

To drive that message home, “The Reddit Explorers Club” showcased some of its most well-known subreddits (subculture communities on the platform), popular memes, where and when specific cultural trends were born, and much more, with the help of interactive games, photo ops and detail-rich exhibits. For more on the story, check out coverage of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in our sister pub Event Marketer.

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Check out this photo tour of six can’t-miss activations from San Diego Comic-Con following its three-year hiatus, according to coverage in Event Marketer, from Audible’s massive sand sculptures to FX’s fright-filled, walkable labyrinth to HBO’s beautifully fabricated “House of the Dragon”-themed castle.

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In its first experiential tour, Ghirardelli activated a sampling campaign that positioned its chocolate squares as a delicious centerpiece to an American campfire classic: the s’more. In a piece from Event Marketer, read how the brand’s flexible footprint, designed like a backyard, charmed consumers across the country while capturing valuable shopper marketing data.

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The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity descended upon the south of France in person last week, after a three-year hiatus, to honor some of the marketing and advertising industry’s most outstanding work. While touring the mega beach activations and chatting with marketing executives, we noticed a key through line: It’s back to business, folks—but it’s also time to celebrate.

We noticed more open floor plans conducive to creative discussions and cutting deals, more top-notch entertainment than in years’ prior, as well as some newcomers, like Reddit, showing up strong for brand creatives for the first time. As Keyana Kashfi, Spotify’s Global Experiential Content & Production Lead, put it, “2019 was very focused on sales meetings. The biggest structures you saw here [in our footprint] were three closed-door meeting rooms. It was a decision to make sure we had spaces to meet and have conversations, but really focus on the celebration of being back.”

“It has been a heavy time, and it still is a heavy time, but at least we could be together and celebrate the good things—and talk out some of the more uncomfortable things,” she continued. “We wanted to have more open spaces to congregate…and use this time to celebrate being back, being out and to celebrate creativity.” Check out this photo tour of some of the brand activations at Cannes this year—and stay tuned for a full field report in sister pub Event Marketer on what we experienced along the Croisette.

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Paul Mitchell’s blooming, garden-themed activation at Ulta’s annual Beauty Field Leadership Conference recently leveraged a mix of augmented reality-fueled storytelling and sensory touchpoints to unveil its newest products and sustainability messaging to attendees. Event Marketer reviews what the experience had to offer.

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