HP clearly acknowledge that they have become a company that many millennials associate with printers and fax machines, and they highlighted music festivals as a space to engage with a new demographic and showcase their creativity. They partnered up with visual artist Android Jones to create an incredibly trippy projection mapped video onto the ceiling of the dome, while fans lay back on bean bags and cushions and blasted off into space. While waiting in lines for things like the bar or the bathroom is the scourge of the festival experience, waiting in line to enter a mysterious art dome created a sense of anticipation, and stoked the FOMO flames that burn brightly at festivals like Coachella.
Guests checked-in with their RFID wristbands, rejoiced in the refreshing mist of the human car wash, and a photo of their experience was captured by a photographer. Set up in both Brooklyn and Los Angeles, the activation was simply 29 branded rooms which the audience are encouraged to mill around and snap selfies in. In some ways this brand activation represented peak millennial experience: heavily branded, collaborative, socially conscious and designed to be viewed almost entirely through a phone screen.
The whole thing was a top-to-bottom experiential marketing masterclass, and so much user generated content that it was arguably the most hyped activation experience of last year.
As we mentioned above—and time and again on this blog —intimately understanding the festival experience will hold brands in good stead when they try to activate the space. Depending on how intricate your sponsors want to get, you could have premade crematic for guests to paint, build your own terrarium stations, or just stick to glitter and glue. Use the spotlight of your event to draw attention to charities or causes your sponsors work with.
Similar to wellness breaks, this gives attendees the opportunity to feel pampered, and ultimately, leave with a great impression of your sponsors. Looking to have attendees blow off some steam, but want to skip the workout? How about a play area. Customize a swag bag with premium merch not available to all attendees. If you really want to go for it, get sponsors involved to offer more high-end gifts, like massages, tickets to shows, or wine.
In addition to the traditional bag, you can now offer a digital one. New services allow you to set up a page with offers from sponsors before, during, and after your event. These fully enclosed booths offer a quiet place to make a phone call or have a meeting. But it cannot survive unless all parties see eye-to-eye. That's essentially marketing , and it applies whether the brand is a multinational or individual. The two brands should share values.
One recent example of this being done well, which also clearly shows we are living in the future, is the World Health Organisation and Knox Frost. WHO is a global agency concerned with healthcare which needed a big visibility boost for its campaigns last year. Ultimately, this really comes down to basic brand partnership principles — the need for two partner organisations to align. Other memorable examples of this include TED and Rolex, which arguably set a benchmark for sophisticated gatherings by combining the famously elegant Swiss watch manufacturer with the inherently intelligent series of presentations.
How's that for the thinking person's partnership? Less academic, much more glam, Toronto International Film Festival has successfully been allied with leading hair care brand L'Oreal for several years now. Outside of the events sector, we think energy drink and extreme sports giant Red Bull teaming up with everyone's favourite HD head cam, GoPro, made a hell of a lot of sense.
Historically this is one of the most popular approaches to festival sponsorship and larger gatherings. Sprawling sites with countless areas and stages are notoriously difficult to navigate as an audience member, not least once night falls and the lighting becomes disorientating, at which point you may have had a little bit too much fun and consumed a few too many centilitres of your favourite tipple s , adding to the problem.
Signposting and wayfinding iconography really helps, and if it comes with a brand partner logo or similar then all the better. Just because you're running a virtual event doesn't mean there's no need for wayfinding , it just comes in a slightly different format. It's still one of the most engaging virtual event sponsorship opportunities that you should consider. If you have created a sprawling and immersive virtual environment then this is really a case of transposing the signage into the digital venue you have developed.
For more general stream events, though, you can still create some quality wayfinding partners through the clever use of outbound links. Tying your sponsorship to attendee engagement is the best way to make sure people stay tuned. Suggest your sponsors donate prizes to gain visibility and a chance to earn some free swag! With so many virtual event platforms out there, you may choose to gamify your own events. We highly recommend taking a proper look, because the post explains how data is a key selling point for brands, but the data has to be 'good'.
This means looking at psychographics and behavioural analytics and moving past the old hat demographics of 'English Male, 37' into more specific details about what these people really do, how they act and, crucially, how they make purchasing decisions. To understand just how much data is now driving the events industry you only need to look at this blog post on b2b website, Eventsforce.
That was almost four years ago, and pandemic or not the sector has moved fast in this area, meaning in you can't afford not to engage. The first step in this process is scanning business cards and collecting data with your attendees permission that allows you to build up contact details for potential leads. Then categorise these contacts by qualifications like industry type, job description or location. Once ordered and cleaned, this information is golden for your sponsors.
This is a popular one in any list of sponsorship ideas for virtual events. It works in two really powerful ways. First up — and this is particularly true for one-off, debutant and young events — advertising your affiliation with a respected, relevant household or industry brand can really boost your perceived market credibility. More importantly, though, incentivising prospective audiences by offering discounts, gifts and exclusive deals is a great way to boost attendance.
It lists a number of reasons, and these include the way landing pages funnel traffic and focus conversions, alongside their usefulness in terms of social media marketing. It also runs through what you should make sure the landing page includes, from basics what the event is, runs it and when and where it will take place; through to more subtle details like the position and length of attendee sign-up forms, one-touch sharing on major social media platforms, and, of course, logos for any and all affiliated brands.
We'd also say you need to have all this there, without overwhelming visitors with a chaotic landing page, which is why great design is so essential. Both of which can be fully customised and branded to your needs. Many brands and sponsors use events as the perfect opportunity to place their products in the hands of potential customers. During physical events, swag bags and giveaways worked well, but what about virtual events?
For example if you are hosting a virtual event on digital marketing trends, you could do partnerships with companies that provide tools for this audience. Then build a unique landing page with exclusive attendee only discounts. Virtual events offer a unique means to gift and trial new products amidst a new target market, raising both brand awareness and delighting event attendees. Guests leave humbled and happy in the receipt of exclusive offers from either one or a number of sponsors whilst brands relish in the opportunity to gift directly to what might become a future valuable customer.
The registration page or website is another perfect place for sponsorship. It's prime real estate. Alternately, you can hold some kind of an educational session. For example, a nutritionist or dietitian could have a video running at the event site educating attendees on important aspects about eating well or how the body uses the nutrients it needs.
You could also hold talks at various times of the day to draw attendees to your event space, or offer interactive stations to keep them engaged. If your firm covers several areas of law or different kinds of cases, it's worth having a representative available for each, at least through different times of the day. Similarly, offering educational sessions can be particularly useful.
Consider bringing in outside experts to further position your firm as experts. For example, if your firm deals with IP protection, bring in a CEO of a software company, especially if it's local. Or a real estate firm could bring in a prominent real estate agent or a real estate writer to discuss pertinent topics.
Depending on the event, it might also be appropriate to bring in displays for more experiential marketing, but you need to be sure that these are always appropriate for the event.
For example, a firm that handles certain kinds of automotive cases could bring in a crashed car — a particularly visual lesson if your firm handles DUI cases — however, this sort of shock value isn't going to suit every event. The emphasis for financial companies is often on education.
Creating the sort of event space that promises an engaging talk to listen to, perhaps with a podium or a small stage, will be a good way to draw crowds in to find out when your business will be hosting these talks throughout the day.
Each talk can focus on a different aspect of financial advice within the purview of your business, too.
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