Why Brands Are Making Spectacles Of Themselves

A growing number of brands are realizing that to turn heads, they need to create an event that transcends consumers’ usual media filter bubbles. Doing so, however, is much harder and riskier than running a typical ad campaign.

In early May, after years of planning, Nike’s effort to break the two-hour marathon in Monza, Italy, fell short by 24 seconds. Judged as an athletic competition, it was a failure for the global brand. But as a marketing campaign, it was an unqualified success.

Nike promoted the event like a movie with a60-second trailer and garnered coverage of the hashtagged event #Breaking2 in Wired, CNN, Sports Illustrated, and FiveThirtyEight, among other publications. It also livestreamed the event on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Elite runners Eliud Kipchoge, Lelisa Desisa, and Zersenay Tadese wore a modified version of Nike’s Vaporfly shoe, which helped publicize the launch of the $250 footwear, which hit retail in June. The event also helped Nike overshadow longtime rival Adidas, which announced its own “sub2” program in February.

Nike isn’t the only brand to realize that to get consumers’ attention you need to do more than just run an ad campaign. Instead, brands are increasingly creating events with strong audience participation elements. The reason: Consumer attention has become a scarcer commodity. To turn heads you need to create an event that transcends consumers’ usual media filter bubbles. Creating and executing such events, however, is much harder and riskier than running a typical campaign, which is why they’re still fairly uncommon.

Brands Creating Events

Nike’s #Breaking2 set a precedent in the social media age: On Feb. 22, 2013, Felix Baumgartner took one small step out of a spacecraft 24 miles above the Earth. Some 8 million people tuned in live to watch the Austrian daredevil careen at about 844 mph. Unlike previous spectacles, such as Evel Knievel’s Snake River jump or the moon landing, this was a commercial activity, designed to sell soft drinks.

It worked. Six months after the stunt, Red Bull sales rose 7%.

Baumgartner’s jump has proved a hard act to follow, but others have tried. David Tiltman, head of content for WARC, said that campaigns with participatory elements and “a focal event or concept that allows people to take part in a campaign or support a particular cause” is one of the biggest marketing trends in recent years. In 2016, 40% of the WARC 100–the organization’s pick for the most effective ad campaigns of the year–included some measure of consumer participation compared with 14% in 2015, he said.

Why? A branded experience has a better chance of sticking in consumers’ memories than just another ad. “A Hershey bar doesn’t just compete with a Snickers bar,” said Peter Horst, a consultant and former CMO of Hershey, in an interview with CMO.com. “It competes with Facebook posts from crazy Aunt Sally and with the latest POTUS tweet and cat videos on YouTube, so you’ve got to earn attention.”

“The idea is that most valuable commodity for all these brands is attention, and the battle for people’s attention is pulled in so many directions,” added Sam Slaughter, VP of content for Contently. “It’s really affected the way brands have advertised.”

Even neuroscience backs this approach. In a recent analysis for WARC, the organization’s U.K. CEO of neuro-insight wrote that emotions frequently color memories associated with a set of feelings that consumers call up in the future. “A well-executed participation campaign … can help drive a wide range of brand associations all at once, accompanied by a strong emotional color,” she wrote. “But the real benefit comes if the brand in question can reinforce or grow the associations created by the initial stunt or event.”

Among the “brand spectacle” campaigns in recent years:

• In March, Mattel launched The Toy Box, an eight-episode series on ABC. The show, modeled after Shark Tank, featured toymakers presenting their creations to a panel of kid judges. The winning toy, announced two months later, went to Toys “R” Us.

• Outdoor retailer REI closed its stores on Black Friday and encouraged consumers to spend the day outside. The brand spread the word via email, PR exclusives, and social media activity (using the #OptOutside hashtag) from its own employees. The event prompted 1.4 million people to spend Black Friday outside and is credited with adding 1 million new members to the co-op.

• U.K. charity Save the Children launched “Christmas Jumper Day,” a national event urging people to wear gaudy Christmas sweaters in support of the charity. After reaching out to companies and celebrity ambassadors to promote the event, Save the Children registered some 50,000 people and claimed an ROI of £3.40 (US$4.50) for every £1 spent.

• Media Markt, a German electronics retailer, hosted “Rabbit Race,” a televised contest. All the rabbits in the race were given numbers. If the winning rabbit’s number matched a viewer’s receipt, he got 50% of his money back. The event drew 21 million viewers.

Why Everyone Isn’t Creating Events

Such events can clearly get attention. They’re also hard to pull off. Creating events of this magnitude requires creativity and a willingness to focus much of one’s resources into a single event. “You probably need a number of stars to align,” Horst said, “and one is that it makes business sense.”

Another limitation is creativity. It’s not easy to think up these moonshot-type campaigns. “Content is still a new thing for a lot of brands,” Slaughter told CMO.com. “The brands that are good at spectacle-based content are the brands that have been doing it longer and tend to be more sophisticated.”

But even if a brand decides a bet-the-farm stunt makes business sense, there’s still the possibility that something will go wrong. Every event has built-in risks, whether it’s possible physical danger (like with Red Bull and Nike’s events) or merely that no one will participate and the event will fall flat on its face. Sometimes events out of a brand’s control can nix plans. For instance, in 2002, Pepsi ran a promo to send a consumer into space on a Russian rocket. But after another Russian rocket, Soyuz, blew up, Pepsi pulled the promo.

According to Horst, creating a big event is riskier than running a Super Bowl ad. “You can pretty much craft and control how the ad comes out before you spend the $5 million on it,” he said. “When you’re doing the giant event, it’s even more of a roll of the dice.”

Finally, even if an event goes well, determining ROI can be tricky. Is the idea to gain awareness? Improve brand affinity? Sell more product? Connecting an event with the latter requires a bit of a leap of faith. No one knows exactly how many people bought Red Bull because of the Baumgartner jump, for instance. On the one hand, marketers realize they need to do events like this to gain attention. On the other, events aren’t like digital media where you can link exposure with purchase intent.

“Typically people who do these things are not hoping to be able to connect the dots to the cash register ringing at the end of the day,” Horst said. “It gets hard to draw the line between ‘I sent some guy to the moon in a blimp’ and ‘someone walked into a store and bought a widget.’”