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The Five Questions You Need to Ask Before Selecting a Venue for your Next Event
The real estate industry may have coined the term first, but experiential marketers have always known that when it comes to connecting with consumers in brief but meaningful ways, its all about location, location, location. What brand marketers today may not know, however, is that there is a lot more to selecting the perfect location than booking the busiest street corner in town. Just as consumers have changed over the past decade thanks to the impact of technology and social media, so have their live media consumption habits. What used to be an easy grab for attention in a teeming Grand Central Terminal has now become an all-out competition with the mobile devices, earplugs and smartphones consumers wear, carry and use to tune out the world. Clutter, which was once a term reserved just for mainstream media messages, has gone personal and mobile. And it has become even tougher to penetrate as a result. Its just one of many reasons why the location of your next activation requires a more thoughtful approachone that takes everything from timing and technology to throughput and impact, into account. A well-strategized location can not only boost the mass awareness generated by your campaign, it can make connections with the right target consumers at the right time and in the right language thats relevant to them. Here, the expert planners and strategists at City Eventions offer a fivepoint checklist of questions to ask before you select the locations for your next campaign. (Keep reading for three real-world case studies.)

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1. Is it relevant to your target consumers lifestyle?
Times Square and Downtown L.A. may be great locations for mass awareness, but do they capture consumers in a context that is meaningful to them? One example: Commuters may also be pet owners, but you have a better shot at winning points and coming across as authentic with people who love their pets at a local dog park than a busy transportation hub.

2. Does it zero in on the right demographic at the right time?

College campuses are obvious hotbeds for student populations, but some campus cultures and academic schedules are more predisposed to engage with your product than others. City Eventions activated a MLB 2K gaming lounge on college campuses during baseball season that delivered a perfect cross-section of sports fans and college students at the same time.

3. Does it provide the best backdrop for the activation strategy or do the locations regulations and permits inhibit the creative vision?
If your activation strategy is in conflict with the location you had in mind, prioritize whatever will deliver you results first. A killer creative idea thats watered down and ineffective because of local restrictions will only tank in the long run.

4. Does it map hard foot trafc and impression numbers back to campaign goals?
Do your research to find out how many feet and eyeballs will travel through your events prospective location and then map those numbers back to your programs goals. City Eventions offers clients hard data from an extensive database of billboard and LED signage inventory to give a realistic ballpark of the potential volume at target locations.

5. Does it enable the brand to maximize social media and digital engagement before, during and after the event?
In addition to online engagement that earns fans and followers, find out how you can leverage surrounding businesses to pre-promote the event and then keep the buzz alive after its over. City Eventions set the social media world buzzing when it strapped a MINI Coupe to a 30-foot rocket ship in New York Citys Meatpacking District. The stunts location (in front of an Apple Store), the relatively low-profile of the buildings compared to other NYC locales and the timing (Halloween weekend), insured that no one would pass by without snapping a photo or sending a tweet. Ready to see the checklist in action? Read on for three case studies that show how brands including HP, Kelloggs and Cricket Wireless leveraged a strategic approach to location selection to drive measureable success for their experiential campaigns.

To lear n more about strategic location scouting, visit cityeventions.com or call 212.736.9400

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HPs Jam Session Introduces the Envy to Student-Inuencers in Five Cities

The HP Jam Session is a best-in-class example of a tease-and-reveal campaign designed to build up consumer excitement for the launch of the new HP Envy laptops featuring Beats Audio. The target consumers were young adults headed back to high school and college in influential and competitive markets all over the United States. To reach them, the brand designed a five-day Back to School tour, featuring laptop demo stations, gaming, a green-screen photo activation, a custom microsite and an interactive digital graffiti wall. In order to maximize the attention of the target youths and cut through all of the mass-market clutter in the laptop space, HP and City Eventions determined that the best course of action was to target six locations across four major markets. They were: Lenox Square in Atlanta, Wrigley Field and Navy Pier in Chicago, South Street Seaport and the Meatpacking District in New York City and Philadelphias Penns Landing. All of these locations were carefully chosen based on high foot-traffic patterns among target consumers, thanks in large part to each spots trendy and attractive locale within its respective city. The Jam Sessions were pop-up parties emerged from shipping containers that unfolded to a 20-foot by 25-foot event space. Inside were all of the activation areas, a dj booth and lounge seating. All of the buzz generated by the careful choices of venue resulted in the campaign being seen live by more than 1.4 million people across the six markets and the social media impressions via the brands digital ambassadors alone was more than 300,000.

Cricket Wireless Leverages Local Digital and Stationary Media to Build Buzz
To create buzz around its expanded coast-to-coast coverage, Cricket Wireless embarked on a nationwide campaign that leveraged an innovative mix of in-market storefronts, mobile billboards, interactive technology and data collection to maximize attention and boost lead generation. The 12-city tour kicked off with a one-of-a-kind interactive billboard experience that traveled to each market for five days as a teaser to the main activation. Touch-screen technology engaged consumers and facilitated data collection in the days leading to the main event. Building projections executed for three nights at each tour stop built excitement and included a measureable SMS component. LCD and projection screens in local storefronts served as another layer of buzzbuilding activity, and dye-cut decals with a short code and call-to-action were placed in market two weeks prior to the arrival of the tour and again when the hype trucks arrived in market. Branded bags, fold-out coverage maps, t-shirts and notepads rounded out the street-level saturation strategy. Crickets objective was to capture market share among 18-34-year-olds with less than $50,000 in household income. This target audience drove the location selection for all media formats. City Eventions led an in-depth scouting and market research effort prior to activation. As a result, typicallychosen high-end shopping locations, tourist attractions and expensive residential and nightlife areas were purposefully skipped. Instead, the agency guided the brand toward a grassroots strategy that reached target consumers at free or inexpensive outdoor events, low-end malls and street-level commercial areas (foot traffic and daily circulation numbers were a major factor in location choice). Crickets theme for the program was Respect. The idea was reinforced at each stage of the activation. We wanted to bring this experience to the next level by bringing them the first interactive mobile billboard, which really shocked the markets as a ground breaking new medium Cricket brought to the world, says Michael Bamford, Senior Operations Manager at City Eventions. These areas rarely see brands coming in and wanting input and awareness at the level Cricket did from this demographic. The activations and interaction made people feel like real tastemakers, important voices and really helped make Cricket the brand that respected the people. City Eventions measured all levels of interaction, including premium distribution, SMS texting levels and interactions between consumers and digital assets on-site, which provided Cricket with a tangible return on investment. Throughout the entire campaign, the agency maintained a private microsite to allow Cricket to see daily updates from each market with photos and videos from the field.

Kelloggs Chooses Hollywood as the Backdrop for its Guinness World Record Attempt
When Kelloggs reintroduced its Crunch Nut cereal to the U.S. market, its goal was to pique the interest of as many everyday consumers as possible. With mass awareness and media impressions as the main objectives, City Eventions guided the brand to a location that had a high-traffic footprint, inherent star-power and the amplification potential Kelloggs needed to be successful in meeting its impression goals. The answer was the iconic Hollywood & Highland complex, which the brand used as a backdrop for its build of the worlds largest cuckoo clock. The clock was the focal point of a 24-hour event that included sampling, green screen activation and social media outreach. The brand set a Guinness World Record with the clock, earning it priceless media attention, and to top it off, partnered with actor and celebrity Nick Cannon, who has been cited by People Magazine as one of the Top Ten Most Successful Young People in Hollywood, to emcee the event. Surrounding the clock, and active for all 24 hours of the event, the brand set up tents to house the sampling and green-screen photo activations, and to draw in the target consumers shopping at the complex. To bring the buzz online, the brand worked with UStream and Facebook to broadcast the events live to the world. By the end of the event, thousands of people had sampled the cereal at the live execution and many thousands more had spent time with the brand watching the clock tick away and waiting for the cuckoo to pop out. Through clever execution, powerful media tie-ins and most importantly, a strategically-chosen location, location, location, Kelloggs earned millions in overall impressions between live, social media, press and television. Tasty.

To lear n more about strategic location scouting, visit cityeventions.com or call 212.736.9400

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