Experiential should transform you

There is one test for whether something was an experience, and it isn't the line around the block, the impressions, or the photo. It's this: is the person who walks out the same person who walked in? If yes, you didn't build an experience. You built a billboard with a door.

Experiential is transformation or it is decoration.

Twenty years in this business and I've watched the industry get very good at the wrong thing. We measure dwell time, foot traffic, earned media, share of voice. All of it measures what the brand got. None of it measures what the person got — and the person is the only thing in the room that can carry the brand out the door and into the rest of their life.

I know what the other thing looks like because I've stood inside it. At The Participation Agency we built a rest stop for touring musicians. Artists arrived off a van at the end of a long drive, slept, did their laundry, recorded a track, played a show for twenty people in the living room, and left as someone who had a home in that city. More than four hundred of them. That is not an activation. That is a before and an after.

Sharks was the same mechanic in a different costume. Nobody walked into a pool club with no staff and walked out with a brand impression. They walked out belonging to something, and they came back on a Tuesday to prove it. Tens of thousands of them. Belonging is a transformation. It is also, not by coincidence, the only kind of loyalty that survives the end of the campaign.

Here is the practice, and it fits on an index card. Before you design anything, write two sentences: who they are when they arrive, and who they are when they leave. If the second sentence is the first one plus a tote bag, kill the idea. Then build backwards from the second sentence. The door, the sound, the person who greets them, the thing they get to do that they couldn't do yesterday — every decision either moves the person from sentence one to sentence two, or it's set dressing.

This is why I don't think experiential belongs in the marketing department at all. It belongs with the people who make entertainment, sport and ritual, the industries that have always known that people will pay to be changed. That is the whole idea behind CAPE: experiential entertainment, built by people who think a night should leave a mark.

Don't count who came. Count who left different.