Experiential Marketing And Why It’s Key To Reaching Gen Z
TL;DR
A fun-sized summary of this article
Gen Z is ignoring your ads; experiential marketing is the best way to get off their block list.
The over-saturation of content has made it harder to grab audiences with traditional ads, especially as people increasingly prefer investing in experiences over materialism.
Gen Z wants experiences built around your brand story - bonus points if you’ll let us be active co-creators.
Gen Z has peered into the black abyss of consumerism and realized its excesses are bottomless; in the digital age, there is never a shortage of products on our feeds. Sure, we treat social media like a hyper-personalized mall - but these platforms in turn treat our FYP’s like a scrolling billboard. Which can, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, get very tiring. And the more advertisement fatigues, the more ineffective it becomes.
This media saturation has led to a paradox where the more content we are exposed to, the less we remember. Our brains are wired to sift through endless streams of information quickly, often dismissing anything that doesn’t immediately grab our attention. And in this context, traditional advertising can feel obsolete.
Experiential marketing breaks the monotony; brands that tap in understand that the best sell is an indirect one. Tangible, engaging interactions go beyond saturating our digital spaces with ads - experiences that center the consumer in your brand story create opportunities to build engaging relationships between the product and the user.
Experience > Stuff
The essence of experiential marketing is to create opportunities for engagement that go beyond the traditional hard sell-to-transaction pipeline. Gen Z processes media at an accelerated pace, and our ability to ignore traditional advertisements is a growing challenge for brands. We’re media multitaskers who’ve trained our brains to filter out irrelevant content. Most of us can swipe past traditional ads without a second thought. Which means, in most cases, your very expensive ad campaign is regulated to background noise.
Experiential strategies are inherently grabby because they divert from the traditional interactions we have with advertisements on the daily; instead of asking for our purchase, you’re asking for us to engage, listen, sit down, and create. You give us something to do, rather than just another thing to consume. When brands focus on creating experiences, they become storytellers as opposed to advertisers and re-introduce that grounded, human element we’re all craving.
The Brands That Get It, Get It
And the brands that don’t, don’t.
An immersive experiential marketing campaign starts with the worldbuilding around your brand; the experiences you create should live in that story. This way, audiences that engage are dropped into your narrative; there is an inherent interactivity to it. This level of engagement requires both an understanding of what your audience wants and a willingness to innovate beyond traditional methods to fill that need. The brands that do it right make us feel immersed in their world; we’re part of their story rather than just targets of their marketing.
Some fantastic experiential marketing examples out in the world:
This Barbie Went Viral: Warner Bros broke the internet with their Selfie Generator that put fans on AI-generated doll covers
29Rooms goes hands-on: Refinery29’s immersive event showcasing the latest in style, culture and tech wants attendees to be co-creators in the experience
Van’s on home turf: If House of Vans pops up at your local skate park, it’s because they know their audience
This Kit-Kat break is phone-free: Some people would pay good money for 3rd spaces to engage and connect - Kit-Kat created a “Free No WiFi Zone” so they don’t have to.