Think of Mosaic Experiential Marketing’s president Aidan Tracey as the Edmund Hillary of Canadian marketing. He saw a mountain that many considered indomitable and conquered it. In Tracey’s case the mountainous challenge, taken up in 2003 when he joined Mosaic, was to elevate experiential marketing (XM) to the major leagues, with the ultimate goal of establishing a level field where XM played as large and vital a role as any other medium. But even Tracey couldn’t have anticipated the scale of his team’s success. Surrounding himself with top-tier talent, he has, in just six short years, managed to grow Mosaic’s Canadian XM revenue by more than 400%, attracting and maintaining an enviable roster of A-list clients that extends from Procter & Gamble, Cadbury Adams and Rogers to Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch InBev. In 2008 alone, he and his team added over $12 million in revenue. That same year, Mosaic in Canada hired 5,500 people to serve as brand ambassadors at customized events, in retail stores and at installations from coast to coast. This year, amid one of the worst employment downturns in decades, Tracey expects that number to approach, or even surpass, 6,000.
To better understand what they call Mosaic’s “secret sauce,” Marketing’s editor-in-chief and executive publisher Christopher Loudon sat down with Tracey and five key members of his senior management team —Jeff Rogers, senior VP, experiential marketing division; Don Murray, senior VP client service, selling and merchandising division; Chad Grenier, VP experiential client services; Heather Radford, VP, experiential client services; and Sean Patrick, VP, interactive—for a lively roundtable discussion.
MARKETING: Experiential marketing is developing and evolving so quickly that if you ask a dozen different people to define XM, you’ll get a dozen different answers. So as leaders in the field, what is your definition of XM?
AIDAN TRACEY: From our perspective, experiential marketing is a blend of marketing disciplines that attempt to engage people in a more personal fashion. At the core of experiential marketing is event marketing, where you immerse consumers in a branded experience. You send teams of brand ambassadors out to engage consumers in a dialogue about a brand, and this usually includes a product demonstration or a sample. With that at the core, you then can start to add on other disciplines that extend the experience.
MARKETING: Even with the rapid expansion of XM, Mosaic’s growth has, in recent years, been exponentially greater.
TRACEY: We’ve been very fortunate that we started from a position of great strength. Our sales and merchandising business, which Don leads, helped to pioneer the industry here in Canada. Our first client, in 1986, was Cadbury Adams. They’ve now been with us for 23 years, and we’ve since built an amazing roster. What really became obvious among our management team about five years ago was that we needed to build another pillar. We bet that the right decision was to make a very significant investment in experiential and event marketing. Our vision was that media would change, marketing would change, and what happened at the retail level would have a much bigger influence in how brands got built in the future. We knew that Mosaic’s established skill for hiring and deploying thousands of people across Canada to serve as brand ambassadors would be of increasing value to marketers. And really, that’s the secret to our success: the ability to find great people across Canada, deploy them with a brand message and thereby reach consumers in an effective way.
MARKETING: How do you extend that definition to speak of experiential as a medium?
TRACEY: It was a pretty novel thought five or six years ago, when we really started to push in this direction. We coined the idea that people are a medium. We believe that people talking to other people while doing a demonstration or delivering a sample is another form of media. You’re delivering a real impression and there is a real frequency to that. Then all you’ve got to work on is the reach. So when you’ve got a reach and a frequency and you’ve delivered impressions, you are, by definition, delivering media. In the past five years, we’ve begun to see media fragment and the value of mass media impressions be questioned in terms of their cost-per-thousand. We’ve also started to see the gap between mass impressions and field impressions—or people media impressions—close in terms of the ROI. Then, with the advent of social media and the Internet, we can now extend offline events to online to garner all kinds of impressions through Facebook, MySpace and other social media tools. So experiential marketing really can be seen as another form of media. Last May, Advertising Age had a great headline that said “Mass Sampling is the New Mass Media,” and they talked about how brands like Starbucks and Coca-Cola are now diverting significant portions of their marketing budgets to mass sampling and events.
HEATHER RADFORD: One of the real benefits of people as a medium is that it allows us to target the sweet spot in terms of the demographic that we’re trying to engage with in a much more effective way than perhaps traditional media are able to.
MARKETING: The long-held budgeting model, with traditional media placed above the line and “additions” like XM or even digital slotted below the line seems to be shifting, with the line erased and a more even playing field created.
CHAD GRENIER: What we’re seeing in a lot a cases is the ability to build an integrated idea and the bringing together of multiple disciplines. With everyone—the digital agency, the PR agency, the experiential agency, the traditional ad agency—unified in developing one single idea, that idea has a much better chance of breaking through and connecting with the consumer. Clients are starting to see that such an approach takes less time and allows their dollars to go further. That’s why that line is breaking down. Now, not everyone is there. I think the onus is on the clients to create environments that are synergistic and collaborative among the agencies, because for many of the players it’s an entirely new way of working. For us [at Mosaic], since we don’t compete in those other spaces, we’re happy to play nice in the sandbox with all the other agencies.
TRACEY: I agree. You need to get all the stakeholders working together to deliver results. That is how the overall spending model is changing and will continue to change.
MARKETING: Traditionally, either broadcast or print has been the cornerstone of most campaigns. More recently, digital has been increasingly been pushed into the forefront. But now also seeing cases where XM is taking the lead.
JEFF ROGERS: A fantastic example of that is Bud Camp. Bud Camp is an integrated property where the event is the core experience, but it is brought to life with a fully integrated, 360-degree plan with pre-event television and outdoor promotional support and post-event social media. Together with Budweiser, we recently won an award in the U.S. [from Event Marketer magazine], with Bud Camp named, for the second straight year, the best consumer event in North America.
TRACEY: I’d add another couple of examples of global brands with grassroots and event marketing at their core. The first is Red Bull. In its early years, Red Bull did a fantastic job of building the brand through sampling and going to the right places to engage with consumers. Big events and traditional media came later. Also, there’s Glacéau Vitamin Water. That’s a textbook case of using experiential marketing and events to grow your brand in advance of doing any mass media.
MARKETING: 2009 continues to be challenging throughout the marketing, advertising and media industries, yet Mosaic is having a comparatively good year.
ROGERS: It has definitely been a very tough year both for clients and agencies, but we seem well positioned to provide the types of services our clients are looking for now. The discipline of experiential marketing is growing as a whole as marketers look for results-based solutions. The economy has been difficult, but we haven’t lost any clients. For some clients there has been a decline [in spending], but we’ve added seven or eight new clients in 2009, which has allowed us to continue our positive momentum.
TRACEY: To build on what Jeff is saying, I think there are two additional factors. First, there’s no such thing as an overnight success, and we’ve been making a very concerted effort in this direction since 2003. We’ve stuck to our plan, and now the work that we do—winning at retail, direct to consumers—seems to be putting Mosaic in the right place at the right time. In terms of winning at retail, I think Don can add some value in terms of why we are having so much success right now.
DON MURRAY: In terms of winning in store and at the shelf, 2008 was our best year ever and that momentum has continued into 2009. Current clients like Coke and P&G are saying we’re best in class in the areas of people process and technology, and this is being rewarded with organic growth. As a result, we haven’t lost a client in over three years. We don’t chase everything that moves. Instead, we selectively participate, and that has led to incremental business from HP, Kraft and Disney in recent months.
GRENIER: What you’re seeing is a lot of buzz around shopper marketing. A lot of people are trying to figure it out and companies are restructuring [their plans] around it. At the same time, stores are getting bigger and more complex to navigate, and store staff are becoming fewer. So retailers and manufacturers are turning to Mosaic to put brand ambassadors in those retail locations to create engaging experiences on behalf of the brand and the retailer. The interesting thing is how much impact it has, because once you’ve created an engaging experience, you can immediately ask for the sale. And that’s actually where we’ve seen a big portion of our growth in the past two years.
MARKETING: The whole realm of XM is new to a lot of clients. What is the learning curve like? How much time does it take to get a client fully up to speed?
GRENIER: That’s a really good question, because experiential marketing as we define it is a new approach. It’s not just straight-ahead sampling. It’s not just straight-ahead events. It’s a fully integrated approach. So for most marketers there is a significant learning curve. We do a lot of lunch-and-learns with our clients, we try to speak at conferences and provide insight and experience, but it will take another few years before senior marketers fully embrace what experiential marketing can and will mean to them. If we have this same interview in 2012, experiential marketing will be much better understood and will be a much bigger part of most marketers’ plans.
MARKETING: There are, and will continue to be, agencies that tell clients they can do it all, from traditional media to PR, digital and experiential. But you are proponents of the idea that many players have an equal seat at the table and an equal voice. How does that enhance the overall experience, especially from the client’s perspective?
GRENIER: It goes back to the concept of having a single idea with multiple touch points. The biggest challenge is getting something to break through, so one big idea that you can see at retail, on TV, at an event, at home, on the cinema screen, is going to have a much better chance of breaking through to the consumer.
TRACEY: It’s really about collaborating well. I think most of our clients consider Mosaic a very good collaborator, eager to build on anyone’s idea. We don’t care where the idea comes from—sometimes the idea originates with us, but often it comes from another agency at the table. We don’t shoot TV spots, we don’t do radio, we don’t do print. Our job is to bring the idea to life experientially. We do digital, because digital is, in our opinion, a natural extension of offline XM. If you look at the growth of web 2.0 and of most social media, most of what is being communicated relates to an offline experience, like ‘here’s a photo of me on vacation’ or ‘here’s a shot of me and my kids’ or ‘here’s me at an event.’ So we believe Mosaic has a role to play in all our clients social media strategies, because at the core of social media are offline experiences that people want to share online.
SEAN PATRICK: Social media as a science has only been around for a couple of years, but society has been around for centuries. What clients sometime forget, as they become focused on the technology and the measurement, is that all social media is simply people talking.
GRENIER: To close off the whole integration discussion, the key advantage is that, at the end of the day, it saves the client time and dollars, both of which are in short supply right now. It takes less time and money to bring your agencies together and come up with one big idea and bring it to life in five or six different ways. Ultimately, the brands are going to benefit from that.
MARKETING: Perhaps the blurriest line for a lot of clients is the one between experiential and PR. They’ll say, ‘we don’t need an experiential agency because we already have a PR agency.’
TRACEY: That’s a great topic to get into. PR is clearly an industry that requires a very specific skill set: understanding crisis management, understanding how to engage the media, how to counsel CEOs and industry leaders to deal with the press, etc. Three or four years ago, Mosaic was considering doing some PR, so we brought in three of the leading agencies and, though they didn’t know it, all three presented case studies that were based on work that Mosaic had done. For me, that was a real eye-opener. I realized we had to become more astute about the role events and experiential marketing play in generating PR impressions. So Mosaic and the PR agencies often now work very collaboratively to develop the strategy and the event. Then the PR agency will do their job, which is to contact the media, make sure they get the influencers out, make sure they’re writing and delivering the key messages. A big part of the payout of event marketing is the media that is generated from the event.
PATRICK: PR agencies love us because we appreciate what they do. PR is all about steering the message. In social media, what we do quite well is putting the message out there and letting the community control it. They’re very different things, but they work extremely well together.
MARKETING: Thinking beyond our borders, Mosaic has also had several recent successes outside Canada.
TRACEY: We’re very fortunate in that Mosaic has a large and well-established business in the U.S., headquartered in Dallas. They’re doing fantastic work for a number of different brands. But the team here in Toronto has also been able to extend our footprint, both into the U.S. and internationally. InBev has awarded us work in China and in South Korea. Jeff is on his way overseas to do work for them in Eastern Europe and Russia. We also just secured experiential marketing work in the U.S. with Dell and Microsoft. The Microsoft assignment is global in nature. We feel excited and optimistic that the skills we’re bringing to the table, combined with the strength of our U.S. office, will help us grow internationally very quickly over the next 24 months.
