How can I break into marketing?

How can I break into experiential marketing or interactive design?

• I've been 'hacking' gadgets and installations as a hobby for a long time, and think I could make a career out of it. I've found that most studios are small, tight-knit, and not interested in interns or entry-level guys. What is a good way to prove my ability, find that first job, and build cool stuff for a living?

• Answer:

  Experiential can actually be pretty easy to break into because most people still don't know about it. What might be holding you back is the fact that you're not bringing any concepts to show how you think. I was an experiential marketing creative director for 5 years after starting in traditional and transitioning to interactive. It was my experience in building community with Adholes which was once a large social network for advertising pros that gave me the insights into what people will or will not be willing to do in certain situations combined with my creative background that attracted the agency to me. That said, from initial interview, to getting a small freelance assignment months later, to actually getting hired was a year in the making and not a decision they took lightly. Often the creative at experiential agencies is either fed from the brand's main agency with the XM firm adding their "spin" to it to make it more realistic based on their experience in running tours, or concepted by people in XM who just don't have traditional creative backgrounds but can at least get the client/agency excited enough about how the idea works and then the brand agency provides the signage/materials/messaging. What's missing is that schools do not teach experiential. So as a creative director I really had to do my best Moneyball impersonation and find people who were creative and could think like is. I hired a creative intern who had an MFA in theater and did all sorts of interesting interactive plays that included audience participation. It was easy for him to make the transition, although many of his ideas were very unrealistic. Which is another thing that makes us apprehensive because you really need to think of things we'd never think of AND it needs to make the producer go "yes, we can do that!" Here are some elements that make an experiential campaign successful: Passive and Active Concepts: Most people are just not going to want to do the activity you come up with. Let's say 10% do. What is the rest of the crowd doing? An idea that has something fun for some people to do that's entertaining for others to watch is a winner! Throughput: Experiential tends to be in high traffic areas. Come up with a cool experience and a lot of people will want to do it. And also, your client really doesn't want to have their CPMs hover around $300, so you need as many people as possible to have the experience, have an amazing time, and go the hell away so the next person can do it and the previous person can go tweet about it. Think about Bill Clinton warmly shaking hands with someone, looking into their eyes, smiling, making them feel like they are the only person on earth, and then deftly moving to the next person. This is what makes experential successful in an even more sociopathic way. Equipment: Whatever equipment is necessary must be cheap to build, very sturdy, travel well through the whole country in all weather and be simple enough for $8/hr brand advocates to understand how to put together. If you come up with anything too complicated, you will draw the ire of the production people who will be no doubt flying to Birmingham, Alabama to go fix something that's broken, not to mention all the times your local staff will not assemble everything in time to get the event started. Tiered Concepts: It's not just about how big an idea can be, but how small it can be as well. Sure, your big idea can unfold into an elaborate 300' x 100' obstacle course with accompanying fireworks afterparty, but how does it look guerilla style in a 10 x 10 footprint on the sidewalk in Time Square? The client can't always pay for the former setup - permits for events are expensive, so there needs to be ways to have the concept come to life in a multitude of situations. For beverages brands one favorite was to use an ice cream truck because on the big side, we could store a lot of equipment in the back that would allow us to have a large and engaging footprint, but on the small scale we could park illegally and hand out product through the window. Still with me? If you can come up with ideas that fall within these narrow parameters, then why not pick a few brands and write down the ideas - what's the big idea, how it works, what the brand advocates are doing, what the small/med/large iterations look like, what the active/passive audiences experience, how does it drive to retail and web, etc.