The spread of COVID-19 in recent weeks is impacting brands in significant ways around the world, challenging both strategies and workstreams across all industries. Frequent cancellations of events one by one served as an initial barometer of the virus’ impact; not just affecting big-name festivals that attract crowds large enough that local economies depend on them, but also smaller activations. The situation begged brands to consider: how can they retain a close connection to key audiences in a time of social distancing?

While the West faces a need to quickly adapt to a new normal prompted by COVID-19, we’re a global creative partner that has serviced clients and areas hit by the virus since its onset in late 2019. Pooling together insights and experiences from teams across the S4Capital family, we’ve put together a report, titled “(Re)Activate Customer Obsession,” that recognizes this moment of upheaval as a profound opportunity for brands to reinvent their strategies and continually reach audiences spread far and wide—perhaps even better than before.

(Re)Define Goals for Customer Obsession

The need for creatively differentiated digital experiences isn’t new; consumer engagement has long migrated toward digital since the rise of ecommerce and social media, with consumers flocking to the convenience and connection enabled by always-on communication and digital personalization.

But for brands that have hesitated to enable these experiences, the trend to social distancing is a wakeup call. “As we come to grips with a world where we can’t shortcut to experience through physical engagement and personal proximity, the challenge is to deliver on the original intent of digital,” says MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar. “Interactive, tactile and personalized moments of magic that create conversation, conversion and commercial opportunities.”

To deliver such experiences, brands must invest in customer obsession. Namely, this means meeting audiences where they are—online—and tailoring resources to better prioritize their needs and enhance the customer experience. For many brands, in-person experiences are critical to cultivating a relationship, building a sense of community and driving emotional connections.

On our blog in the past, we’ve discussed the value of such activations—and the need for a digital layer to connect with audiences faraway. If your brand already has an event plan in place, take this as a moment to consider its goals and how that ladders up into your brand purpose. Our report offers a series of thought-provoking questions to help brands zero in on a digital strategy that aligns with their specific needs.

(Re)Group and Replan

Whether you seek to retain value by pivoting existing plans or are simply struggling to anticipate “what’s next,” our report to reactivating customer obsession offers practical advice on how you can begin to reevaluate and prioritize your goals—and where they fit within digital activations. This is essential not only for brainstorming what new experiences your brand can provide, but makes a critical first step in evolving your operations with the digital skillsets and capabilities needed to deliver them.

Having to face an event’s cancellation is tough, because so much work and preparation had already gone into it. Recognizing this, a move to digital can feel daunting—and you’ll certainly find that strategies must shift, and that what worked for a physical experience may not translate well to a live, digital one. But as we’ve mentioned above, view this unfortunate circumstance as an opportunity to make something even better: a deeper investment in digital, for example, allows brands to build up their data capabilities to better understand which experiences are most impactful, and when.

“One of the things we do is in the data: in social listening and finding the right trigger areas in regions where things are happening,” says Aaron Nava, Director of Digital at Circus, which merged with MediaMonks earlier this year. “From there, we’re able to develop a point of view for brands.” Through increased digital maturity, brands have a greater perspective on how to achieve more meaningful, lasting interaction at different points in the customer decision journey, and become more customer obsessed in the process.

Having a clear sense of purpose is key, too. In-person experiences thrive on inspiring an emotional connection through bringing people together and appealing to the senses, and brands must think carefully about how to inject emotion into digital alternatives.

“Brands shouldn’t aim to think about virtual conferences as replacement of what they had previously scheduled. It’s impossible,” says Kate Richling, CMO at MediaMonks. Still, she notes that you can offer some pretty cool (and in many ways, better) activations that are designed to assist your audience and enrich relationships authentically. Drawing from several example digital activations and scenarios, our report walks readers through what to consider in developing such experiences.

(Re)Imagine What’s Possible

Faced with an immense shift in how they must communicate with consumers over the next few months (and how to pivot back to normal, whatever form that might take), we all stand at a critical moment to reassess strategies. But constraint is beneficial to creativity, and we look forward to tackling more unique brand activations that fundamentally redefine consumer relationships. By taking this moment as an opportunity to hone your digital skills and reimagine what’s possible, your brand will be well-equipped to anticipate consumers’ emerging needs both in the near and distant future.

It’s Time to (Re)Activate Customer Obsession.

First, you feel a thrilling sense of weightlessness as you dive through the city skyline, watching skyscrapers pass you by. But the exhilarating skydive takes a harrowing turn when you spot your target: the Scarecrow, who’s wreaking havoc throughout Gotham City by spreading his trademark toxic fear gas.

As you cut through a gas cloud, your vision becomes clouded: villains from the Batman universe begin to surround you as buildings come crashing down. As you glide through the increasingly abstract and crumbling city, can you catch the villain in time?

This isn’t your typical skydiving experience. It’s just one part of the Batman Experience, powered by AT&T at Comic-Con, celebrating the character’s 80th anniversary and induction into the Comic-Con Character Hall of Fame. The activation made such an impression that Wired said it “soars—while others fall flat,” while the New York Times called Batman and AT&T “a new dynamic duo.” But how exactly does such a heroic tale come to be?

Every Kid’s Dream: Be Batman

In a recent SoDA Report On Trends in AR, VR and Mixed Reality, MediaMonks Creative Technologist Samuel Snider-Held writes: “[AR and VR are] no longer the shiny, new thing it once was, and brands can’t blame a subpar experience on experimentation, either.” Rather than chase the appearance of innovation, he says, brands must closely consider “how a given touchpoint impacts the broader customer experience” and design the offering around that. The VR segment of the Batman Experience achieves this by pairing the virtual scenario—gliding through the city to catch Scarecrow—with the weightlessness made possible by a skydiving wind tunnel.

We all know about Batman’s utility belt full of cutting-edge tools and equipment. This VR scenario lets everyday people experience what it’s really like to try out the kind of tech Bruce Wayne—Batman’s alter-ego—would use. But the immersion begins before participants put on the custom headset shaped like Batman’s iconic cowl, with an instructional safety video delivered by Lucius Fox, who supplies Batman with his equipment.

Contrasting the Batman Experience with other AR and VR activations that fell short of pushing the medium forward, Wired noted that AT&T’s stood out among others at Comic-Con this year: “At all of 77 seconds, it’s not long … But it’s also utterly unprecedented.” It didn’t take much time to make a powerful impact. The cinematic narrative thread throughout the experience, from onboarding to leaving, goes a long way in ensuring that participants are fully engrossed in the world of Gotham City.

The video briefing, for example, turns a boring safety regulation—required for these sorts of events—into an opportunity for storytelling. “We really wanted to immerse participants into the role of Batman in a full narrative sequence,” says Eric Shamlin, SVP Growth at MediaMonks, who collaborated with AT&T to bring the project to life. “Part of this idea was that Lucius would do the onboarding video to showcase a new adaptation of the bat suit, training them on how it’s used.”

Large-Scale Activations Still Benefit Smaller, Niche Audiences

The tech-infused experience showcases the strength of the telecom company’s network that powers many of the things that Comic-Con’s audience cares about: things like streaming movies or TV shows, online gaming experiences and more. By paying homage to 80 years of Batman in the opening of the Comic-Con Museum, AT&T pays respect to the franchises and characters that the corporation recently inherited in its acquisition of Time Warner.

The exhibit also gives attendees an idea of the partnership’s increased creative and production muscle. “The combination of the two companies was intended to create something new in the media industry,” writes the New York Times covering the exhibit. “A powerhouse that could reach millions of people through its vast distribution system of mobile devices and satellite networks, while also creating the content that will fill their screens.” Through an exhilarating cinematic activation, fans get a taste of the ways AT&T might bring its properties to life on and off the screen in the near future.

Following insights from this year’s Cannes International Festival of Creativity, Accenture Interactive highlighted the need for brands to “think small to launch big, going after enthusiasts in need. It’s a need for niche rather than mass.”

A dependable strategy, even with large-scale activations like this one, is to start small by first targeting niche audiences by delivering the experiences they crave. While superheroes aren’t necessarily a niche interest these days—they continue to dominate in box office sales, and Batman himself is one of DC’s most popular characters—it’s worth noting that San Diego Comic-Con’s audience makes up some of the most passionate fans of comic culture.

And while the superhero-loving audience may be growing, it’s also a skeptical one, highlighting the importance in delivering exceptional creative to those ends. “AT&T might be viewed by some as a heavy-handed corporate voice,” says Shamlin, “but they’re successfully navigating how to leverage the very significant pop culture icons they’ve come to control to make themselves more approachable to a very discerning audience.”

Ensuring an Experience for Everyone

The team knew that not everyone attending the museum would have the chance to try out the VR experience that stole the show. “We didn’t want those who missed a chance to try the skydiving experience to feel they missed out, so we designed the entirety of the activation to be fun and shareable,” said Shamlin. The multi-layered activation made full use of the Comic-Con Museum, bringing attendees the chance to engage with the Batman universe in a variety of ways.

This included a Bat Cave, built by MediaMonks, where attendees could play through an archive of Batman video games. We also developed a training room filled with punching bags featuring portraits of villains from the franchise. As you punch the bags, light projections dynamically fill the walls with comic panels and onomatopoeia (“Pow! Wham!”) that let you feel like you’re in a comic book—or the campy Batman TV series from the 60s. Throughout the museum, attendees could pause to snap a selfie with a variety of props from Batman movies, including costumes and the iconic Batmobile.

Pulling all of this off was a heroic effort in itself, requiring the alignment of several parties: AT&T and its agency The Collective; Comic-Con, including the group managing the Comic-Con Character Hall of Fame; and the city of San Diego itself, who issued the required permits for hosting the massive stage for the skydiving experience. “Our activation was just one part of a larger one within the museum,” said Shamlin. “There was an incredible amount of coordination and back-and-forth communication.”

From aligning a diversity of experiences to getting several partners (and fans) on the same page, an exhibit on the level of the Batman Experience is a huge undertaking. But together, the multiple layers of the activation culminate in a rich, accessible exploration of Batman, his history and his cultural impact over the decades—a recognition that the character doesn’t need, but certainly deserves.

Physical activations are great for impressing an in-person audience, but they can pull double duty by engaging with audiences far away as well. In fact, they should.

The online buzz, PR and social media engagement produced by an impressive physical experience can be well worth the cost when done right. The secret to a good experience? It’s one that “compresses time and space,” says MediaMonks Director of US Production and Partnerships Chris Byrne. What might sound like witchcraft (or a scary sci-fi plot) is actually a simple strategy for producing experiences that engage far and wide—here’s how to achieve it.

Treat physical and digital experience as equals.

It might be tempting to privilege physical experience over digital, but an experience that truly engages with a distant audience must not treat digital as an afterthought. When planning out your experience, try considering first and foremost how to create an exciting experience for digital audiences, then look for answers on how physical elements can make it even cooler. The key is to provide your audience with the ability to make significant impacts on the experience no matter where they are in the world—not treat them as a passive viewership who’s watching everyone else have fun.

In addition to the typical geek-themed influencers you’d expect at Comic-Con, the Jack Ryan Experience also invited pro athletes like Ronda Rousey and Richard Sherman to take part. Their presence helped to stretch the experience’s appeal beyond just geek culture while maintaining relevance to the experience’s physically demanding challenges.

Physical and digital experiences go really well together—a bit more like peanut butter and jelly than oil and vinegar. Your approach to extending the reach of any physical experience, then, involves carefully considering how one audience’s actions support (or challenge) the other’s. By striking this balance, you should have little trouble extending your experience’s digital reach.

Curious what the Jack Ryan Experience was really like?

Early in its planning stages, the Jack Ryan Experience was conceived as a game of laser tag in which IRL participants were pitted against the internet. It eventually ballooned into a 60,000 square-foot hyperreal obstacle course that took the form of a Middle East black site, though one quality remained from the beginning: both digital and IRL participants were supported in equal measure. In the project’s final iteration, the competitive aspect between those participating physically vs. online were retained by allowing Twitch viewers to launch attacks at participants while they watched live.

If flashy explosions rendered in VR seem outside the realm of your budget, don’t despair. “It’s not about the size of the interaction, but how you do it,” says Byrne. What really makes the digital interaction click for Twitch viewers of the Jack Ryan Experience is that they get instant visual feedback and can see how their presence makes a mark on the environment by hindering the progress of those attending in-person.

Ask participants to share the fun.

Experiences that are given a life online aren’t bounded by physical constraints, nor should they be bounded by time. Even if your experience or activation takes place during an event, a smart multichannel strategy should allow it to extend beyond the confines of its event or hosting stage. From microsites that promote the experience before and after to highlighting key user-generated content (UGC) collected over its course, plan for ways to attract audiences no matter where—or when—they browse.

UGC played a key role in the Jack Ryan experience’s success. At the experience’s bazaar segment, for example, participants were tasked to fulfill small missions that involved puzzle-solving, engaging with actors and taking photos. These small challenges helped participants insert themselves into the world of an IP, then share that experience with their friends. Automatic video capture also provided participants with a custom video of their visit that they could also share to social media.

Some participants even walked away with some swag, which also provided them with something to share and brag about online. And that’s an important note to remember: UGC also has the potential to ignite a sense of fear of missing out (FOMO) in digital audiences, prompting them to sniff out more information or to follow along with the event from afar. In fact, encouraging FOMO was among the top goals for the Jack Ryan experience to build buzz: “The throughput wasn’t the intent,” Eric Shamlin told the audience at the DigitalLA summit. “FOMO and social conversation were the intent, along with PR response.” Consumers want to strike a human connection through digital media, and sharing their good experiences—wish you were here!—is a key way to do it.

Broaden the audience with influencers.

One key way to share the fun is to invite influencers to participate in your experience, then broadcast their impressions to their online audience. While partnering with influencers aligned with your niche is a great idea, you might also consider working with someone who can extend beyond the first demographics that come to mind.

Today’s consumers privilege experiences over things, while brands seek to capture audiences’ attention in unique and innovative ways. A natural trend in response to both is the brand activation: moments or events that reinvent the space around them or make the impossible, possible.

Experiential events may range from offline installations to comprehensive, larger-than-life livestreams that compress time and space to deliver wild experiences to far-flung audiences. Experiential and brand activations typically build buzz around a brand or product, but most importantly they should celebrate what makes those things unique through creative, inventive spectacles.

At the 2019 SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas, for example, on-demand food delivery service DoorDash celebrated the festival’s love for tacos and its own penchant for fast, dependable delivery by inviting attendees to a tiny home installation, where hungry participants could experience at-home delivery away from home. By ordering through a custom app and even answering a door to get their meal, the activation made for a fun twist on the experience of dining out—or in.

While this style of experience is rewarding for those who are able to attend, why not share the fun with a wider audience? Bolstered by streaming platforms, live activations add a new layer to the experience through audience interaction. “Live experiential is all about building innovative and interactive experiences while amplifying their online reach through livestream opportunities,” says Ciaran Woods, Producer at MediaMonks São Paolo. Through live experiential, brands can scale up the experience and go beyond simply building buzz.

Tiers of Amplification

Every experience has an air of FOMO (fear of missing out) about it, making them great for prompting user-generated content and social buzz whether online or off. For simpler experiences that aren’t broadcast to live platforms, this can manifest in providing Instagram-ready spaces or share-worthy moments. When influencers are added to the mix, you can take the conversation even further. For example, laundry detergent brand Skip invited influencers to try on outfits in front of a smart mirror that measured their excitement about them, allowing them to take home anything that scored high on the excitement meter. The event resulted in footage and UGC that drove conversation online about the brand.

But social only goes so far, and is often one-sided in terms of audiences living vicariously through the fewer in-person attendees. Live experiential can offer all the social amplification discussed above, while also providing a more level playing field on the amount of influence and enjoyment that distant audiences can have with the experience. And that interactivity is key: according to Woods, “Viewer interaction must be ingrained in the experience. The viewer has a say.” In other words, live experiential should not only ask viewers to watch, but to act.

Portraying the Brand Value

The best experiential activations reflect their brands’ offerings in a fun, unique way. Take Xfinity’s “Project Dead Zone” for example, in which paranormal investigators broadcasted their exploration of the Winchester Mystery House—the largest haunted house in the US—to an audience of over 3 million live viewers, who offered the investigators words of encouragement via Periscope and Twitter.

In this case, the tech behind the broadcast itself highlighted the brand’s value. In order to broadcast all throughout the spooky house, the crew made use of Xfinity’s xFi Pod series of WiFi extenders. As viewers watched in horror while investigators disappeared one after another, one thing that never went missing over the course of the stream was a stable connection.

Finding this value and creatively building upon it is among the most fun parts of designing an experience. It can also be the most challenging, especially when it comes to making such ideas a reality. For organizations that don’t know where to start their idea (or how to execute loftier goals), a creative and production partnership can help to lend shape to the experience—all by keeping viewers’ experience in mind. “What makes these experiences cool is having a commentator booth you can cut to, or a reporter on the ground,” says Woods. “Basically, treat it like the Super Bowl.” Because a key aspect of live experiential is how it will be broadcast to far-away audiences, it’s important that brands don’t lose sight of production needs.

Supporting User Interactions

Because viewer interaction is essential to live experiential, brands interested in hosting such activations must familiarize themselves with interactions and features unique to the livestreaming platforms available. While live experiential can be platform agnostic, designing your experience with specific interaction triggers in mind helps to make it the best it can be.

Perhaps the most feature-rich of the major livestreaming platforms is Twitch, which supports open-source, custom “Twitch Extensions” that prompt viewers to interact with a stream in unique ways. These can include minigames that relate in some way to what users are watching, heatmaps tracking viewer cursors, scoreboards, voting and more—because the technology is open-source, the possibilities are endless.

The fact that Twitch has such robust viewer interactions supported lends to the fact that it’s purely a livestreaming platform. It also has a more niche audience, though alternatives such as YouTube and Facebook offer massive userbases and reach. Facebook’s major interaction outside of chat is its emoji-style reactions: viewers can select an emoji that represents how they feel about what they’re watching in that specific moment. And don’t forget more mobile-focused broadcast platforms like Periscope and Instagram, which are lighter in terms of features but lend a unique level of authenticity.

No matter the platform (or platforms) you choose, “the trick is to build a system that can translate those interactions into real-world effects,” says Woods. This requires a mature technical understanding and a flair for innovation—and is an area in which working with a creative partner from the earliest stage of the project makes the most sense. In addition to making these interactions possible, a partner may also develop an entire content package for how the experience can enjoy a life beyond the initial broadcast—like through film.

No matter the type of experiential you seek to support, the key is to highlight what makes your brand unique in a fun, innovative way—then reward your audience for their enthusiasm to engage with it. Integrating online platforms through social sharing or livestreaming helps to spread that sense of fun far and wide, providing brands with the opportunity to lead the conversation that surrounds them. It’s time to go big or go home—but no matter where you go, ensure your audience is provided with opportunities to engage.