Michael Jordan never got extra points because his cross-court slam-dunk looked pretty. His game was strictly numbers driven: sink it and the score totes up. The tendency among most marketers is to approach event promotions the same way. Drive sales, move units, then check the tally at the end of the day. But such narrowly quantitative measures fail to collect other categories of information that should be judged when evaluating a promotional event.
“It’s science and art,” says Steven Woods, the newly appointed president of Pierce Promotions, a Portland, ME-based agency with a heavy emphasis on events. “Yes, you look at daily numbers. But you also look at how you’ve enhanced the relationship with the consumer, that day and further out.”
Those intangibles count too. “Putting dollars to the value of event marketing and other face-to-face marketing programs is a challenge,” admits Steve Weiner, president of Ascent Talent, Chicago. “I have yet to see a good way to measure the impact of sampling [and other promotions] at street fairs, for example. But [brands] do get value from a personal interaction between the consumer and the product.”
Tracking longer term
Short-term evaluation needs to be supplemented with a longer-term perspective, they each suggest. Pierce and other a few other agencies are starting to collect data from consumers months and even as much as two years after an event to evaluate the impact it may have had on the brand awareness and buying habits. This is then compared to a control group of consumers who did not attend the original event. “A valid statistical pool would be about five to ten percent of attendees at a retail-based event or two to three percent of attendees at a festival event,” Woods says. It requires a significant investment in database resources, but with clients such as Unilever and Gillette asking, agencies are finding a way to provide such analysis. Several agencies are contracting out data management functions, while others (including Pierce) are setting up long-term tracking in-house.
New technology innovations can help. Mass Connections, which specializes in “retailtainment” events for Wal-Mart and other mega-retailers, is evaluating ways to measure repeat business, ways that go beyond reading scan data in the weeks after an event, and comparing that to weeks when no event occurred. “We’re looking at ways to measure the after-effect of an event,” explains Sherry Smith, team leader for national accounts at the Cerritos, CA-based agency. The firm has been working on the development of a club card or courtesy card that consumers are given at an event. They are asked to present the card to cashiers when making future purchases of the brand, and in exchange the buyers get various “membership” perks. “These are specifically not retailer cards. They are to be used to follow up purchases of that brand,” Smith says. Mass Connections is floating the card concept to several brand mangers that invest heavily in retail events, but so far none have committed to a trial.
What can you measure?
For now, its focus is on measuring execution, because there it exerts some control. In fact, Smith says, Mass Connections tracks staff productivity exceptionally well, thanks to its new electronic clock-in/clock-out card, used by field staff at any register as they enter and leave a retail location. By making a small purchase (less than $2) with a specially programmed credit card, staffers are logged into a reporting system that can feed data to the agency, the retailer and the brand manager. Hours in store can then be weighed with other register-based data, such as merchandise moved, coupons redeemed and other quantitative variables.
While computerized reports are useful, they don’t fully replace the impressions of agency account managers and the brand owners who are on the scene. “We send all our account executives, no matter what their level of seniority, into the field to conduct at least two events per year,” says Smith.
Post-event, Mass Connections not only evaluates how it did for its brand client. It also evaluates how the local staffing and execution agency (it maintains a roster of over 300) did its job. It distributes annual “report cards” that evaluate how the agencies did in such areas as punctuality, clean up and execution of paper-work. Top-scoring local firms, an elite group of about 90 agencies across the country, get the bulk of assignments from Mass Connections.
Ascent relies not only on its own field supervisors, but also on reports by senior people sent by the integrated marketing agency and the brand manager. (The agency is currently using a paper reporting system, but plans to convert field teams to a Web-based productivity tracking system “in the next few months,” Weiner says.)
“Watching consumers interact with your product at an event provides lessons that translate eventually into better branding — and the value of that is intangible, nigh on impossible to quantify,” says Woods.
Calculating the ‘fun’ quotient
“RETAIL ENTERTAINMENT IS A DEFINITE TREND,” says Sherry Smith, team leader of national accounts for Mass Connections. “And it is becoming much more than selling cheese on a cracker.”
Mass Connections has exclusive contracts to run retail-based events for TARGET and WAL-MART. Its creative approaches to events can be low-cost but high impact. For example, it runs the Dubble Bubble bubble-blowing contest, now entering its fourth year as an event in every Wal-Mart store in the U.S. Drawn to the event area by Wal-Mart P.A. announcements and spots on Wal-Mart Radio, children try to blow the biggest bubble per store (special “bubble meters” are used to measure). Top winners receive certificates from the store organizers and go on to regional and national competition. The top three finalists win gifts and show off their talents on NBC’s Today Show for a “Dubble Bubble Blow Off.”
Brand marketer CONCORD CONFECTIONS, Concord Ontario, Canada, makers of Dubble Bubble, made donations from store events to the Children’s Miracle Network for the last two years.
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