For brand experiences, the most important metric is emotion

Experience can work like nothing else. In a world where people are bombarded by anywhere from 500 to 5000 marketing messages a day, brand experience offers a far more deep and meaningful connection between brands and people than any other medium.

But if your brand experiences don’t move people emotionally, they aren’t working as hard as they could or should.

Building memories, building brands

In order to build brands, we have to build memories. And in order to create a memory, we must make people feel—not just think about—the experiences we create, in order to deliver results for our clients.

Creating value by moving hearts and minds

I recently attended the EX Awards at the 2016 Experiential Marketing Summit. The most acclaimed work made people laugh, cry or wonder. We at Jack Morton took home a Silver Award this year for our work with T-Mobile’s Un-carrier campaign, a brand experience that convened some of the biggest names in film and music in order to encourage customers to binge watch the shows and movies they love—without watching their data. The other award-winning campaigns, too, created memorable experiences that moved hearts and minds, creating both short- and long-term value for those brands.

Experience scales, but more resonant experiences achieve greater scale

A brand experience—whether it’s an activation, an event, or any of the wide range of things we do for our clients—often takes place over a relatively short period of time. Scaling beyond the experience is critical to delivering maximum ROI.

We approach this by thinking strategically about pre- and post-event activities in social and other media. But the most crucial element in achieving scale is creating extraordinary brand experiences and content which are built on unique, engaging ideas that elicit emotion and demand engagement.