AI brings performance marketing to experiential strategies

For Michael Kors, Technology, Humans And Taste designed its “Walkbox” Shanghai activation that made guests the stars of their own brand fashion film by using a 50-foot LED-lined walkway shot with three cameras and featuring an AI editor that created more than 300 fully-finished films in one evening. Creating those films without AI would have required a large team of editors. The films generated millions of engagements across socials from celebrity and influencer posts.

“With AI, we aren’t limited to measuring throughput, views or ticket sales,” Phillips said. “We challenge ourselves to craft an ROE (return on experience) for anything we create. This metric or series of metrics aims to better understand the emotional and marketing value of an intelligent experience. And unlike more traditional experiences, we always make adjustments as both the machine and our team learn more about how humans interact.”

Creative tech and experience design shop Deeplocal, which has created experiences for clients ranging from Google to psychedelic rock band The Flaming Lips (frontman Wayne Coyne is actually an experience designer at the agency), uses its SaaS platform, Gumband, to collect data on event visitors and evaluate which experiences people are engaging with most.

For one of Deeplocal’s retail clients, Gumband collected and analyzed data from in-store pop-ups and then passed that data onto corporate to be aggregated with other retail data including foot traffic and sales.

The agency said currently the data can only be captured once a guest starts to interact with an activation but it’s working on expanding capabilities to include insights from onlookers, as well as which exhibits attract crowds and which people are ignoring.

Deeplocal expects to release its latest product to use in experiential marketing in June: A cameraless sensor that can gain these types of insights in real-time. All of the data being collected by Gumband is anonymous in order to protect people’s privacy and stay compliant with GDPR and CCPA regulations.

More on agencies: How PR agencies are using AI

Tracking technology has recently gotten some flack for seeming to infringe on people’s rights. MSG Entertainment, the owner of New York’s Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall, was criticized when it was reported late last year that it was using facial recognition technology to identify and turn away lawyers who represent people suing the company.

Deeplocal Creative Technologist and Chief Innovation Officer Patrick Miller said all of the data Gumband collects is for the purpose of enhancing the experience for the brand and visitors; the agency is careful not to infringe on people’s privacy while doing so. He said Gumband never collects information on specific individuals; it won’t say: “Oh that’s Patrick Miller and we know everything that he’s looked at today; we can sell more stuff to him.”

“We have to be willing participants of it otherwise it quickly crosses the line to creepy,” Miller said. “People want their privacy so there needs to be some value exchange. If I’m at an event and the event wants to know who I am, the experience that’s being created should be much more valuable to me as a user going through the experience.”

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