Beyond the ballroom: How integrated campaigns turn experiential into a year-round growth engine

On this episode of Inside the Brand Experience, Invision’s Rodrigo Espinosa joins host Laliv Hadar to discuss how integrated campaigns transform experiential from one-off events into year-round growth engines. Discover why human-to-human connection, AI-driven personalization, and content atomization are redefining B2B marketing.

Transcript

Laliv Hadar:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Invision podcast, Inside The Brand Experience, where we discuss trends and approaches that cut through the noise and allow brands to own every moment with their audiences. Today I'm super excited to welcome Rodrigo Espinoza to the podcast. Rodrigo joined us, he's, I think, at the 60 day mark approximately, joined us not that long ago as SVP Integrated Campaigns, and I'm super excited to chat with him today, hear more about his background, what he's done, and also what he is excited about doing at InVision. It's definitely an area that we're looking to grow in as an agency. We've dipped our toe in some campaign work over the last couple of years, and we know there's a lot of opportunity to take experiential forward into more of a campaigns approach. So, Rodrigo, welcome to the podcast.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Thank you. Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

Laliv Hadar:

Excellent. Maybe to open up, do you want to tell us a little bit more about your background, even prior to InVision, and the things you've done and what brought you to this moment in time?

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Sure, thank you. I've been involved in experiential marketing now for, gosh, long time, two decades plus, and even going back to my college years when I ran my own agency of event and travel agency out of my dorm room. And so I've been involved in this space forever and really love it and love the design aspect of it, love the brand aspect of the manifestation of a brand and a physical environment, digital environment, and spent time at large agencies, spent time doing global work both in Latin America and other regions, spent time leading strategy teams, spent time leading business development teams and client services teams. So I've been able to see the whole gamut of what it takes to really create an experiential program that has an impact for brands and for our clients. It's been a great ride.

Laliv Hadar:

That's awesome. And as you think about your role at InVision and sort of taking the reins here, what are some things that you're excited about and that you see within the industry, how it's evolved, and where it's going?

Rodrigo Espinosa:

I mean, we're in such a dynamic space. I mean, the industry's evolved so much. COVID was clearly a significant point in time that changed our industry and changed so many different industries five years ago. And being part of InVision is really where the excitement kind of comes in. You have 30 plus years of an excellent organization creating campaigns, messaging that drives people to action, and that's really at the core of experiential ultimately does, which is create an environment, create the manifestation of a brand, create a design that ultimately is moving a brand forward in some shape, way, or form from a business perspective, cultural perspective, growth perspective. And so, for me, coming and joining InVision at this particular moment in time with our fairly new CEO and her vision, and she likes to say going from beyond the ballroom, which is where our core is, is an exciting time as a catalyst of that growth.

I think what's really fascinating about, and one of the many unique things about InVision, is that we are experts in moving people emotionally, in crafting messages that emotionally resonate regardless of the channel. And so from an integrated campaigns perspective, we've already won awards on that front, we've done this work for quite a bit of time. My job is to accelerate that work. But it's really comes second nature to us and our clients know that, which is if you're looking to really drive your business forward from a communications perspective and experiential perspective, InVision knows how to do that from a human-to-human perspective. It's an exciting time to be here and be part of that evolution.

Laliv Hadar:

Absolutely. Yeah. Love that. Okay. When you say integrated campaigns, that is one of those marketing terms that I think people may have different potential interpretations of. In the land, particularly of B2B marketing and beyond really, what does an integrated campaign mean in practice? And then how does that differentiate from a standalone experience or event?

Rodrigo Espinosa:

That's a great question, and yes, it's important to define integrated campaigns or even just marketing as a whole, right? They cut such quite a wide wrath. From our perspective, integrated campaigns is the expertise of seeding a message throughout different marketing channels. So whether you have a keynote or on an expo floor or an event or a digital campaign that has some outdoor aspects to it, how you see that message across different marketing channels to drive an audience, a variety of audiences to some action, that is obviously predetermined from a business perspective and a brand perspective, that's how we view integrated campaigns. And so we are taking our expertise of 30 plus years of knowing how to do that really effectively for top tier brands around the world and seeding that and engaging across different channels.

To circle back to one of the parts of your question is that experiential was at its origin, an actual moment in time, right? A moment in time or something popped up, literally it was a pop-up or a B2B conference or a B2C engagement or a Super Bowl, if you will. Something that popped up in a moment in time where a brand used that moment in time as a catalyst to impact people. But, again, it was within the guardrails of that moment in time. In today's marketing landscape, those moments in time are happening 365, 24/7, and globally, right? With the advent of obviously of social media, which we have now 15 years of, but with the advent now of AI that we're leaning into as well.

But you have, essentially, everyone that is participating as their own media channel, and you want to create an environment where that moment in time expands throughout different aspects of where you're meeting your audience on their terms. And so experiential, the way I see it, is really at the center of the marketing strategy now. It's the content engine, it's taking that emotional aspect of what is happening at that moment and expanding it. And we're very, very good at doing that. Our integrated campaign practice, as I noted, has won some awards for doing this very, very well. And we're just looking to expand that expertise with our current and future clients.

Laliv Hadar:

Great. Love all that. When I think about the world becoming more and more digitized, it's just everything is around us with AI. And certainly, like you said, social media has been around and now gen AI and all the other aspects of that that are making our world much more automated. It seems that the importance of gatherings and experiential and really feeling a brand sort of like in person or somehow coming to life is becoming more important. Would you agree with that? You talked about human-to-human and so would love your perspective on the overall trends going on in the industry?

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Yeah, I think that technology is a wonderful catalyst of so many different things. And we're here in Silicon Valley and we live it every day. And I think what with AI now very much in the forefront, what's really happening is the long tail effect, which is a book from the late '90s, early 2000s, Web 1.0, which it talked about bookstores will disappear, but those rare, unique community focused bookstores that offer a value beyond the actual tangible product of a book are the ones that are going to survive. And I think from an experiential perspective, we're in that place right now where gathering together as a community, as a tribe, gathering together with like-minded people or a diverse group of people to learn or to learn something different is really becoming a long tail scenario. It's a unique aspect of living our digital lives. To your point, we're always in digital, that we're looking for that physical, more intimate gathering of humans.

And as humans, we are tribal by nature. We look for that environment and we are in the business of crafting, designing those elements that drive people to want to be there, to want to share, to want to gather and have the conversations that are ultimately fruitful for whatever endeavor they're gathering to be around. We're very big believers in the human-to-human aspect. People talk a lot about B2B business-to-business marketing or business-to-consumer marketing. I've always been a believer of a human-to-human. I think regardless of the channel, it's still humans who you're marketing to and humans who you're trying to persuade certain behaviors forward. And now, more than ever, because we're so digitally engulfed in messaging, that human aspect is becoming paramount for every brand, whether it's a business-to-business brand or they see themselves as a business-to-business brand or business-to-consumer brand or H2H brand, human-to-human brand, which is where I lean more towards.

Laliv Hadar:

As we think about switching it to the client perspective of how they view things and what's in it for brands, what is, I guess, the value for the client coming at it from more of an integrated perspective versus looking at these programs as potentially one-offs? How do they benefit from that? And also a secondary part of that, do you think that brands themselves are creators? Like we talk about the humans being creators these days, everybody has social media, everybody can claim they're an expert on every topic, but where do brands sit in that world? Are they also sort of creators, do you think?

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Yeah, I do. I think every brand is a media brand and every brand has the potential to express themselves and have a voice and a tone. And you're seeing that with so many different brands, whether they're in the B2B space or the B2C space of having their own voice, essentially, their own voice, their own tone, their own positioning. And I think that that's paramount in today's marketplace. And when you look at designing an experiential program, you look to the tone and the tenor and the voice of a brand and, "Are they serious? Are they funny? Are they a combination or they're extroverted or introverted?" And our creatives have a phenomenal way of uncovering that and finding the purpose of the brand and how that purpose exemplifies itself into the marketplace with its audience. And so, yeah, I absolutely believe that all brands are essentially media brands, and if they're not in today's marketplace looking at it that way, they're really missing out on potential equity there and engagement in a more authentic way with an audience.

From an integrated campaign perspective and an integrated marketing perspective, I think it comes down to a number of different things. One is an economic leverage, right? As an organization internally or externally, and you're creating a lot of content around that and messaging, you want to be able to leverage that messaging across different platforms, across different times zones or timestamps. So there's an economic aspect to taking what you're creating for that particular moment in time and expanding it across an integrated plan. And then there's also the fact of consistency, right? Brands need to be consistent, their messaging needs to be consistent. And if you don't look at it from a, "This is what we're going to communicate, this is how we're going out into the world," and you just kind let it take on its own life versus a strategic plan across platforms, you're going to run the risk of the messaging not resonating the way you'd like it to resonate.

Now, there's some flexibility in that because you want audiences to co-create and own and own part of that messaging as well, back to the creator economy. But the core aspect really needs to be there from what the brand purpose is, the brand manifestation, and what we're saying to certain audience segments. And finally, from an integrated perspective, oftentimes brands have internal audiences, they have external audiences, they have partner channels, they have executive audiences, they have the press as an audience, they have future clients as an audience, current clients. So there's a lot of segmentation of who they're speaking to. And in our practice and the way we look at it from an integrated perspective is we're experts at being able to craft a message across those different segments that is still consistent, but will resonate with those audience members in the way they want to hear that audience or the way they want to feel that message.

Laliv Hadar:

I think that's really at the core, right, is understanding audiences and audience behaviors. And that's something that we definitely take pride in at InVsion in terms of the insights and being able to get at the behaviors that are underlining that experience. So I think that's core. And you said things like content. I think of something we've talked about for some time is around content atomization, events and experiences act as a forcing function. So just one example of efficiency is, "All right, you've created all this great content for your event. How do you take that and then utilize it throughout the year and find a way to create a campaign where you're utilizing that content on an ongoing basis to continue to engage your audience going forward, really leveraging the content that you've already created for the event?"

So, anyway, that's one thing that came to mind. So I think there's so many examples and use cases. Are there any things that you would recommend? Much of our audience, not all, but much of our audience are event profs and folks that are in the world of events and experiences. If they wanted to dip their toe further into experiential and campaigns, is there something off the top of your head would be a good place for them to start in terms of thinking about a more integrated approach to their own work? Any tips?

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Yeah. Yeah. I think one, embrace AI in a big way because AI is going to take the personalization of an event, the experience of an event, and it's going to put it on steroids, right? You're going to be able to use your bot, use AI to have AI customize your agenda, customize your time there, advise you on where to go, how to go, where to go, all these different aspects. So I think we, in the event space, and we at InVision are certainly embracing AI and bring it into our day-to-day and our campaign and our work and so on. So I think that's certainly somewhere to start for sure today given what's happening in our space and in the marketing space as a whole. I would also say from an experiential perspective, there was a time, a long time ago, where it was an event that started this day and this day and we focused on that and we focused on the logistics of it.

And all that still remains to be very, very important. But I think looking at experiential with a wider lens, a lens that involves an array of different audiences, an of different channels as we've noted, and how does experiential play in that when you look at it through that lens? Which is what we have done very fruitfully with current clients and are doing with some new ones, which is, "Yes, we have this amazing moment in time, we have this experiential, we have the manifestation of your purpose and what your brand stands for. Who are we speaking to? What do we want to say? What is the current state of state? What is the current behavior? What does success look like? Not just in this moment in time with what we've looked at it before, but across the organization and across the GOs, if it's a global program?"

And really look at experiential from that point of view, looking, evolving it from into integrated campaign 24, 365, 7 days a week kind of scenario. And expanding our view or our definition of audiences that we speak to. Oftentimes internal audiences are forgotten and they shouldn't be because they're the carriers of the brand and they're many media organizations in their own right. Sometimes your partner ecosystem is looked at as just a plug-in to an event. And they should be, in my opinion, that ecosystem also is a media outlet and a media moment, and for those partners to really engage and connect with the brand and with the campaign. So really looking at just a lot of different angles where you can really amplify the experiential execution.

Laliv Hadar:

And you've mentioned what is the criteria for success? So I'm curious as to some thoughts, high level on measurement. When you think of an integrated campaign, what are some key things that brands should be looking for that goes kind of above and beyond a survey you might do post-event, right? Is it about more reach impressions? Is it resonance of message engagement, things like that?

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Yeah, I think those are all very good. I think depth of reach when you're looking at, "Did your message resonate with the audiences you were looking to reach and was it fruitful for them? Did they feel that it was talking to them?" I think in the work of integrated campaigns, it's logistics of, "Okay, we're going to do an outdoor campaign, with a digital campaign, with an influencer campaign. We have a keynote coming out of this moment in time as well. We're going to roads show this to another horizontal event, so we're going to be doing a couple of stops along the way at key clients," et cetera. So looking at all those moments as essentially many marketing campaigns that bubble up into a larger marketing campaign. This comes from the world of brand and brand layers and a brand pyramid.

And so the measurement is going to be different depending on what your objectives are. And it might be measuring an integrated campaign can get fairly complicated because, by the sheer nature of it, you're speaking to different audiences in different channels. And so those channels sometimes resonate differently as well, right? You're not going to measure a digital channel the same way you'd measure an outdoor campaign. And so look at the channels, look at the audience and see if the messaging is really cementing or landing, if you will, with that particular audience, and that'll tell you how successful the campaign is going to be or was.

Laliv Hadar:

Yeah, great. Those are some great words of wisdom to folks just starting out in this path. So I think there's a lot of great things to look into. You gave us a lot of food for thought today, I think. Any other thoughts on, I guess, the future of experiential? We touched on AI, we touched on some elements of content. Anything else, I guess, on personalization that you want to touch on or other just trends that you're seeing?

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Yeah, thank you. I mean, it's such an exciting time, and we say this always because it's always an exciting time, but it's an exciting time to be particularly an experiential because experiential gathers increased momentum and increased view within the C-suite of an organization from a CMO to a CFO to the CEO, experiential becomes much more impactful. And from an industry perspective, we are in some ways just growing up and starting to be in those rooms more than we may have been in the past. And those rooms become several different budgets start to play into there, whether it's PR budget, data budgets, et cetera, social media budgets, as well as event budgets. And so for us, as an industry, you really have to be able to represent and speak to the impact that experiential has in those rooms with varying budget owners and other agencies that have other disciplines and have it work well together, which is ultimately what integrated campaigns strives to do.

And so I would just say too, from an industry perspective, think beyond the moment in time, if you will, and really look at as experiential as the catalyst of the content engine. And ultimately, and I use this all the time, but ultimately the manifestation, physical and digital, of a brand. And for me, that's where we really get traction as an industry, as an discipline. And it's an exciting time because lots of C-level executives and senior level communications executives are looking to us, to our industry, to really have an impact on their business objectives. And that's a great place to be.

Laliv Hadar:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, we have exciting times ahead and really want to thank you for coming on the podcast today and speaking with us. I appreciate your time, Rodrigo, and tell our audience to be on the lookout for the next episode of Inside The Brand Experience.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Yay. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Laliv Hadar:

Sure thing. Great. Thanks again-