Is advertising dying? It’s certainly fashionable to say so. Conventional wisdom holds that traditional media’s grip on consumers continues to slip as they increasingly turn to the internet and their peers for entertainment and purchasing recommendations.

In FEED, a new report by Razorfish, they found that digital brand experiences are having an inordinate sway on consumer purchasing habits and brand affinity. For example, 65% of U.S. consumers report a digital experience changing their perception about a brand (either positively or negatively) and 97% of that group report that the same experience ultimately influenced whether or not they went on to purchase a product from that brand. In a nutshell, experience matters. A lot.

Of course, brands that were “born digital” intuitively know this. Google, Amazon, facebook are pioneering experiential brands.
But what about more traditionally-minded marketers who weren’t born digital? Can they succeed in an experience-driven world? According to Garrick Schmitt the answer is “yes” and here are some of the best:

Red Bull
Red Bull basically pioneered the experiential category. Not only did the brand rise to prominence by sponsoring alternative athletes and lifestyles, it went further by creating its own events, like Red Bull’s Flugtag and even its own sports like Red Bull’s Crashed Ice, which takes over old Quebec with a mix of hockey and motorcross.

Guinness
Guinness may be 250 years old, but it’s acting like a much, much younger marketer. The company has embraced experiential branding both literally and figuratively with its “It’s Alive Inside” positioning. For its anniversary, Guinness offered up Remarkable Experiences, including a trip into space. It also released a pub-finder iPhone application with a social media twist. More impressively, the brand created the Guinness Storehouse, a seven-story building that functions as both museum and pub, that has now become one of Ireland’s top tourist attractions. And, more recently, Guinness even wired up its rugby team with RFID tags (including balls and players) to capture a whole range of statistics about how fast, powerfully and effectively the game is played.

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