Making our Debut at the Event Marketing Summit in Chicago! #EMSCHI

Last week TEAM president Sean O’Toole and Bacardi Brand Manager Jason Dyke made TEAM’s inaugural presentation at the Event Marketing Summit. The summit, organized by Red 7’s Event Marketer magazine, is a 3-day conference with almost 1000 attendees gathering in Chicago to learn from thought leaders in experiential marketing.  While Bacardi has taken part in years prior, this was the first time that we had been asked to participate, and it was an even bigger honor given that the summit focuses on brand presentations and rarely invites agencies to speak.

On Tuesday May 17, we held our 45 minute presentation about the convergence between social media and traditional engagement marketing being the sweet spot for brands to win the heart, minds, and ultimately dollars of their consumers.  Our goal with our presentation was to show, rather than just tell – after all, we ARE an experiential marketing agency! To that end, we created a mini-event in the conference room.  The room was filled to capacity – we were in the largest room which holds approximately 330 people – and attendees were lined up outside the doors waiting to get in well in advance of our 4:15 scheduled start time.  As the attendees walked in to the room, which was fully branded with “Bacardi Together” signage and a state-of-the-art bar loaded with Bacardi product and branding, brand evangelists offered guests a Bacardi Cuba Libre (after all, we were the last presentation of the day, and it WAS happy hour back in Miami!).  Throughout the presentation, TEAM’s Bacardi Portfolio mixologist Pablo Moix was creating signature Bacardi cocktails and afterwards, offered to show interested attendees how to make a classic Bacardi Mojito.  After the presentation was over, we created a second event at a local key account, the Bull and Bear, which featured several Bacardi drinks on special, including the new Arctic Grape flavor, which was very well received.  We had our wonderful brand evangelists interacting with guests, inviting them to engage with interactive Bacardi games on iPads and the summer-themed green screen photo station. Despite it being an unseasonably chilly Tuesday night, the place was packed and a great time was had by all.

The presentation highlighted the Bacardi Together platform and tactics of “1 million likes” and the million-sample Flavor Blitz, which is a strategic and massive-scale example of the important symbiotic relationship between events in the real and cyber worlds.  It was a terrific forum to explain how an actual experiential program, in conjunction with the harnessing of the power of social media, works in tandem to build brand affinity, create memorable brand experiences, and continue building a loyal consumer base for Bacardi and their new flavors.  We tracked the evolution of experiential marketing and how we have created ground-breaking experiential programming for Bacardi over the course of our 2-decade-long relationship, and discussed where we see the industry going in the near future. If you’re not already familiar with some of the incredibly powerful applications for Augmented Reality, you should definitely acquaint yourselves!

We had a terrific time in Chicago, and look forward to our next opportunity to continue the conversation with our experiential marketing peers. If you’d like to continue the conversation with us, or would like to learn more about the content of our presentation, please contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Please take a look for yourselves by checking out our photo album entitled Chicago Event Marketing Summit 2011 at https://www.facebook.com/TEAMenterprises.

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