Consumers can be forgiven if they forget American Express is a financial services firm and not an event producer. From staging concerts at the Apollo Theater to designing an interactive video experience featuring N.B.A. players to providing U.S. Open tennis fans a professional swing analysis, the company’s activations touch several areas of its cardholders’ lives.
Spending on marketing appears to be paying off. The company maintained a 90th-place ranking on the Fortune 500 list last year and reported $34 billion in annual revenue with a net income of $5.8 billion.
Not every company gets a chance to launch a new initiative on Good Morning America, but American Express used the high-profile platform in November to debut the American Express Unstaged Taylor Swift Blank Space Experience app, which let users explore the mansion used in the singer’s “Blank Space” video and engage with characters. The app was a digital outgrowth of the long-running American Express Unstaged concert series, a partnership with YouTube and Vevo that launched in 2010 and stages concerts at landmark venues with famous filmmakers directing the show for a live stream. Recent combinations have paired Pharrell Williams and Spike Lee for a show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and Tim McGraw and Bennett Miller for a show at Hammerstein Ballroom.
Many of the company’s events have a common thread of providing cardholders with exclusive experiences. It is a longtime partner of the Tribeca Film Festival, and this year cardholders had access to the New York premiere of the film Misery Loves Comedy. The company is also exploring new partnerships. In 2015, American Express signed its first sponsorship deal for major music festivals with Coachella and Stagecoach, which previously only accepted cash.
For sports fans, American Express has continued to build on its U.S. Open American Express Fan Experience, a 20,000-square-foot activation at the tennis tournament in New York that in 2014 included professional swing analysis as well as a hologram of tour pro Sloane Stephens. R.F.I.D.-enabled wristbands easily let fans share their experiences on social media. The brand hosted a similar fan experience at golf’s U.S. Open in Pinehurst, North Carolina. During the N.B.A. All-Star weekend in New York, American Express invited basketball fans to engage in a digital video experience called Pivot that allowed them to manipulate their views of several star players’ signature moves from a console. The images were displayed on life-size screens.
Other events are more clearly tied to American Express’s services. Its U.S. Small Merchant Group presented Online’s Day Off, a partnership with merchants that primarily do business online: Birchbox, Bonobos, and Rent the Runway. The event, held in September in New York, started with a thought-leadership panel followed by a day of shopping events at the merchants’ brick-and-mortar locations. For the launch of its EveryDay Card—intended for small, frequent purchases—a splashy party incorporated items such as groceries and drinking straws into the decor.
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