When Charlie Horsey talks about experiential marketing and using digital platforms to target Gen Y, it’s all about micro-communities. It’s the idea that building a relationship with a small group of a brand’s target audience and engaging with them in authentic ways—i.e. satisfying a need—leads to advocacy that will produce stronger results than a blanket campaign.
This strategy defines the work of MKTG, a New York-headquartered agency Horsey leads on projects for clients including Diageo, Nike, Google, and Nintendo. “We’re finding a lot of our clients want to move away from mass communication to more micro-targeting, and that identifying and corralling these smaller groups is going to have a greater impact,” Horsey says. “It serves along the lines of dialogue instead of messaging. Companies are going to gain so much more by having a relationship and developing an understanding of those need states from consumers.”
Perhaps the company’s most notable project in past year was MKTG’s marketing activation for Beats by Dr. Dre in London during the Summer Olympics. The audio products company created headphones customized with national colors and flag patterns and built a pop-up lounge for athletes competing in the games. The exposure proved invaluable when Olympians sported the headgear on television and tweeted about the products. As Beats wasn’t an official sponsor of the games, the effort became controversial, with the International Olympic Committee prohibiting athletes from only mentioning official London 2012 partners on social media. Beats was cleared of wrongdoing but had already become one of the buzziest brands at the Olympics and saw a significant increase in sales.
