The Last Mile of Marketing: Event Marketing Playbooks For Any Budget With Clay Lundquist, Founder of Exposure Agents

Tim Rowe Whether you want to go one-on-one with an audience, launch a product, host a promotion, or just get back to your grassroots as a brand, the last mile of marketing has always been and will always be putting your product in the customer's hands. And it may not necessarily be a new or novel idea. But it is getting harder and harder to do in a meaningful way. Because gone are the days of propping up a soapbox by the docks and hawking your wares. They're replaced instead by the challenges of sourcing reliable brand safe talent to rep your company and coordinating all of the logistical pieces, getting the permits, making sure everything and everyone shows up on time and that no one pours coffee in their lap in the process. Bottom line is it can be hard to show up in the way that you want to. And therein lies. Bottom line, it can be hard to show up in the way that you want to, and therein lies the opportunity, the obstacle. Because if the difference between climbing Everest and sitting at home and playing video games is someone carrying my gear for me, then, well, I'll see you at the top. Because the obstacle is the way. And if it takes a Sherpa to get you from where you are to where you want to be, then I say, omblé. Clay, thanks so much for being here.

Clay Lundquist Thanks for having me.

Tim Rowe Absolutely. We're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about how as a brand, we can use events as a piece of the overall marketing puzzle. It's something that, that you work on exclusively. This is your sole purpose and focus is, is helping brands bring these sorts of things that we're going to talk about to life. But maybe as a starting point, why do you believe, why is it so important for brands to show up in the real world?

Clay Lundquist I think there's a real magic when you actually can touch and feel a product. We see so many things advertised online on billboards, stuff like that, but actually being able to go out and be like, okay, this is what it is. I get to play with this. I get to taste it. I get to demo it. There's something to that, especially because all these products are costing us money. So actually being able to get it in our hands before we spend the money is a real It's a real opportunity for, you know, brands to, you know, tell their customers, like, we actually care what you think of this, this brand as you, you know, and we want to bring it to you.

Tim Rowe It's funny. I don't know how many of the listeners know this, but before I, before I got into advertising, I actually sold cars and we had a saying, and that saying was, the feel of the wheel is half the deal. And it was really to emphasize the importance of getting your customer to take a test drive because they're making a, you know, what is referred to as the second largest purchase of our adult lives. So it would make sense that all of the other products in our lives, we would want our customers to experience them as well. 83% of retail still happening offline in a brick and mortar store. When we think about showing up in the real world and we think about the explosion of direct to consumer, where maybe is the opportunity for D2C brands? We see some brands do pop-up shops and some really clever things and executions like that, but is there more on the bone there? It feels like there's an opportunity for D2C to become more real world.

Clay Lundquist Yeah, I think with, you know, with DTC, you know, there are other pop-up shops, but that's the 1% that can actually do that. I mean, those are very expensive activations. A lot of time goes into it. I talk to different DTC founders all the time, and that's not even on their radar or something to do. Maybe be a piece in a pop-up shop, but not like do their own and actually promote their own. Whereas with events, You can really start with nothing, if you want, and then it's the moon. If you've got something that's edible, you can go out with a permit and a wagon and basically go and sample it to people on the street. That's all you need. You need a person that can actually talk about the, the, your brand and the correct way, some product and start handing it out.

Tim Rowe It's pretty scrappy. Like that's something that I don't want to say anyone could do, but I mean, I feel, I feel like I could pull that off.

Clay Lundquist Yeah, exactly. And I've seen founders do it. I know founders do it. And the other part of it is, the other reason to do it is for market research. You should do it as a founder. You should be out there during these first things, seeing what people think of your product. Because you're going to know right away, especially with something they can taste or, or, you know, play with, you know, you're going to know right away what they feel about it. I mean, on the other side of it, you know, if you have a bigger product, like I worked a lot with a cross net. Sure. That games out in parks and let people play them. Um, what do you mean?

Tim Rowe Like, just like when, so, so for folks that don't know cross net, it's the four way volleyball. I think there's four way soccer. Now pickleball, it's exploded into a whole backyard game franchise, but maybe describe what you mean by that. So setting up the product in this case meant. What setting up the, the, like the volleyball net, the four way volleyball net, just putting it up in a park.

Clay Lundquist Yeah, we had different variations of our events, but the most simplistic one was we would, you know, literally go on a beach somewhere, set it up, and just kind of wrangle people in to play it. Interesting. And we see from that, you know, a lot of people are like, what is this? And they would come over and play the game. And there were potentially customers, whether it's the people that are playing it or the people that are, you know, just going, you know, walking by it. And I've done that with several games at this point, you know, that, Just being able to see what it is versus seeing it online or in an ad, it's a different feeling for people. And that's the bare bones, grassroots version of it. Your next version is becoming a part of an event, sponsoring into an event. And that could be anything from a farmer's market to a festival to a sporting league. There's all sorts of partnerships you can do. seed through that and events should be a piece of the puzzle of that.

Tim Rowe And from a content standpoint, it seems like the sponsorships or doing some of these grassroots, we're going to go set up a net. From a content creation standpoint, you're now able to start leveraging assets around these things, whether that's content created around the sponsorship, content created around people trying this game for the first time. And now we're going to run that. We're going to take that and run that as our social media or paid content. Do you see, or I'm sure that you've seen brands execute on a strategy like that. What do you see when you can combine, you said that kind of special magic moment in the beginning there, but when you can layer those things together, the offline and the digital, it seems like that would be a big unlock.

Clay Lundquist Yeah, I mean, I really like it when a brand looks at it like an ecosystem with what they're doing as far as events, their ads, their out-of-home, legacy media, things like that. Events is a piece of the puzzle. We're going to actually be talking to you face-to-face. I think it's the most intimate of all of them. because you're really with a customer, a potential customer, and letting people demo your product or taste it if it's a food product. And then that's a piece of the puzzle that probably has come about after they've seen it online, seen it in social, seen it in ads, seen it out of home. And then If they're, you know, they still haven't bought the event portion of it is a really good way to get them across the, the, the finish line.

Tim Rowe Just thinking about kind of like the, the social proof hierarchy where a review is good, right? We will, a review helps me to make a decision. Hey, someone else who has a challenge similar to me made a similar purchase, you know, decision to, to solve their, their problem of, uh, I don't know, maybe it's. Cappuccino in the morning, you know, reviews are a helpful source. And then we've kind of got user generated content that grassroots feeling credibility distributed digitally. And then maybe it's a one-on-one recommendation, but at the top it is, it always comes back to, there is no replacement for putting the thing in your customer's hands. On that spectrum, between maybe like sampling the product and kind of like seeding the market, I think of this story with Red Bull when they launched and they crushed up a bunch of empty cans and stuffed them into garbage cans around stores where they sold Red Bull. guys seeding the market, if you will, for, for, you know, purchasing. Hey, there's a bunch of demand here for Red Bull. You should get some too. How do you think about those two different things? Sampling versus seeding? What's, what's kind of the playbook between those?

Clay Lundquist I think it just depends on the product. Sampling is mainly with the food stuff, something that's a package good or from a restaurant type place, like your McDonald's of the world, places like that. They can do sampling. You know, things like a granola bar, gum, sodas, anything you can find in the in the grocery store, not anything, but a lot of things you can find specifically snacks are samples, you know, and I've even done stuff with a brand, you know, where it was called almond accents, okay, you know, from a palm brand, and it's the almonds that go on your salad. So we set up at high-end food shows and food festivals and made salads for people with almond accents on them. So it doesn't just have to be your product. The product that we were promoting were a piece of a bigger, you know, sample. Compliments, like the thing. Complimenting it, you know, actually being like, It would have been a different experience if we would have said, Hey, here's a, you know, a little cup full of almonds. Well, everybody knows what that tastes like. Well, we gave it to them on a salad that, you know, we, you know, spent a lot of time trying to figure out, you know, the right, the right salad for each event. And now they're like, okay, I really get how this works. Um, and you know, what the, what the benefit is.

Tim Rowe So that's sampling. Yep. How is that different than seeding?

Clay Lundquist Seeding, I look at it for products that you can't really taste, have the taste and feel. So take a game, take some kind of technology. you know, any kind of product, a car, like ride and drives, you know, or, you know, you put a car out at a, at a, a baseball game and, you know, just kind of let people, you know, get in it, feel it, stuff like that. Anything like that, that's kind of on the bigger spectrum, that's more seeding. You're putting it into a place where it makes sense for those, those, that group.

Tim Rowe What are, maybe I'm a, I'm a team that has scaled beyond a few people. I have product market fit. I've, I've kind of gotten past the handcrafted founder stage. And I want to look at bringing in a team to help enable some of the execution here. What are the things, maybe the potential pitfalls, what are the things that most commonly. go wrong or that we should keep an eye out for if we're thinking about using events as a part of the puzzle?

Clay Lundquist Sure. I think the biggest thing is just not knowing what your actual goal is. Oh, that's interesting. Is your goal to get it out to the most people possible? Is your goal to get the right people? It's like any other kind of advertising and finding places that fit. So the actual value. Yeah, venue or, you know, someplace that fits because not every brand should be in every place. You know, you see places that they're, you know, shoehorning them a brand into something. And you're like, I don't really understand how this makes sense for me being at a soccer game. You know, when I'm looking at some, some brand, why is, why is my electrical contracting company?

Tim Rowe Yeah. At this soccer tournament.

Clay Lundquist Yeah, exactly. Somebody talked him into it and maybe they're just fans, but that's probably a lot of… The problem with some kinds of events as well as sponsorships is brands, they're doing it for two reasons. One is the one you hope for is they're doing it to sell more product, to really get it out there. The other is they're doing it because they think it's cool and it looks good. Either way is great for the person selling the sponsorship, but not both of them are that beneficial to the brand.

Tim Rowe It can, and then that comes back to sort of the brand risk elements of. Maybe not showing up in the way that people are going to expect you to show up potentially just missing the mark completely. No one even notices, right. That I guess that the worst than that scenario is someone does notice and they, and they're, they're, you know, off put by it. But, uh, you know, one level better than that is just no one notices. And that's obviously not the outcome that anyone wants. So it makes sense to, to get those alignment pieces, right. Organic and gorilla versus sponsored. So, so we, we, we got the venue, right? We've got the, the targeting, right? We know what our objective is by doing this. What's your take on doing things kind of unsanctioned versus the, uh, the official route we'll say.

Clay Lundquist I think both have a clear, you know, and there's advantage to both. I mean, events, once you go in the sponsorship route, can get very expensive. And you're not going to see a clear ROI a lot of times because you just can't. It's really hard if you're sampling Gatorade to be like, okay, did this drive a lot of sales for us? It's really hard to tell. So you could spend a boatload of money and not really be able to pinpointed back to wins. Now, my view of that is, again, it's a piece of the puzzle. So you're not going to get a clear view, but it also is going to be one of those things where you're just another thing in the ecosystem of, okay, they saw the ad, they saw the billboard, now they saw the event, maybe it went by. So it kind of gets split up between that. Doing stuff guerrilla is cheaper, but you're looked at not quite the same way. It's not quite the same thing as if you have, you know, a cool setup or a vehicle or something like that, and you're supposed to be in front of this festival or at this game. If you're, you know, the person rolling through there, yeah, people will take it and they'll try it, but you're not looked at as kind of the same Like you're supporting that festival or you're supporting that team, stuff like that. So it just kind of depends what you want. Now, it's like I said, it's a very cheap way to get product into people's hands and there's nothing wrong with that. So I would do it all day as long as you do it by the book.

Tim Rowe And we've seen there's probably a lot of brands out there too that that's part of their kind of brand makeup is being a little bit disruptive and a little bit against the grain. I, you know, I'm thinking about a great campaign years ago by, by a friend, uh, all terrain shout out Adam. Um, they worked with. It was specifically with Converse, with Chuck Taylor, and they were doing this cool street execution and turning pictures of people in the shoes into wheat pastings. And it was a totally guerrilla execution, but it made sense. It was aligned to the brand and obviously that street culture. So it seems like there's an opportunity for brands to align to some things like that, but it's an important consideration of where do you want to fall next on that spectrum. And how do you want brands to perceive, or how do you want your customers to perceive you?

Clay Lundquist Yeah, and a lot of those things like that, they can look organic. They might not be. You might have permission. That's a great point. You know, a lot of people do like… Make it look organic. Yeah, they'll do like digital… like digital projections on buildings and stuff like that. And you're kind of like, Oh, that's cool. They just kind of went out in there and did that, you know, kind of like graffiti, but now they've got permitted, you know, they've done it, it permitted all these things. So you can have that kind of crossover. So you can kind of seem like, you know, the bad boy, but. You did dot the I's and cross the T's to, to get it right.

Tim Rowe You're still a fortune 500 company and you don't want to end up on the news and getting sued.

Clay Lundquist Because the worst thing about doing something straight guerrilla is if you put a lot of time and money and effort, you know, whether it's through your own company or your agency, is that getting a shutdown before you even begin. Makes sense. So, and that can happen, you know, in guerrilla. So you do want to, you know, kind of, there's some checks and balances you want to take care of with, with guerrilla even.

Tim Rowe Well, Clay, I'm sure you're working on a lot of stuff that's top secret and we'll find out about after the fact, but maybe give folks a little bit of an idea of the things that you're working on. Where's your attention actively these days? What projects can you maybe tell us a little bit about?

Clay Lundquist Yeah, right now, I mean, my core focus is on, as far as doing experiential stuff, is I work with top fast food restaurant. And so we do a food truck for them. And, you know, we're out there sampling world famous fries. I'm guessing you know who it is.

Tim Rowe World famous fries. Who could that be?

Clay Lundquist You know, who's got the best fries? I can't say. So we've been doing that one for a month. Right. We've been doing that one for many years, but you know, that's a legacy product that it still makes sense to, you know, everybody's tried a McDonald's fry. You know, everybody probably in the world has tried a McDonald's fry, but it still makes sense to, you know, market it to people as, you know, remembering like, Hey, these are out there and they are still good and getting them into people's hands. We get a lot of questions, you know, why we would do that. But it's like, it's because they're so iconic, iconic. And so we've been doing that promotion with different products, not just that, but different products for, uh, You know, over a decade now, um, and different food launches, different, um, you know, different activities that they're, they're promoting and stuff like that. So that's a lot of, uh, what we do on my side. Um, as well as I work with, you know, different brands, a lot of them are in the food side. And then from time to time we'll work in, you know, telecom and different things like that. And, you know, some, uh, some other tech stuff.

Tim Rowe It's interesting to think about. Obviously McDonald's is iconic and does not need to do that additional element. They don't need to do that. They're still going to serve billions and billions, but there becomes a level of obligation. Almost, almost the responsibility. Once your brand has transcended that level too. I just think about as you're saying that, like the last time I've, I had McDonald's French fries. I really couldn't tell you probably a decade and a half, but as you're saying that I'm thinking about all the memories I had going there with my family, with my sisters, going to the play place, going there with friends. Like it's a piece of Americana, frankly.

Clay Lundquist Exactly. Exactly. Hey, Tim, you want to roll that part back? Yeah. So let's do that one over. I was very I was rambling on it.

Tim Rowe Oh, you were perfect. You were you were I thought you were excellent.

Clay Lundquist I thought I felt like I was rambling.

Tim Rowe Let's let's let's let's take it up wherever you want to take it from. Yeah, right.

Clay Lundquist You know, ask me that question again. And like what you're working on. I just went like, Yeah. The way you work out. Let's just go there. I'll make it, I'll make it quicker. Okay.

Tim Rowe Cool. Um, Clay, I'm sure you're, you're working on a lot of top secret stuff that we won't find out about until after it's happened, but maybe, uh, maybe share with us some of the projects that what's maybe something that you're working on actively right now. Uh, get the juices flowing for, for folks. Now they've got this master's class on events. What are you working on?

Clay Lundquist Yeah. So right now, I mean, on the experiential side, which is the event side, you know, my main focus is on a couple brands. One of them is a brand that's been with us for over a decade now. McDonald's. With them, we've created several different activations over the years, but right now our biggest one is around a food truck. So we are out sampling our world-famous fries as well as other products and different things that are coming out. We also utilize the vehicle and other setups to promote different different things they're promoting like delivery and their app and things like that. So that's probably our biggest thing right now, as well as we've got some other clients that we're working on that we do, you know, samplings. We've got a couple people we're just helping doing on the sponsorship side and working with, you know, actual founders and bringing founders and sponsors together. in smaller events. So I do a little bit of everything when it comes to it. I kind of one of those people that gets bored. Even this past weekend, I produced a festival and part of doing that festival was working with brands to figure out the best way for them to activate and get to the attendees at the festival.

Tim Rowe That's, I guess, coming full circle on the idea of last mile marketing, bringing that connection back into the festival. How can we connect your brand with the people that are here? Clay, I can't thank you enough for being here and sharing as much as you have. We use Latin long to give the directionals in the real world. Give folks the Latin long. Where can they get in touch with you? Learn more about what you do.

Clay Lundquist I mean, the easiest place to get me is I've got clay at exposureagents.com. That's where I really promote the sampling, the seeding of different products, specifically working with a couple of large brands, but I'm really getting into working with the smaller D2C founders and things like that because I think there's a real need for them right now. I'm not a big social guy, but you can find me on LinkedIn.

Tim Rowe You can find them. That's that's how I originally found clay many moons ago, many moons ago. And, uh, it's a, it's an exciting time, especially now to see as many. New brands coming into trying things like events. Clay. I know this is going to be a helpful resource for a lot of folks. So thank you again.

Clay Lundquist Perfect. Thanks for having me.

Tim Rowe I appreciate it. If you found this to be helpful, please share it with someone who could benefit as always make sure to smash that subscribe button and wherever you're listening, leave the podcast review. That's how you help us grow. We'll see y'all next time.