It beats banner blindness.
The average person sees somewhere north of 5,000 ads a day and remembers almost none of them. An experience interrupts that pattern because it's not asking to be ignored — it's asking to be participated in.
Outdoor Advertising
How to Run a Successful Experiential Marketing Campaign
You’re walking down the street and you spot a sign over a bed of flowers: “Smell however the f*ck you want.” You stop. You smell the flowers. You take a photo. You post it.
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What We Do
What Is Experiential Marketing?
Experiential marketing — sometimes called engagement marketing, brand activation, or event marketing — is advertising that audiences live through instead of look at. Instead of telling someone what your brand stands for, you build a moment that lets them feel it firsthand.
That moment can engage any of the five senses. Smell, taste, touch, sound, sight — the more channels you fire at once, the deeper the imprint. Marketers call this multi-sensory marketing, and research consistently shows that engaging multiple senses at once is one of the most reliable ways to build long-term brand memory.
Advertising your audience lives through instead of looks at.
The format is wide open. An experience can be live, virtual, or hybrid. It can last twenty minutes or a six-week tour. It can sit on a sidewalk in SoHo or roll across the country in a custom-wrapped truck.
Types of Experiential Marketing
The format menu keeps getting wider. A few of the most effective types we run for our clients:
- Pop-up shops and brand activations — temporary retail spaces designed to drive foot traffic, social shares, and earned media
- Mobile billboard tours and sampling trucks — branded vehicles that bring the experience directly to your audience’s neighborhoods
- Street teams — boots-on-the-ground brand ambassadors handing out samples, swag, and information at events, transit hubs, and high-traffic corridors
- Interactive installations — walls, sculptures, and murals built to be photographed and shared
- Augmented reality (AR) and immersive tech — phone-triggered experiences layered onto outdoor placements
- Pop-up sampling and tasting events — food, beverage, and beauty brands letting consumers try before they buy
- Stunts and guerrilla activations — high-impact moments designed to break through and go viral
- Hybrid digital experiences — physical activations with online components that scale reach beyond the location
Your imagination is the only ceiling. The best campaigns we’ve run started as ideas that sounded a little crazy in the pitch meeting
Examples of Smart Experiential Marketing Campaigns
These are real campaigns we’ve helped bring to life — and a few of our favorite examples of the format firing on all cylinders.
Klarna
To reach millennial dog owners, we went where they actually spend their weekends — a Brooklyn dog park. We built an interactive mural covered in hundreds of playful, real dog toys. The dogs came for the toys. The owners came for the dogs. The phones came out for the photos. The tagged posts came for days.
01
Maroon 5
We built a custom vending machine stocked with limited-edition Maroon 5 cassettes and concert ticket drops. Fans queued. Phones came out. Lucky winners walked away with tickets they couldn’t have bought online if they’d tried. Built around the two ingredients that turn a passing crowd into a posting one: scarcity and surprise.
02
Afterpay
Financial products are notoriously hard to make exciting. So we didn’t try. Afterpay handed out free ice cream from a branded truck with one perfect line on the side: “like eating the whole carton and spreading the calories out over 6 weeks.” The slogan did the explaining. The ice cream did the converting. The crowd did the rest.
03
Fenty
80,000 flowers. One unforgettable invitation.
To launch Fenty Eau de Parfum, we built a billboard out of 80,000 real flowers — every variety hand-picked to represent a note in Rihanna’s unisex fragrance. The wall toured the country with one perfect line: “smell however the f*ck you want.” The result was the kind of organic social saturation that paid media can’t manufacture — every passerby became a publisher.
04
Why Experiential Marketing Works
It drives purchase intent like nothing else.
Industry data on branded events suggests roughly 85% of attendees walk away more likely to buy. That's a number digital ads almost never touch.
It builds emotional connection — which builds revenue.
Marketing campaigns that create real emotional connection have been shown to grow new accounts by around 40% and produce customers worth ~52% more in lifetime value than the average buyer. Experiences are one of the most reliable ways to manufacture that connection at scale.
It generates free media.
Every phone in the crowd is a distribution channel. A great activation gives people something to film, post, and brag about — and that organic reach is worth multiples of what you paid for the activation itself.
It gives you face-to-face data.
You learn more from ten conversations at a pop-up than from a thousand survey responses. Experiences put you in the same room as the customer, in real time, with their guard down.
It builds loyalty cheaper than acquisition.
Retaining an existing customer costs roughly 5x less than landing a new one. A great experience turns a one-time buyer into a regular — and turns a regular into someone who recruits their friends.
8-SHEET ADVERTISING — NEW YORK
How We Measure Experiential Campaigns
The old knock on experiential was that you couldn’t tie it back to revenue. That excuse doesn’t fly anymore. Here’s what we benchmark on every campaign:
- Foot traffic and dwell time — how many people showed up, how long they stayed.
- Sampling-to-purchase conversion — when sampling is involved, what percentage of recipients become buyers.
- Branded search lift — increase in organic search volume for the brand in the activation market post-event.
- Social share volume and earned reach — how many posts the activation generated and how far those posts traveled.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) shifts — pre- and post-event sentiment among engaged attendees.
- First-party data capture — email, SMS, or loyalty signups generated on-site.
- Sales velocity in the activation market — week-over-week revenue lift in zip codes the campaign touched.
Why Work With DASH TWO
We’ve been running outdoor and experiential campaigns since 2009. We’ve handled wild postings, billboard takeovers, mobile tours, sampling programs, and street teams in every major US market. We know which permits you’ll need, which neighborhoods will work for your audience, which vendors will deliver, and which corners of the internet will pick up the campaign once it’s live.
We work directly with brands and with their agencies. We’re media buyers and producers, not order-takers — which means we’ll tell you when the idea won’t work, and we’ll bring you a better one.
8-SHEET ADVERTISING — LOS ANGELES
Experiential Marketing Campaigns FAQ
What's the difference between experiential marketing and event marketing?
Event marketing is one type of experiential marketing. Experiential is the broader category and includes pop-ups, mobile tours, street teams, AR activations, branded installations, sampling programs, and more — anything where the audience participates rather than just observes.
How much does an experiential marketing campaign cost?
Budgets range widely depending on scope, footprint, and duration. A single-city pop-up can run in the low five figures; a national mobile tour with custom builds, permits, staffing, and media support can run into seven. We’ll scope to your budget, not the other way around.
How long does it take to plan an experiential campaign?
Simple street team and sampling activations can be ready in 3–4 weeks. Custom builds, permitted installations, and multi-market tours typically need 8–12 weeks of lead time to do right.
Can experiential marketing work for B2B brands?
Yes — and it’s underused there. Trade-show takeovers, executive dinners, hosted experiences at industry events, and targeted activations near client offices all work. The tactics shift, the principle doesn’t.
Do you handle the production and the media buying?
Both. We produce the activation and buy the surrounding outdoor, digital, and social media to amplify it. One team, one timeline.
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Digital and Outdoor Advertising Agency. Expertise in the science of digital and the art of the outdoor.
214 S. Locust St. #200
Inglewood, CA 90301
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