Corporate sponsorship has traditionally been utilized as a marketing tool in the summer music concert and festival scene. However, in this interactive day in age,
showing people a brand or telling them about the brand is no longer enough.
Your audience must experience the brand for themselves to truly be won over.
PayPal has taken this to heart with its sponsorship of the Governors Ball Music
Festival this weekend. In its sponsorship of the festival, PayPal is providing
free lockers for festival goers to store their personal belongings and wallets.
It is also partnering with festival vendors so that guests can pay through the PayPal
app, eliminating the need to have cash on hand, access an ATM, or deal with
malfunctioning on-site credit card processing. By using PayPal and “checking
in” festival goers will also be able to redeem $5 offers with several festival vendors,
yet another method for users to experience the brand first-hand. PayPal is also
providing additional free wi-fi to make sure that its app services and payment
processing goes off without a major hitch.
Leveraging mobile technology to help drive sales and promote
its brand of “quick convenience” certainly gives PayPal a competitive advantage
and more visibility by tapping into the summer music festival market. This is especially
important to gain loyalty from customer and detract conversion to other digital
payment processing competitors such as Google Wallet and the emerging bitcoin
movement.
“Factory 360 worked with them to create
organic opportunities that can help
consumers, which in terms of PayPal branding, hopefully logs the positive experience in their minds.”[1]
This method of finding “organic”
partnerships in the digital marketing arena between live performance and
businesses is expected to continue growing. Recently T-Mobile announced a
partnership with SFX Entertainment, a global leader and producer in music
festivals, live entertainment, and digital entertainment focused on electronic
music culture. The companies believe that this type of ongoing partnership will
allow them to connect with millenials not by splashing an ad in front of them
but through a more experiential deep, cultural root.[2]
"The nature of sponsorships has
fundamentally changed," said Anuj Nayer, PayPal’s senior director of
global initiatives. "People want to experience it themselves. They don't
want to be shown or told. They want to experience it themselves and make their
own decisions."[3]
I believe that this trend towards experiential acquisition
of customers will only continue to grow. Businesses will be forced to be much more
creative and outward-facing in how they develop digital marketing strategies, especially
within the realm of live performance events.
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