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One more thing: experiential economies and the future of public relations

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Content i
One More Thing:
Experiential Economies and the Future of Public Relations

By

Andres Munt

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(STRATEGIC PUBLIC RELATIONS)
December 2014

ii
Table of Contents
Dedication .................................................................................................................................. iv
Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................................v
List of Figures ........................................................................................................................... vi
Executive Summary ............................................................................................................... vii
Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1
1. History of Public Relations ............................................................................................. 4
2. Public Relations in the 20th Century ............................................................................ 5
a. The Role of Public Relations ................................................................................................... 6
b. Key Functions of Public Relations ......................................................................................... 7
c. Building Trust Through PR .................................................................................................... 8
3. Public Relations Today .................................................................................................. 10
a. The purpose of PR in the present day .................................................................................... 10
b. The greatest challenges to PR today ...................................................................................... 11
i. Freedom of Information............................................................................................................................... 11
4. The Future of PR ................................................................................................................ 13
a. Navigating a Two-Way Media ................................................................................................. 13
b. Re-focusing Crisis Management ............................................................................................. 14
c. Re-inventing PR within the Experience Economy ............................................................... 15
5. The Stages of Marketing a Product or Service ............................................................ 15
a. The Theories of Gilmore and Pine ...................................................................................... 15
i. Commodity Businesses ................................................................................................................................ 17
ii. Goods Businesses ......................................................................................................................................... 17
iii. Service Businesses ...................................................................................................................................... 17
iv. Experience Businesses ............................................................................................................................... 18
b. The Distinction between services and experiences........................................................... 18
c. Case Study: The Cost of Coffee ........................................................................................... 19
6. The Experience Economy: Origins .............................................................................. 25
a. Origins of the Experience Economy ................................................................................... 25
b. Pine and Gilmore’s definition .............................................................................................. 26
i. Examples of Experience Economies in Action................................................................................... 26
ii. Growth of the experience sector ....................................................................................................... 28
iii. Criticism ................................................................................................................................................... 29
c. Experiential Marketing ......................................................................................................... 32
i. Marketing responses to the Experience Economy ............................................................................. 32
ii. Transmedia in Marketing ........................................................................................................................... 34
d. The History of Experiential Public Relations ................................................................... 35
i. Announcers ....................................................................................................................................................... 35
ii. Carnival barkers ............................................................................................................................................ 35
iii. Door-to-Door salesmen ............................................................................................................................. 36
iv. Modern Day Missionaries ........................................................................................................................ 36
7. Subcultures ....................................................................................................................... 37
a. Targeted Approach ................................................................................................................ 37
iii
b. The Word-of-Mouth Effect .................................................................................................. 38
c. Using Events to Attract Broader Audiences ...................................................................... 39
8. The Shift to Experiential PR ......................................................................................... 42
d. Digital spaces and the 24-hour news cycle......................................................................... 42
e. Building communities ............................................................................................................ 43
9. Experiential PR in Entertainment ............................................................................... 44
a. How does experiential PR fit into entertainment? .............................................................. 44
b. Interview with Kelly Bush Novak, Founder and CEO of ID PR .................................. 45
i. The importance of the full service agency............................................................................................ 47
f. The Role of Celebrities in Building a Brand ...................................................................... 48
i. Appearances and conventions ................................................................................................................... 50
ii. Interview with Todd Jones, Celebrity Operations Director, ECCC .......................................... 50
g. Interview with Natalie Bruss, VP of Digital Strategy at ID PR ..................................... 53
i. The Digital Strategy Shift ........................................................................................................................... 53
ii. Alienation and Isolation ............................................................................................................................. 57
iii. Leveraging Your Individual Brand ...................................................................................................... 58
10. Experiential PR in Branding ...................................................................................... 59
a. Make or Break: The Value of Events..................................................................................... 59
b. Interview Heather Greenfield, Senior Vice President of Brand Strategies, ID PR ... 63
b. The Apple Model ....................................................................................................................... 64
i. Experiencing the Product ............................................................................................................................ 64
ii. The Store Environment as Experience ................................................................................................. 65
11. Quo Vadis: Future Growth & Advice ....................................................................... 66
a. Communication .......................................................................................................................... 66
b. Determining Goals ..................................................................................................................... 67
c. New Technologies ....................................................................................................................... 67
d. Pitfalls of Technology ................................................................................................................ 67
e. Empowering the Consumer ..................................................................................................... 68
12. Potential Downsides of Experiential PR ................................................................... 68
a. Cost ........................................................................................................................................... 68
b. Relevance ................................................................................................................................. 69
c. Adverse Effects ....................................................................................................................... 69
d. Hype and Disappointment .................................................................................................... 69
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 70
Works Cited ............................................................................................................................. 71
Appendix A .............................................................................................................................. 76
Appendix B ............................................................................................................................... 82
Appendix C .............................................................................................................................. 87
Appendix D .............................................................................................................................. 97
Appendix E ............................................................................................................................ 109

iv
Dedication

I dedicate my thesis to my family and friends, for everything you have done for me…

My partner Nick who keeps me running.

My mother Miriam and siblings, Miriam, Melanie, Jake and Lucas for being there all day,
every day.

My grandparents Sarita and Sergio for being the best cheering section anyone could ask
for.

My life-long partner-in-crime Tonny Uy, for always saying it.

My mentors Katherine Oleson, Chris Paul, and Laura Jackson for teaching me that
arriving at an answer was never an end point but a beginning.

Finally my beautiful babies: Lucy, Varys, Thenardier, Harley, Ozymandias and Melfi.
The most wonderful companions in the world and the brightest light at the end of every
tunnel.

v
Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to advisor Burghardt Tenderich and readers
Laura Jackson and Jennifer Floto. Thank you for encouraging me to pour all of my crazy
ideas onto a keyboard and helping me produce the culmination of my academic journey.

I would also like to give my sincere thanks to the wonderful family at ID PR, Kelly Bush
Novak, Courtenay Barrett, Natalie Bruss, Leanna Balaban, Heather Greenfield and Emily
Loren, for helping me carve time out of insanely busy schedules so that I could pick at
the most brilliant minds in the field.

Thanks to my fanboy spirit animal, Craig Byrne, for encouraging my made-up words and
providing insight into your fascinating world.

And a final thanks to Emerald City Comic Con’s Todd Jones, for helping throw the best
party in the Pacific Northwest.

vi
List of Figures

Figure 1: The Progression of Economic Value ................................................................. 16
Figure 2: Economic Distinctions ...................................................................................... 18
Figure 3: The Price of Coffee as an Indicator of Varying Economic Stages .................... 20
Figure 4: Regional Specialization in Experience Industries ............................................. 28
Figure 5: : Size of Experience Industries sub-sectors ....................................................... 29
Figure 6: ComicCon 1 ....................................................................................................... 39
Figure 7: ComicCon 2 ....................................................................................................... 39
Figure 8: ComicCon 3 ....................................................................................................... 39
Figure 9: Sony PlayStation 4 Launch ............................................................................. 600
Figure 10: Xbox One Launch 1 ...................................................................................... 611
Figure 11: Xbox One Launch 2 ...................................................................................... 611
Figure 12: Xbox One Launch 3 ...................................................................................... 611
Figure 13: Xbox One Launch 4 ...................................................................................... 611
Figure 14: The Apple Store in Soho… ........................................................................... 655

vii
Executive Summary

This paper argues that experiential public relations are the future of the field of public
relations, partly due to the growth of experiential economies themselves. Drawing on the
literature in the field and on primary sources such as interviews, the thesis emphasizes
that public relations is in and of itself about creating a certain experience and selling that
to an audience, so therefore, the notion of the experiential economies best reflects the
refinement of the field of public relations in the 21
st
century.

1
Introduction

What is Public Relations today? In an age with decreasing amounts of privacy,
how can the field of public relations tap into the need for firms and individuals to both
maintain privacy and communicate?
This study was conducted in order to assess the significance of a shift from
commodity and service based economies to experiential economies, particularly as seen
within the entertainment industry, and through the complicating factor of new
technologies, which add a number of challenges for the field of Public Relations. This
report will use a qualitative method to analyze the chronological development of Public
Relations, the Experience Economy, and the ways in which these two developments have
already intersected over time. This method allows this report to show changes over time,
which will help the field of PR to position itself within experiential economies and to see
where Public Relations has already changed and in which areas changes are most urgent.
This report will then use a combination of case studies and interviews to determine the
present-day challenges to Public Relations, and the opportunities for future development
offered by experiential economies.
This report will look at the history and present-day status of Public Relations, to
examine the current position of the field in modern day economy, and the ways in which
Public Relations currently responds to the challenges of experiential products. This report
will then examine the origins and nature of experiential economies in detail, looking
especially at the theories of Pine and Gilmore, to show how Public Relations has played a
vital part in the development of this economy, which relies heavily on the creation and
management of strong brand narratives and the development of two-way relationships
2
with consumers. This report will show how experiential Public Relations, in some form
or another, has existed since at least Roman times.
This report will then examine how Public Relations today meets or falls short of
the demands of the new Experiential Economy, as defined by Pine and Gilmore, to
determine what changes PR must undergo, and what challenges it will face as a
consequence of this shift. This report will focus particularly on the role of PR in the
entertainment industry, and providing a more in-depth look at the specific roles of the
publicist, event planner, and branding manager to see the challenges each faces. This
report will provide a number of case studies of successful experience-oriented businesses,
including Comic-Con, Apple, Xbox, PlayStation, and Starbucks, to show how Public
Relations should contribute to the development of immersive experiences. This report
will also provide a more in-depth look at the specific roles of the publicist, event planner,
and brand manager to examine the challenges each faces, and to see how these roles are
positioned within the shift from primarily outward-facing PR to the inward-facing needs
of companies that provide experiences rather than commodities. This report emphasizes
the many dualisms and contradictions inherent in the contemporary practice.
In its final part, this report will focus on how the advent of the Internet changed
the way business is done, and how the rise of social media changed the conversations that
brands have with consumers. From a public relations standpoint, the Internet has led to
both manifold opportunities to engage with consumers, as well as a new attitude of
eternal vigilance in order to monitor any situation before it explodes into a socially
mediated disaster. This report will offer predictions and advice for Public Relations by
3
looking at the goals and potential pitfalls inherent in experiential products that rely
heavily on transmedial communication and new technologies.
Finally, this report will offer an overview of the downsides and weaknesses of
experiential PR, to give insight into the immediate obstacles the field must address in the
near future. Public Relations has always played a vital role in the creation of experiences,
but this report will aid the field in identifying how PR can change its focus and position
itself at the heart of the experience economy.

4
1. History of Public Relations

Public Relations may only have been formally and institutionally defined in the
early 1900s, yet the concept of employing an intermediary to address and manage the
public is as old as civilization itself. The ability to communicate, negotiate, and translate
(in terms of language but also the translation of culture) lies at the heart of humanity’s
transcendence over the animal kingdom. People share knowledge, people trade, and thus
people build. People build a business, a village, a government, an empire. As Bernard of
Chartres proposed: We stand on the shoulders of giants (Salisbury & Chartres, 1955, p.
167), but we only do so because those giants had the power to communicate with others,
to negotiate a workable and livable society, and to build on each other’s strengths.
Spokespeople have held a place in businesses, organizations and governments
since the dawn of humanity, or at least the dawn of economic or social inequality. James
Grunig and Todd Hunt found PR’s origins in the ancient world, in which politicians and
religious leaders developed strategies for communicating with their public (Gruning &
Hunt, 1984). Nolte traces the earliest forms of PR even further back, to 4,000 year old
cuneiform writings that contained advice on how to harvest crops. (Nolte, 1979) More
recently, Cutlip et al. proposed four stages of PR history from Ancient Genesis to the
American Beginning, followed by the Industrial Revolution (the “Middle Years”),
especially Manchester Capitalism, and eventually the structural formation of Public
Relations as a fundamental discipline of professional communications at the beginning of
the twentieth century. (Broom, Cutlip, & Center, 2009) Theories abound, but consensus
seems to be that Public Relations has occupied a place in society for nearly as long as
5
civilization has existed, though the field was only defined as such in the last century or
so.
2. Public Relations in the 20th Century

For Bernays, whose Propaganda is one of the early key texts in the field of Public
Relations, the 20
th
century concept of PR arose from a need to not just communicate
information, but rather to benignly manipulate that information to fit an agenda that
sought to further the cause of progress. (Bernays, 1928, pp. 125–6) As Sigmund Freud’s
nephew, Bernays recognized early on the tremendous emotional and psychological
potential of PR and propaganda to motivate the public. Bernays’ work exudes an
infectious enthusiasm for propaganda as a positive and transformative tool for public
relations; a call to action to better mankind and to build a stronger community. As a result
of optimistic advocates such as Bernays, the boom in propaganda between the First and
Second World Wars brought Public Relations theories to the mainstream, for better and
for worse. (Bernays, 1928, pp. 9–13) The enthusiasm for propaganda in the 1920s and
1930s backfired after World War II, when propaganda’s profound potential for malicious
manipulation became evident from the actions of National Socialists in Germany. Despite
Bernays’ best intentions, propaganda and public relations would experience a radical and
vital split, allowing Public Relations to grow as a field in its own right. On the other
hand, perhaps the field of propaganda itself lacked an effective public relations strategy –
or, anti-Fascists perhaps had a stronger public relations strategy than Fascists and this led
to the interpretation of propaganda so negatively.
6
Returning to the present, this report will examine more recent developments in the
field of Public Relations,
1
within the context of the notion of Experiential Economies. In
order to do so, it is important to first observe and keep in mind the key factors of public
relations in order to understand the importance of the shift from traditional practices
toward experiential public relations.

a. The Role of Public Relations

First it is important to examine the need for Public Relations, and why Public
Relations will need to shift its position to grow into a central component of the
Experiential Market. PR provides the foundation for professional communication
theories. How do practitioners communicate with their public in the most effective and
productive manner, so as to optimize relationships and professional goals? PR begins
with the sociology of human interaction and the psychology of human relationships.
These findings are then adapted into a theory informed by the marketing and
communication needs of an organization. Divorced from its maligned counterpart
‘propaganda,’ as a result of the experiences of World War II, Public Relations has come
to focus on communication rather than manipulation. As Theaker and Yaxley summarize:
Public relations is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say, and
what others say about you. Public relations is the discipline which looks after
reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing
opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and

1
In this thesis, the proper noun “Public Relations” denotes the specific name of the field, including
the literature on the topic, whereas the more common noun “public relations” denotes the practice.
7
maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its
publics. (Theaker & Yaxley, 2012, pp. 7)
PR connects the public to the product without the expenses of marketing, and with
careful consideration of the organization’s client/user-facing image. In that sense, the PR
specialist must be a Jack-of-all-trades who has the business sensibilities of a marketing
team and the psychological insight into the consumer’s needs and desires for both the
product and for the experience he or she has in their communication with the
organization. Through all of this, a PR manager also works to establish brand consistency
and to meticulously sculpt the company’s image.

b. Key Functions of Public Relations

Though the view of what purpose public relations serves, it can be agreed that PR
brings together a variety of disciplines and professions in order to fulfill the following
five key functions or purposes:
1. Identify and analyze target audiences from among the public
2. Bridge the gap between the consumer and the organization
3. Design and maintain a consistent public image for the organization
4. Complement and enrich the organization’s marketing strategies
5. Communicate key information between stakeholders
Each of these points has two commonalities. The first is the maintenance of a
relationship, in some form or another, between two or more parties. Public Relations
people are not merely responsible for communication with the client, but also for
managing internal communications, as well as for situational outreach campaigns, for
example in the event of a crisis.
8
The second commonality between the five key functions is the management of a
human experience. There are many levels on which an organization must consider the
value and impact of experience, and a Public Relations Department must guide and
manage these experiences as much as possible, to ensure consistent and effective
branding, but also to build and strengthen relationships between stakeholders. For
example, one could think about the ways in which a Public Relations team determines
how a customer experiences messages they receive from the organization. Does the
organization want to come across as professional and formal, or fun and informal?
Should customer service conform to a specific image? Should one address a customer as
‘Morgan’, or as ‘Mr. Freeman’? What message should the organization’s marketing
campaign send about a company? Is the company the kind that makes funny viral
campaigns about chickens stealing a mother-in-law’s bottle of wine, or does the company
make suave videos starring Daniel Craig in a designer suit sipping wine in a Tuscan
vineyard?

c. Building Trust Through PR

The more care a Public Relations Team invests in effectively crafting an
organization’s image, the more a client or consumer will feel as if they have a personal
relationship with the company. People build relationships with others on the assumption
that each party has a (somewhat) consistent and predictable personality: John loves
candle-lit dinners and slasher movies, as does his spouse, that’s why they fell in love.
Rupert likes to play rugby, and so does Robert, so they built a team together. Similarly, a
company must strive for consistency, so that its relationship with clients and partners, or
its internal relationships, can grow into a fruitful exchange, and so that its Public
9
Relations team can accurately predict how the consumer will respond to different types of
communication. When communication succeeds, the relationship becomes stronger. And
the stronger and more consistent the brand, the stronger the customer’s loyalty to the
brand will be. (Amine, 1998) In other words, Public Relations crafts an experience that
builds trust and understanding, and that helps each party understand the other’s needs and
desires. This information is then communicated to other departments within the
organization, such as the marketing team, so as to optimize their performance.
Experiences are the fabric from which public relationships are crafted. That is
why it’s surprising that so little has been written about the role of Public Relations in the
Experience Economy. When a company’s primary product is not a commodity or even a
service, but rather an experience, then Public Relations must move from the position of a
bridge between two parties to the very core of the company; it must become the beating
heart that pumps its blood into every artery and vein of the company’s body. No
experience can be crafted for a consumer without extensive consideration of those five
key purposes of Public Relations. The experience must take the audience into account, a
connection must be made between stakeholders, the experience must be consistent to
ensure success, and the experience must communicate a vital emotion, thought, or feeling
of transformation to the customer. This is all the more vital because an experience,
although lacking the transfer of a tangible object, has such a transformative impact on the
customer that he or she is willing to pay for nothing but the sensation of the experience
and the resulting memories.

10
3. Public Relations Today

This report examines present day Public Relations theories and approaches to see
what the future of the field may be. In particular, this report looks at how Public
Relations will play a vital role within the Experience Economy, not only within its
traditional functions, but as a company’s building block for the product itself. This
requires a radical change of PR’s position within a company, but PR must also change its
own attitude towards communication by shifting from a siloed, controlled communication
environment to a highly interactive relationships that demands in-depth two-way
communication. This report will identify the benefits of such a shift, and will offer a
predictive analysis along with advice for stakeholders in the field of Public Relations to
ensure successful integration into an increasingly experience-driven economy. The basis
for this analysis will be the groundbreaking work of Joseph Pine II and James H,
Gilmore, who laid out the economic principles of what may well become the largest
commercial sector in industrialized economies around the globe.

a. The purpose of PR in the present day

Public Relations facilitates a direct connection to an organization’s key audiences.
Public Relations practitioners analyze their client, safeguard the organization’s public
image and reputation, and they build a relationship of trust between all stakeholders.
Public Relations allows a company to manage control over their public image, and to
distribute or obtain the information that is needed to promote a product or service. In an
experiential economy, this role is extended and integrated into the development of the
product itself, which, being an experience, requires a more immediate and immersive
engagement with the public.
11
b. The greatest challenges to PR today

i. Freedom of Information

Among the greatest challenges Public Relations face today are credibility,
managing the impact of social media, and total freedom of information. The latter
challenge is created by the global flow of information on the internet, which is largely
unregulated, unmediated, and impossible to control. Good examples of this would be
BP’s attempts to contain the spread of information regarding the extent of their 2010 oil
spill in the U.S. Gulf Coast. Their attempts were thwarted by the rapid dissemination of
information from a multitude of digital sources that contested BP’s claims. (Vidal, 2011)
Similarly, one can look at the PR challenges of recalling information once it has been
released. For example, Beyoncé’s attempt to contain the spread of a particularly
unflattering concert photo. Where traditional media such as newspapers might easily have
been influenced to omit that photo, crowd-controlled media on the internet rapidly
formed a backlash against Beyoncé’s Public Relations faux pas. (Vincent, 2013)

ii. Crisis Control
The latter case also exemplifies the challenges of social media management.
Public Relations practitioners must refine their understanding of consumer behavior to
pre-empt unfavorable viral publicity, and when that publicity happens nonetheless, the
PR team must apply entirely new forms of damage control to avert or remedy a crisis.
Retractions and apologies may prove ineffective, while a humorous embrace of a mistake
is often much better received on social media. Sincerity is necessary but not in itself
sufficient in PR crisis control today; humor, wit, and reciprocal engagement, that is, a
personal experience, have become paramount. (Kerpen, 2011)
12

iii. Authenticity
The third challenge, establishing credibility or authenticity, requires a delicate
balance of sustained social outreach. Public Relations professionals must create and
preserve a sense of authenticity, which is the antidote to accusations of PR being
primarily about “spin.” The organization’s voice may still be a finely crafted device, but
it must come across as authentic to be embraced by a 21st century audience that has a
unique benefit of exposure to nearly unlimited information and perspectives.
Achieving this credibility and sense of authenticity will require a restructuring of
traditional Public Relations approaches and theories. As Roger Bolton, president of the
Arthur W. Page Society, explains:
Business leaders face change at every turn – from newly empowered consumers
and employees, to different ways of accessing information, to new levels of
transparency. These changes unquestionably create challenges. But by building an
authentic corporate character and building advocacy at scale, chief
communications officers can turn these challenges into opportunities for new
kinds of enterprise success. ("Arthur W. Page Society Unveils,” 2012)
The Arthur W. Page Society has responded to this challenge by unveiling a new model
for corporate communications in 2012, entitled “Building Belief: A New Model for
Activating Corporate Character and Authentic Advocacy”. This model draws on
behavioral sciences to establish four stages of engagement: ("Building Belief…", 2012)
 Forging a Shared Belief
 Spurring to Action
 Building the Confidence to Sustain Behavior
13
 Enabling Advocacy at Scale
Corporations bring together key decision-makers to forge a shared belief, which is then
converted into specific action items. When those actions are successful, they inspire
confidence, which in turn generates self-motivated and authentic advocacy. In short, this
system ensures brand consistency, which brings authenticity as the corporation builds
trust between its various stakeholders, including the public. Authenticity is especially
valuable within the Experience Economy, where the ‘product’ must be unique and
transformative to be successful. (W. P. Carey School of Business, 2008)
2

4. The Future of PR

The future of public relations – Public relations is one of the most rapidly growing, yet at
the same time rapidly shifting fields positioning it in a place that is rife with opportunities
and challenges. It’s important for practitioners to understand and stay at the forefront of
cultural shifts and technological revolutions in order to more adequately represent clients,
their products and needs.

a. Navigating a Two-Way Media

A shift has already been witnessed to a crowd-sourced information sharing
system on the internet, which has created significant challenges for Public Relations,
especially when it comes to information distribution and authenticity. The necessity of
finding new ways to navigate the modern media may mean the death of “traditional”
public relations. That is, one can no longer rely on a liaison with reporters to build a
corporate image or reputation. Instead practitioners must build a two-way symmetrical

2
For more, see also the Page report’s section on experiential marketing.
14
relationship directly with the customer. (Stacks & Watson, 2009) Natalie Bruss, VP of
Digital Strategies at innovative experiential PR company ID Public Relations, explains:
Traditionally the only voice of the brand that companies had was through
advertisements. To me, the biggest and most exciting is how important service
and customer service has become. Like if you think of the history of the Best Buy
Twitter account or @DeltaAssist which was an account I think before Delta was.
It shows brands need to provide value for their customers too and the smart
brands are doing that. It’s different than “I’m going to buy your product” but for
you to choose to actively subscribe that it’s emails or tweets coming to you from a
brand they have to really show that… Why people subscribe to the Orea Twitter
account is because they provide something that actually adds value to my day and
it’s put a lot of accountability on brands to truly add value. (Appendix C)
Reinventing relationships with customer and ensuring that it is symmetrical and
balanced will require the development of new theories of communication, aimed
particularly at social media, that take into consideration the needs of a public with
extensive access to information, as well as the difficulties of crafting a sense of
authenticity within this open access environment. Public Relations must learn to accept
reciprocation from a public that can communicate back to the company directly and other
stakeholders via social media channels, videos, and blogs.

b. Re-focusing Crisis Management

The role of crisis management in PR will change radically as well. As has been
seen in various modern “scandals,” trying to bury information is nearly impossible to do
the digital age and attempting to can often bring more attention to the subject. This means
15
that crisis management must shift from a prevention/containment approach to a
communicative/minimizing approach. This means that crisis management will no longer
be focused on suppressing information, but rather on altering public perception of that
information, and responding with authenticity and sincerity.

c. Re-inventing PR within the Experience Economy

The second major shift is the result of rapid growth in the Experience Economy,
which will create yet more new and complex challenges for the field of Public Relations.
Particularly in a previously underdeveloped area of Public Relations. When the
commodity is an experience, Public Relations will be expected to play a central role in
the development of that experience. As a result there has been a partial move away from
primarily outward-facing Public Relations, and towards an inward-facing advisory
position, in which Experiential Public Relations will be expect to aid in channeling the
company’s image, brand, and relationship with the customer into the experience that
forms the ‘product’ of the company.
5. The Stages of Marketing a Product or Service

a. The Theories of Gilmore and Pine

In their now-famous article “Welcome to the Experience Economy,” published in the
Harvard Business Review in 1998, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore first
introduced the world to what they had dubbed “The Experience Economy.” Their theory
chronicled an evolution of economies from an agrarian economy that relied on raw
materials and homemade products, to an industrial economy that outsourced the
16
production of basic materials to efficient factories, and which then transformed into a
service economy where even basic labor and services were outsourced. Gilmore and Pine
illustrated this progression with the example of the mother who bakes her birthday cakes
from raw materials such as farm-grown ingredients (agrarian), then buys the ingredients
premixed from Betty Crocker (industrial), and finally simply bought the entire cake
premade (service economy). Now, they argued, a new economic model had emerged in
the form of the experience economy, where the mother doesn’t bake her cake at all, but
instead outsources her child’s birthday experience entirely to a company such as Chuck E
Cheese. (Gilmore and Pine, 1998, p. 97) This evolution is strongly tied to the progression
of economic values that has emerged from the Industrial Revolution. Within this
progression, there are four stages, each of which represents a business model, as is visible
in Figure 1.

Figure 1: The Progression of Economic Value (Pine II & Gilmore, 1998)
17
i. Commodity Businesses

A commodity-oriented business charges for undifferentiated products. These
products are essentially indistinguishable from one another. These commodities are
natural and fungible, and tend to be sold to a market or to person who will process them
into Goods. Examples of commodities include milk, flour, or natural gas, which may be
sold to a baker or factory to be turned into cake, a ‘good’.

ii. Goods Businesses

A goods-oriented business charges for distinctive, tangible things. For example, a
baker might buy undifferentiated commodities such as milk and flour, and turn them into
cake, which he bakes using natural gas. The result is a tangible product, namely a cake,
which is distinctive by virtue of his unique recipe, baking skills, and decorating talent.
These products tend to be standardized. That means the baker makes a distinctive cake,
but he makes 10 of them every day, and they all look the same. Goods are less easily
substituted for other goods because of their distinctive nature. As a result, they are more
expensive, and competition to produce a desirable product is higher than with a simple
commodity, which is the same no matter where it is purchased.

iii. Service Businesses

A service-oriented business charges for activities they have performed on behalf
of their clients. Services are intangible, customized, and delivered directly to a client on
demand. For example, a taxi driver runs a service-oriented business. By giving the client
a ride to his or her individually specified destination, he offers an intangible product with
18
clear benefits. Similarly, a hairdresser is paid for delivering a customized service that
offers the client visible results but no tangible object.

iv. Experience Businesses

An experience-oriented business charges for the transformative benefits that
customers receive for their money. Memories are an integral part of the product that
customers are buying, so the experience must be memorable, personal, and have a
profound impact. Experiences are not so much ‘produced’ as they are staged. Figure 2
shows the various economic distinctions between the Experience Economy and other
economies, listed by economic offering.

Figure 2: Economic Distinctions, (Pine II & Gilmore, 1998)

b. The Distinction between services and experiences

One could argue that Gilmore and Pine’s Experience Cconomy is not the next stage in
an evolution, but simply a subset of the existing service market. However, there are
several clear distinctions between services and experiences. While services tend to meet a
19
practical need, experiences tend to meet a personal, emotional, or spiritual need. Services
replace tasks that need completion; they are a substitute for a users own time and labor.
Experiences, on the other hand, are better viewed as a luxury item with transformative
value. For example: Dinner at a restaurant instead of cooking at home may be a service,
while a pirate-themed murder mystery dinner theater is an experience, with food
secondary to entertainment.
A more extreme example of value-adding experiences is Virgin Galactic’s space
flight. Flying from New York to Los Angeles on Delta Airlines for work or vacation is a
service, while paying $200,000 to go into space with Virgin Atlantic is an experience.
The first flight has a practical goal and no memorable value, while the second flight has
value as a transformative, once-in-a-lifetime experience, despite having no destination or
specific goal. The Experience Economy is in the business of creating memories, which
requires a re-imagination of the ways in which businesses interact with the public. This is
where Public Relations can carve out a new space within the industry.
c. Case Study: The Cost of Coffee

In their extended study of the Experience Economy, published in 1999, Pine and
Gilmore use the development of the coffee bean into a coffee experience as a microcosm
of the shift from a commodity economy to an experience economy. This narrative begins
with the coffee bean, which costs only a few cents per cup of coffee. The bean is a raw
‘commodity’, sold by the pound, and its price varies slightly depending on place of
origin, respective labor costs, and volume in which it is purchased.
The second stage in this narrative is the conversion of coffee into a ‘good’
through the grinding and roasting process. At this stage, value is added to the coffee bean
20
Figure 3: The price of coffee as an indicator of
varying economic stages. (Pine & Gilmore, 1999, p. 2)
through the labor and machinery cost involved in the grinding and roasting process, as
well as through transportation costs and branding. The same coffee bean is now worth
twice as much.
The third stage is the conversion from the roasted
coffee into a cup of coffee in a café. This is where the
service economy adds value. Rather than producing a cup
of espresso at home from either the commodity or the
good, a consumer can visit a coffee shop that offers a
service that includes preparing and serving the coffee. At
this point the price of the materials increases to around
$1, which, for example, will buy the consumer a plain
cup of filtered coffee at a gas station or a fast food
establishment.
The fourth stage in this process is the point in which the experience economy and
its value-potential becomes evident. Gilmore and Pine, writing in the late 1990s, use the
example of a prime location as a mark-up. Their story involves a couple drinking coffee
in the San Marco Square in Venice, and paying $15 for a cup of coffee, which, to them,
was worth the money because that $15 bought them the experience of sitting on one of
the finest squares in all of Europe. Gilmore and Pine identify this mark-up as a new
source of value:
Experiences are a fourth economic offering, as distinct from services as services
are from goods, but one that has until now gone largely unrecognized.
Experiences have always been around, but consumers, business, and economists
21
lumped them into the service sector along with such uneventful activities as dry
cleaning, auto repair, wholesale distribution, and telephone access. When a person
buys a service, he purchases a set of intangible activities carried out on his behalf.
But when he buys an experience, he pays to spend time enjoying a series of
memorable events that a company stages – as in a theatrical play – to engage him
in a personal way. (Pine & Gilmore, 1999, p. 2)
While the materials of coffee combined with the service of filtering could be delivered at
a cost of around $1, a business can add a considerable amount of value by transforming
that cup of coffee into an entire experience.
Gilmore and Pine overlook some factors in their claim about the Venetian coffee
experience on San Marco Square. Their assertion is that a cup of coffee can gain $14 in
value as a result of a well-designed experience. Their graph attributes this difference
solely to that experience, which is a misrepresentation of their own example. In reality,
the cost of renting a commercial space on San Marco Square in Venice, Italy vastly
exceeds the cost of renting an equally sized space in the heart of, say, the unincorporated
village of Venice, Louisiana, population 202. (U.S. Census Bureau, 2014) So while, on
the one hand, the proprietor of Caffe San Marco in Italy does not have to do much work
to ‘earn’ a lot of money on a cup of coffee, because the experience is already there as a
result of his location, he may in fact earn no more in profit than the proprietor of “Burt’s
Coffee” in Venice, Louisiana. This means that, while Gilmore and Pine are certainly
looking in the right direction for a model of the experience economy, their actual
example falls short on one detail: the lack of evidence that Caffe San Marco’s profit is
higher as a result of the experience.
22
Nonetheless, Gilmore and Pine’s model is easily transposed onto a much better
example of coffee as an ‘experience,’ which they may well have chosen had their book
been written in the 2000s, or ‘the age of Starbucks.’ Throughout the late 1990s and early
2000s, America’s shopping streets began to transform as independent coffee shops made
way for chains such as Starbucks and Seattle’s Best Coffee, which became a wholly
owned subsidiary of Starbucks in 2003. (Helliker, 2010) Unlike corporations such as
Walmart, these coffee shops did not cause independent cafes to go out of business by
ruthlessly undercutting them. On the contrary, Starbucks charged as much as $3-5 for a
cup of coffee, albeit one with added flavors. Their raw materials cost was low, their rent
was no higher than the local coffee shop that had existed in the same retail space, and
their product was essentially the same as what any competitor did or could offer. The
added value of their cup lay in the Starbucks ‘experience’.
The Starbucks experience is composed of three elements, centered around their
mission of: “to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one
neighborhood at a time”. (Starbucks Corporation, 2014) The first is employee training as
part of Starbucks’s public relations approach on the lowest level: the retail store itself.
Each barista, who is called a “Starbucks Partner,” receives the Green Apron Book, which
details the “ways of being” that will make the employee successful at Starbucks. The core
values instilled in employees are: “be welcoming, be genuine, be knowledgeable, be
considerate, and be involved.” (Michelli, 2006, p. viii)
When sales levels dropped for the first time in 2008, Starbucks organized a
synchronized shut-down of stores around the country for a three-hour period in order to
retrain employees. (Grynbaum, 2008) Their choice of shutting down the store at the busy
23
after-work rush hour of 5:30pm was a cleverly orchestrated PR strategy that ensured that
a large number of customers would take note of their pro-active stance towards customer
service. The ideals put forth in that training session were succinctly highlighted in the
signs that went up in Starbucks stores around the country, announcing the ‘perfection
pledge’: “Your drink should be perfect, every time. If not, let us know and we’ll make it
right.” While the vast majority of customers may never ask for their drink to be re-made,
the dedication to service added considerable value to consumers’ positive perception of
the ‘Starbucks Experience’.
The second element of the Starbucks experience lies in branding, and especially
the extensive customization of flavors that help customers create their own “Starbucks
Signature Drink,” which they have built into an interactive transmedial experience with
the use of a build-your-beverage experience online, among other strategies. (Ethan S.,
2011)
The creative branding of these products further expands the Starbucks experience.
One element of their branding relies on Starbucks lingo, including the use of the word
‘partner’ for employee, “engendering a sense of teamwork and a connection that reaches
across managerial relationships.” (Richardson, 2012) Custom cup names such as “tall”
and “grande” quickly became synonymous for their respective sizes, much to the
annoyance of baristas of competitor stores. This lingo builds brand loyalty and gives
customers a sense of familiarity when away from home or abroad, and it reinforces the
idea that Starbucks will consistently produce the same experience, no matter where you
are in the world. Other elements of Starbucks’ branding include an emphasis on
community involvement through boards that announce their charitable work, the use of
24
branded products in stores to extend the Starbucks Experience to the consumer’s home,
the use of customer loyalty cards, and a selected emphasis on Fair Trade products and
recyclability.
The third element that completes the Starbucks Experience is the evolution of
their brand designs. Starbucks’s PR team has built an extensive brand philosophy with
regard to interior design and construction, which emphasizes that “a coffeehouse should
be a welcoming, inviting and familiar place for people to connect” and that stores should
“reflect the unique character of the neighborhoods they serve.” Further emphases are on
sustainability, the use of recycled materials such as reclaimed urban wood, and the use of
the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED certification as a benchmark for successful
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. (Starbucks Corporation, 2014)
The overall effect of these combined elements has changed the concept of a “cup
of coffee” as a consumer product to an extensive, transmedial experience that reaches out
and engages the community. The experience is constructed from elements that Starbucks
has determined to be valuable to the consumer, such as environmentally friendly
production processes and design concepts, and extensive personalization of each
customer’s drink experience. Unlike Gilmore and Pine’s cup of coffee at an expensive
retail space on San Marco Square, Starbucks has fully embraced the notion of the
Experience Economy, and it has become an exemplary model of how to build and sell an
experience, one cup at a time.

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6. The Experience Economy: Origins

a. Origins of the Experience Economy

The Experience Economy as a term was first coined by Pine and Gilbert in their
landmark 1998 article, yet the concept appears as early as the 1970s in the work of
American journalist and futurist Alvin Toffler. Entitled “Future Shock,” his visionary
work describes the impact of rapidly changing technologies and information overload on
the public, as we experience a revolution that will take us from industrialism to a ‘super-
industrial’ economy. (Toffler 80-83) Toffler predicts that consumers will witness “a
revolutionary expansion of certain industries whose sole output consists not of
manufactured goods, nor even of ordinary services, but of pre-programmed “experiences”
(Toffler 226). Technology will exponentially increase the efficiency of the manufacturing
industry. As a consequence, the scarcity of resources will decrease and material objects
will lose value. Toffler predicts that, with rising affluence and increasing transience,
people will lose their interest in material objects as a sign of wealth or success, and they
will begin to collect invaluable experiences and memories instead. Vacation packages are
an early example of such a commodity, along with the rise in group sessions, classes and
workshops, which may have some educational value but which are popular with
consumers because of the learning experience itself. The Experience Economy thus
replaces the devalued material commodity, and elevates the concept of practical services
to a pleasurable luxury.

26
b. Pine and Gilmore’s definition

Pine and Gilmore refine and update Toffler’s analysis. They look back at the
decades since Toffler and describe how the transition to the experiential stage came about
as a result of companies offering experiences as added value to traditional products.
(Pine/Gilmore 98) They predict that, over time, a growing part of the population will be
willing to allocate a high percentages of their salaries to the experience industry.
Developments up to and beyond Pine and Gilmore’s article already show that that people
in the industrialized world have increasingly more leisure time. In the early phases of
industrialization, the average person allocated approximately 30 percent of their expected
lifetime to work. As of Andersson and Andersson’s 2006 study, total working time after
education today can be expected to be no more than 60,000 hours or 9% of our expected
lifetime. (Andersson & Andersson, 2006, p. 48) In order to fully profit from the resulting
growth in spending on leisure time, companies must deliberately commit to the design of
engaging and transformative experiences and to building their relationships with the
public. Companies should keep in mind that the Experience Economy remains based on
supply and demand, and that experiences must continually be reinvented for the public to
remain interested. Unlike a gallon of milk, customers will not keep buying the same
experience.

i. Examples of Experience Economies in Action

Examples of experience economies in action, include:
 The vacation industry (as a subset of the travel industry). Customized packages
and tours may be composed of a variety of services such as hotels and air
transportation, but their overall aim is to create a specific experience. Typical of
27
an experience economy, these packages tend to be organized not by the content of
their components (destination, mode of travel) but rather by the nature of the
experience (sun & sand, city break, wildlife safari, etc.).
 Theme parks such as Disneyland build on products such as movies to create
immersive experiences that draw on nostalgia and fandom, or that appeal to a
need for fast, safe, and convenient ‘adventures’ within a controlled environment.
Employees are trained to give a “Disney Experience” and to follow a set of
corporate ideals that ensure the transmission of a carefully crafted image to the
consumer.
 Virgin Galactic specializes in an experience that draws value from its scarcity.
While the flight does not transport the traveler to any particular location, and it
does not meet any practical or educational need, the experience is unique and
extremely rare. Exclusivity is the currency of this experience.
 A recent development in the spa industry, Sweat Lodge Retreats offer cultural and
spiritual experiences that draw on a combination of consumer needs. They are
meant to have a spiritually transformative effect. They meet a desire for stress
release or a need to escape urban life and reconnect with a natural or womb-like
state. These experiences also take advantage of a perceived disconnect between
Americans and the heritage of their lands. Alternatively, they are a way for
companies to exploit a cultural desire (born from collective guilt) to validate
Native American contributions to modernity, even if these ‘contributions’ draw
more on stereotypes than on historical fact. As such, these experiences meet a
28
cultural need (among non-native Americans) more than a practical or educational
need.

ii. Growth of the experience sector

The growth of global wealth, especially in industrialized nations, has given rise to
increased spending on luxury
consumption. Lorentzen notes
that given the freedom to
consume on higher levels of
Maslow’s pyramid, today’s
consumer can afford to spend
his or her income on the highest
level of consumption, namely
“self-realization.” This means a
shift in consumption from purchasing
necessary and practical items to buying
luxury items that consumers don’t need but do like. (Lorentzen, 2009, p. 832)
Additionally, Lorentzen suggests that alarge portion of this spending has gone towards
Experience Industries.
According to Lindqvist & Protsiv, during the period 2004-2009, employment in
Experience Industries grew by on average 3.13% annually in Europe. (Lindqvist &
Protsiv, 2010, p. 10) Experience industries employ about 9.8 million people in Europe.
(Lindqvist & Protsiv, 2010, p. 5) This growth of interest in the experience industry can be
Figure 4: Regional Specialization in Experience Industries
(Lindqvist & Protsiv, 2010, pp. 7)
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largely attributed to the growth in leisure time seen in recent centuries, where individuals
went from dedicating 30% of our total lifetime to work in the early phases of
industrialization, to dedicating only 9% of our lifetime to work. (Andersson &
Andersson, 2006, p. 48) As seem in Figures 3 and 4, the majority of leisure time and
spending is concentrated in gastronomic and vacation experience. This has led to
considerable growth in the Experience Economies in areas that depend heavily on the
tourist industry.

Figure 5: Size of Experience Industries sub-sectors (million employees, percentage) (Lindqvist & Protsiv, 2010, p. 7)

iii. Criticism

Thus far, a limited amount of criticism has been written of Gilmore and Pine’s
theories. Söderland (1999) criticizes Pine and Gilmore’s failure to present “an imperative
directed to companies to build in experiences in their offerings” (as translated in Pollnow
& Österlund, 2005, p. 16). Present literature still lacks clear directives that illustrate how
industries can take advantage of developments in the Experience Economy, or how
30
Public Relations can play a role in establishing interactive relationships that meet the
needs of both consumers and the industry.
As Bäckström and Johansson point out in their 2006 article on “Creating and
Consuming Experiences,” there is limited empirical research or support for Pine and
Gilmore’s theories (Bäckström & Johansson, 2006, p. 417). Though Boswijk et. al added
a significant contribution in 2007 in the form of a study of the theory and applications of
the experience economy, which addressed the shortcomings of Gilmore and Pine by
looking at practical aspects for a variety of industries, as well as an analysis of the
business-economic significance of meaningful experience. (Boswijk, Thijssen, & Peelen,
2007) There is even less research to show the role of Public Relations within this
economic shift, despite the obvious contributions that Public Relations can make in the
development and shaping of experiences created for the public, especially in the form of
building relationships and gauging the needs and desires of consumers, as well as
ensuring brand compatibility of individual experiences, which should serve to enhance
the reputation and image of the company.
Gilmore and Pine’s theories have been criticized as a matter of hype (Scoot,
Laws, & Boksberger, 2013), linked to the 1990s dot-com boom, which was at its height
when Gilmore and Pine produced their famous article. Holbrook goes even further by
suggesting their theory is no more than a “gloriously upbeat, positive and opportunistic
picture of consumer culture full of Millennial optimism”. (Holbrook, 2001) In that sense,
Public Relations has been a central element of the industry’s representation of the
Experience Economy. Although audiences may indeed be embracing experiential
business models, much of the hype surrounding Experience Economies may be the result
31
of effective marketing campaigns and meticulous crafting of the public image of products
and companies by Public Relations departments.
On the other end of the spectrum, Gilmore and Pine have been criticized for
simply adapting and broadening pre-existing theories from the tourism industry. There is
ample evidence to support this, but Gilmore and Pine already credit earlier theorists such
as Toffler, and much of their theory is built on an analysis of 20
th
century developments
in the tourism industry, particularly in the United States. Nonetheless, there is an
implication of ‘hype’ in this criticism as well; a suggestion that the Experience Economy
is a mere extension of a common principle of the tourism industry. This is perhaps
evident in Gilmore and Pine’s choice of example: they cite British Airways chairman Sir
Colin Marshall to show how BA has transformed the functional service of travel into a
“distinctive en route experience”. Marshall’s claim echoes sentiments expressed through
Delta and United campaigns in the United States in recent years. A good example of this
is Delta’s use of comedic safety videos to communicate a message while also entertaining
passengers and improving their on-board experience.
Nevertheless, after two decades of claimed or actual attempts at transforming air
travel into an engaging experience, there is little evidence to show that the air travel
industry has successfully created anything more than suggestive commercials. They
employ marketing strategies to exploit the experience hype, and to convince the
consumer that he or she is receiving an experience, when in reality, consumers are
increasingly more displeased about the discomfort and cost of air travel. A 2013 report
examining consumer satisfaction placed the airline industry at number 15 out of 19
industries, with an average industry rating of just 60%, and all airlines rating from
32
“extremely poor” to just “okay”. (Temkin, 2013) In terms of developments in Public
Relations, the disconnect between theory and reality, as shown in the airline example,
suggests that Public Relations practitioners are currently accustomed to communication
an image of engagement with the public, while they are not effectively being used to
interact with customers to create the experiences the public wants. Altogether, this
disconnect suggests that Gilmore and Pine may partly have fallen prey themselves to the
hype created by corporate Public Relations campaigns. This common critique of their
work is underscored by the lack of empirical evidence in their 1998 article.

c. Experiential Marketing

i. Marketing responses to the Experience Economy

As the examples from the airline industry show, marketing strategists have deftly
picked up the guiding principles of Experiential Economics. By enhancing existing
products with a targeted experience, they can distinguish themselves from the
competition, and add value to a product without significantly increasing production costs.
In many cases, this added value can be derived primarily from storytelling: “Axe Body
Spray doesn’t just cover up your body odor. The ‘Axe Effect’ will make your body
release an irresistible male musk into the atmosphere, so women will throw themselves at
your feet!” Here the idea of experiential marketing has less to do with crafting an
experience or building a relationship with a client, and more with developing a narrative
that connects customers to products in a transformative way. The prevalence of these
sorts of marketing campaigns indicates that uptake of experiential principles has been
33
high, while at the same time, these ‘experiences’ remain mere enhancements of a material
commodity.
While marketing has focused mostly on the storytelling aspect of experiential
economics, there are more thoroughly engaged marketing strategies as well, that are
based on the concept of the Experience Economy. One example of a product that takes
the narrative element from experiential marketing, but develops it into a fully engaged
experience without reliance on a material product would be Massively Multiplayer
Online Games, or ‘MMOs’. Despite lacking a clear goal (there is no princess to save to
end the game), and despite offering no material benefits, MMOs cleverly exploit users’
desire to transform into another character and live out an alternate life inside of a fantasy
universe, complete with professions, politics, and extensive social structures. Marketing
strategies for MMOs emphasize the ways in which these games erase the inequalities of
real life, in favor of a meritocracy with complete social and economic mobility. MMO
marketing especially emphasizes the highly personalized and mutual interaction that the
Experience offers, for example by allowing players to create their own content to enhance
the game, and by organizing conventions surrounding the game, much like Comic Cons
around America create an interactive experience around comics.
The MMO marketing strategy serves as the perfect model for experiential
marketing, because it highlights the key features of what a marketing campaign should
emphasize: An experience offers an alternative to everyday life that leaves the user
feeling transformed into a better, happier person. Informed by the insights and
relationships built by a Public Relations team, this experience is achieved through
34
extensive mutual engagement and participation, which ensures the personalized nature of
the experience.

ii. Transmedia in Marketing

Narrative is integral to the construction of an experience, and Public Relations is
the key to a consistent transmedial narrative. An experience usually begins with a story.
That story can connect multiple platforms, allowing it to disseminate a central brand
image, while also inviting consumers to engage and interact with the brand. Consumers
enter the experience via one platform, for example social media, which then guides them
to a point of purchase, for example on a website, although media can also include non-
digital media. Throughout this story, the Public Relations Team must ensure brand
consistency, as well as preserving the authenticity and credibility of the story, to ensure
that the experience feels less like marketing and more like building an emotional
connection with a brand. Each channel adds new content to the story, but all serve the
same purpose and guide the consumer into spending money on the experience. Much like
in the example of MMO marketing, businesses must reach out and encourage the
consumer to contribute to the experience, which helps them personalize and immerse
themselves. Because this targeted experience requires the company to pull consumers
towards them through a narrative, rather than push them towards a purchase, PR becomes
pivotal to success, replacing to some degree the role that was previously held by
marketing teams.

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d. The History of Experiential Public Relations

While experiential Public Relations appear to be a new invention in response to a
change in consumer-oriented industries, the profession has existed for millennia, albeit
under different names. Public Relations has always been a central component of any large
organization’s interaction with the public, and its practitioners have often been tasked
with encouraging audience participation in an experience. Some example include:

i. Announcers

The Roman Senate had a dedicated crier, ‘praccones’ or ‘announcers,’ who would
run through the markets to announce important news to the public. Their duties included
helping Senators gain public support, promoting the Emperor’s causes, (Landrau, 2011,
pp. 199, 450) or persuading people to take part in festivals and public rituals. (Belayche,
2011, p. 277)

ii. Carnival barkers

Carnival barkers were a type of public relations figure that established an
organization’s brand and reputation by ways of planting an idea in the imagination of the
audience. (Jackall, 2010, p. 175) They were particularly popular in the 19
th
century, and
were famously used by P.T. Barnum, who exploited mob psychology to entice people to
buy tickets to his shows. He would even go so far as to stage fights in public, to engage
the audience and get them in the mood for the experience of a show. (Hare, 2012, p. 61)
Carnival Barkers encouraged word-of-mouth advertising, and their role could, in a sense,
be seen as an early approach to ‘viral’ PR and marketing.
36

iii. Door-to-Door salesmen

Door-to-door sales are typically seen as a function of sales and marketing, yet
they may be better classified as a low-level form of experiential public relations. Door-to-
door salesmen (and women) have the task of connecting directly with customers,
establishing a relation of trust, and building an illusion of a brand in people’s minds.
These sales are based entirely on the interactive experience between the single
salesperson and their customer, without the aid of advertising campaigns, store displays,
or other gimmicks. The company’s brand image only comes to life through this
interpersonal experience.

iv. Modern Day Missionaries

Spiritual and religious experiences have a large place within the experience
industry, both as a source of profit and as a way of proselytizing. Starting perhaps as
early as the 16
th
century Jesuit distribution of Francis Xavier’s letters from India as a
means of recruiting others to the profession (Cushner, 2006, p. 22), to Mormon
missionaries, religious groups have been refining Experiential Public Relations strategies
for centuries.
As an example, Hutchinson (1995) uses the example of the Mormon church
which employees a strategy that involves broad transmedial marketing campaigns,
widespread distribution of their sacred texts, educational courses to teach missionaries
how to interact with the public and persuade people to join their cause, and the careful
curation of a public image that paves the way for missionaries. (pp. 33–35) Through
37
missionary outreach programs, the Church of Latter Day Saints has built an expansive
and highly immersive multi-billion-dollar establishment that includes real estate, malls,
schools, religious retreats, theme parks, and even entire villages. In short, missionaries
have not only served as Public Relations figures for an immersive experience, but for a
product that offers an entire lifestyle.
7. Subcultures

Popular subcultures are groups of particular interest to experiential public
relations because they have already adapted an experience as a lifestyle. A further
advantage of targeting subcultures lies in their dedication, as a community, to specific
interests. From a marketing perspective, this makes them a more uniform and predictable
target group than one that is merely based on traditional identifiers such as gender, age,
socioeconomic status, nationality, etc.
a. Targeted Approach

Subcultures can be difficult to reach with a campaign directed at the general
population, yet strategic public relations initiatives can target these cultures with
personalized campaigns. An experiential approach can be a way to offer these groups a
direct channel to their interests, pulling them towards the business in a guided manner.
For example, in 2014 when Russia announced stricter sanctions on public displays of
homosexuality, Iceland immediately responded with an extensive transmedia PR
campaign. Their efforts to create a direct channel to the gay community included
billboards welcoming LGBT travelers at the airport, the mayor of Reykjavik tweeting
that people with homophobia are not scared but “just assholes” (Gnarr, 2012),” the
38
official Visit Reykjavik website created and featured a section on Iceland’s pride in
defending equal rights regardless of sexual orientation (Visit Reykjavik, 2014), and the
mayor of Reykjavik filed a motion to terminate Reykjavik’s sister city relationship with
Moscow. (Brydum, 2013) Iceland also hosts an annual Gay Pride parade, as well as
entertainment and immersive experiences such as the Pink Parties and Bears on Ice.
While it is too soon to measure the effect of this experiential PR campaign, an analysis by
the Boston Consulting Group suggests that the Icelandic tourist industry can expect to
profit considerably from targeting LGBT subcultures. (The Boston Consulting Group,
2013)
b. The Word-of-Mouth Effect

Because experiential PR offers a very involved, transformative experience that
impacts people’s lives, participants are likely to spread knowledge of the brand and
experience via word-of-mouth advertising. They’re not simply using a product, they’re
“living” the product. If the experience is successful, it has a meaningful impact on
participants’ lives, and their memories of the experience will become something to
treasure and share with others. In that sense, the commercial experience seeks to achieve
the same aims as an authentic life experience: to be remembered. The narrative
experience thus produces its own narrative within the memory of the participant; a
powerful story to share by word-of-mouth, only in the case of commercial experiences,
that story is about a particular brand.

39
Figure 8: ComicCon attendees and celebrities alike dress
up in costumes to immerse themselves in the 'experience'
of the character. (Felon, 2013)
Figure 7: Artists and Merchandising Companies
set up booths to showcase and sell their products.
(NMIT Blog, 2013)
Figure 6: Famous actors, directors and celebrities attend ComicCon to promote their latest television shows or
movies through open panels. (Macauley, 2011)
c. Using Events to Attract Broader Audiences

Targeted communication to specific groups can be highly effective when those
groups have a known common interest or goal. Word of mouth is an equally strong form
of communication for experiential commodities, which lend themselves to the act of
story-telling. A third way to reach and attract traditionally non-target audiences is by
organizing large-scale events that are sufficiently broad to appeal to a wide range of
people.
The aforementioned gay pride parade in Iceland is a good example of a larger
event that connects a broader audience to a subculture (public gay pride parades are
generally well attended by straight people as well), and that simultaneously promotes the
target experience to be sold, namely “The Icelandic Experience.” That experience results
in spending on further, small-scale experiences (such as tours and gastronomical events)
as well as on other Icelandic products (for example wool, Brennivin, licorice in
chocolate, and Icelandic music).
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Comic book and gaming conventions similarly target wide audiences that may
otherwise have little in common. These events result in the sale of tickets for the
experience, but they are also a form of advertising for further products produced by
companies in attendance, both experiential (movies, games) and tangible (figurines,
merchandise). By inviting a large variety of vendors to contribute, the experience
becomes both highly personalized and broad in appeal.
The addition of famous television or movie stars, or even astronauts such as at
Emerald City Comic Con, further widens the potential audience for these conventions.
(See also Appendix B: An Interview with Todd Jones of Emerald City Comic Con)
“You will see a lot of groups that come together at these conventions. This is the
biggest weekend for some people. I think the guests will do that too. You get
dynamics like that because people truly like each other. People truly are friends.
It’s a great place for people to touch base when they’re not on set, when they’re
not holed up writing three different comic books or drawing four different pages.
(…) I think the future is bright. I think we keep growing in reputation, I think we
keep growing in attendance. I think we keep growing within the city of Seattle.
We try to do more year round events, we try to involve our minions in more
things. I hope to start seeing more community action types of things. This year a
group of people organized a choir, it was great attendance despite being the
coldest day of the year. They got out there and they sang and represented ECCC.
That’s where I see the growth.” (From An Interview with Todd Jones, Appendix
B)
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From mere comic books these companies have created an experience that builds a
community surrounding the brand, and community is a valuable commodity in large
urban areas. Elements of the experience, such as the choir mentioned by Todd Jones, do
not necessarily contribute directly to sales, but they are allow a business to establish lines
of communication with these communities of consumers, to pull them towards sales:
“[The benefit for the talent that participates is that] they get their work out there.
Maybe they make a new fan or two. It’s promotion for them, it’s a chance to meet
their fans, and it’s their chance to make new fans. It’s good to see them outside of
whatever element or movie or TV show they’re working on, it’s good to see that
person up on stage talking to the crowd like “hey, we’re just chatting.” I think
that’s the big benefit, that buzz, which creates more fans. I’ve got friends with
kids who go, and their kids get into new things, it creates a new generation of
readers. It’s good for the businesses and the vendors who come.” (From An
Interview with Todd Jones, Appendix B)
This flexible targeting poses new challenges to public relations professionals, who
must be able to compile experiences that go beyond “highly personalized” to “highly
personalizable,” where an event must offer a multitude of possible experiences. From a
public relations standpoint, the advantage of a successful event is the ability to reach new
audiences that might not have been accessible through a single, targeted approach or a
one-dimensional material product.

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8. The Shift to Experiential PR

Experience economies have thrived thanks to a rapid increase in disposable
income in recent decades and a growing desire for unique experiences as a ‘commodity
of memory’. In response, the economy has seen changes in consumer access to
companies, brands, and talents, and shifts in the ways companies communicate with
customers. The result has proven beneficial to the field of Public Relations which now
finds itself at the heart of the ‘production process’ of the experience. However, PR itself
must reinvent itself to take advantages of the Experience Economy. Audiences are no
longer happy to be spoken to; they want mutual interaction with the companies they are
interested in and with the brands they follow.

d. Digital spaces and the 24-hour news cycle

Experiential economies today depend heavily on the use of digital spaces, which
enhance the experience, generate word-of-mouth advertising, and which can guide
consumers to points of purchase. The field of Public Relations must embrace the use of
intermedial approaches to communication. This includes extensive use of digital channels
and spaces as a way of interacting with consumers. A shift from traditional media to a 24-
hour news and information cycle also means that Public Relations teams will need to
have alternative methods of crisis management, so that they can manage communications
and respond to consumers globally, regardless of the time of day.

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e. Building communities

The need for community participation and the desire for a sense of belonging are
the foundations of civilization. Experiences, as a product, meet a variety of so-called
‘ontological needs’ as Max-Neef (1989) calls them. These go beyond human evolution
through Maslow’s hierarchy, which Gilmore and Pine addressed, to show our emotional
and mental needs as social beings. Individuals have a natural curiosity that causes them
seek out experiences such as Virgin Galactic’s space flight. They experience a need to
participate, which they can do through experiences such as MMOs, which allow them to
work with others, take on responsibilities, and to dissent without the repercussion such
decisions might have in “real life”. People want leisure time so they can have fun, relax,
day-dream and remember, and we fulfill this need through immersive entertainment
experiences such as Disneyland. People also crave a strong sense of identity, which
includes a need to establish a sense of belonging by determining cultural values and
placing themselves within social groups or communities.
Within a company, it is up to the Public Relations team to take all of these needs,
concerns, and desires into consideration. Once a clear image is formed of the essential
requirements of an experience, a company can begin to build a concrete experience on
those findings. Public Relations then comes in again to build the network of ideological
relationships with the consumer, which will guide them towards a purchase.

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9. Experiential PR in Entertainment

a. How does experiential PR fit into entertainment?

It can be argued that the entertainment industry is the main beneficiary of the
Experience Economy, and it has adopted experiential public relations more adeptly than
most other industries. Selling entertainment has always been an early form of experiential
economics. An audience pays to feel emotions and create new memories, without any
material gain. In recent years, the entertainment industry has expanded its reach into
secondary experiences and the products that are sold through those. Red carpet premieres
are an excellent example. Despite the premiere event adding no value to the movie as a
stand-alone product, a red carpet premiere adds value to the brand by offering a
secondary experience based on the primary experience (the movie). Televising these
premieres results in considerable added exposure as well as promotion for the movie, and
by taking the movie experience out of the theater and onto the sidewalk, where fans may
congregate to watch their favorite celebrities attend the pre-movie premiere, regardless of
whether they have access to tickets themselves they are able to participate in an exclusive event.
The entertainment industry has adopted the large-scale event as a way to open
new channels to a diverse group of consumers. Network television shows alone would
generally not be profitable until syndication, which requires around 100 episodes or
more. Yet by transforming a single show into a multi-channel experience, the One
notable example is the all-encompassing Glee experience which now includes not only
the TV program but CDs, exclusive downloadable songs and merchandise, tours, in
which performers do not appear as themselves, but rather as their television characters.
45
This innovative approach extends the experience and allows the viewers, who identify as
Gleeks, to immerse him- or herself into Glee in a way that a television show alone could
never achieve.
b. Interview with Kelly Bush Novak, Founder and CEO of ID PR

In an interview, Kelly Bush Novak, Founder and CEO of ID PR, talks about how
the role of the publicist has changed since she first entered the industry. In the 1990s
when she started, she says the outside world viewed publicists as “glorified personal
assistants,” while larger companies who represented big stars used their position of power
as a barrier between the celebrity and the outside world. As Bush Novak describes, the
role of the Publicist as a stager of the brand and as a Public Relations person has changed
considerably:
“You know if you look up a couple of articles that ran [when I first started as a
publicist], journalists’ perceptions were that we opened limo doors and picked up
dry cleaning. And I find that so offensive obviously, we weren’t in the power
position that we are now. We weren’t necessarily well regarded and I think part of
that was well deserved because I think there were a lot of people doing this job
that didn’t understand what the job really should be and what the potential of it
was. They were gatekeepers. The biggest firm at the time was PMK, they had all
the biggest movie stars and wielded their power – in my opinion – not always for
good, taking a very threatening approach “if you don’t comply we’ll close off
your access” kind of thing. And so here I came, very scrappy, not from this world,
no connections and it just didn’t feel right to me. So I took a very different
approach 20 years ago I took the approach that my job was to be a collaborator
46
and a bridge to my clients and either the studios or the networks or the media, and
not a wall, that’s what I believed at the time and I believe it even more so now.
And of course now that the walls are down because of social media, I was right.
Now you have a direct connection to the world as a talent, no matter what kind of
talent you are. Why didn’t I think of Twitter and Facebook myself? I had the
foundation!
I think the job now is grown from that point where we weren’t necessarily always
invited to the table. Now clients call us before they make decisions about movies
they’re going to do or shows they’re going to appear on and people want and
value our opinion. It’s become a much more of a marketing job than a straight
public relations communications job.” (Appendix D)

From the beginning, Bush Novak has tried to fulfill the role that most publicists take
now, which is to form a bridge between the client and the industry, as well as between the
client and the public. This shift marks the influence of the experience economy on the
entertainment industry. Today, it is no longer sufficient to distribute information and
assume that customers will buy tickets or hire a client. Publicists must work to build
relationships between different stakeholders, in order to develop two-way communication
and an authentic experience. The latter requires careful management of social media
channels, to ensure that a talent client comes across as sincere and genuine, without
actually allowing the celebrity to interfere with, or disrupt, the carefully cultivated image
that their publicist has nurtured.

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i. The importance of the full service agency

Full service agencies diversify in order to retain control of the various elements of
the immersive experience they are trying to produce. This allows a Public Relations team
to carefully craft and build the company’s brand into the experience, which in turn ensure
consistency and authenticity. At the same time, full service agencies close the loop and
keep customers within their own channels, guiding them into repeated and diverse
purchases and experiences. This has a strategic benefit as well as a financial benefit. As
Kelly Bush Novak, CEO of full service agency ID PR explains:
“We diversified based on an authentic growth path but also financially it makes a
lot of sense to not have all your eggs in one basket. There was a moment when
there was a SAG actor strike right at the same time there was a writer’s strike and
there was a worry actually that all of the actors in the union were going to not
work and therefore not publicize their projects that they’d had in the can for six
months to a year, but because we were a company that had diversified and had
film and had brands and had events, we weren’t too worried but there were firms
that were really worried they’d go out of business if all of their clients put them
on hiatus because of a strike.” (Appendix D)
Diversifying, maintaining control of all elements of the extensive experiences that
consumers seek, and closing the consumer loop requires an entertainment agency to offer
a wide range of services, which requires a Public Relations team to maintain consistency
and authenticity.

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f. The Role of Celebrities in Building a Brand

Talent is similarly affected by the shift to experiential public relations. While a
publicist controls and maintains their image, the celebrity must help build his or her own
brand by interacting directly with their fans. They do so through an intermedial platform,
which may cover anything from personal appearances at events or conventions to
maintaining a Twitter and Facebook account with regular posts that are carefully
considered and monitored by a publicist. Bush Novak of ID Public Relations, explains
the benefit of allowing celebrities to participate in the process, and what the role of Public
Relations is in guiding the client:
“[When social media first started] traditional Hollywood types were “who’s the
buyer, how are we making money?” And we said: we don’t know yet but we want
to make sure we’re building this, and engaging and getting a following that would
be passionate about supporting whatever message you’re putting out there.
Whether it’s philanthropic, or a movie, or a book or a TV show, or a cause you
care about. For us, it was clear that we and the clients could control the message
without the filter of an editorial, without the filter of a talk show host or a
producer. (With social media) You can put out there exactly who you are and how
you want to be portrayed and the message is unfiltered. If you don’t have
skeletons you’re fine, if you’re going to tweet after three glasses of wine and call
people names, probably not a good idea for you. And that’s up to us also to say:
“this is something you should stay away from or this is something you should
embrace.” And people made mistakes, even some of our clients made mistakes.
We feel our job is to really guide them.” [Appendix D]
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Bush Novak’s colleague Natalie Bruss, VP of Digital Strategies for ID PR, explains how
experiential marketing through social media has changed the way she develops strategies
for her clients, which include the celebrity PeeWee Herman, for whom ID Public
Relations created a highly successful social media-based comeback strategy:
How do you see digital strategy shifting the way individuals interact with talent
and brands?
“I think people are more accessible, I think there is less and more of a role for the
media because they serve as a filter, which is really valuable and incredible. I’m a
news junkie and I love reading THR stories, but I think the real time nature of it,
the accountability that that puts on people, the responsibility that they hopefully
feel to their fans and the audience they’ve created. I think it’s changed
dramatically and hopefully even people that don’t feel comfortable doing it
themselves. Some of the more exciting things that we get to do is when there’s
somebody that doesn’t want to engage in social so how can we amplify something
that they’re doing in social?”

What benefits do you see for audiences who are engaging?
“I mean the access is incredible and the impact of an individual. If I wanted Alicia
Keys to see my thing, the amount of gatekeepers that I have to go through to show
it to her is incredible. I can just tweet it to her and chances are that she’ll look at
her @ replies and she might see something that I as an individual created. The
access and impact is both sides of that coin.” (Appendix C)
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As Bruss indicates, through social media elebrities can thus take a hands-on role in the
creation and marketing of their own brand, adding a strong sense of authenticity to
communication with their fans, and giving the fan a sense that their relationship with the
celebrity brand is personal and unmediated.

i. Appearances and conventions

The simplest way for talent to engage with fans to help build the experience of his
or her brand by participating in engaging events like meet & greets, signing autographs at
red carpet events, or appearing at conventions to show fans that the talent is real,
authentic, and essentially a normal human being. Fans see value in these experiences, and
are willing to pay for them, because these personal interactions give them a sense of
community and a personal relationship. Ideally, the talent makes them feel
acknowledged, appreciated, and loved. In exchange for this experience, the fan renews
his or her dedication to the talent, which translates into sales at the primary
(movie/cd/concert) and secondary (merchandise, meet & greet tickets) level.

ii. Interview with Todd Jones, Celebrity Operations Director, ECCC

Todd Jones of Emerald City Comic Con gives insight into the meaning of “brand”
in today’s experience industry. A brand is no longer simply a logo that stands for a
commodity that can be bought at the store; in experiential public relations, the brand
becomes the focal point of an experience. Gone are the days when brand recognition
consisted merely of consumer familiarity with a brand name. Today, a brand must evoke
emotions and memories. A brand must release desires. For Emerald City Comic Con, a
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brand is a destination, an experience that consumers seek out and talk about, and which
translates into new fans and new customers.
What would you say the brand of ECCC is?
“I want them to make it a destination. We want people to come to Seattle to see
comic book writers and guests. We had an astronaut and our NASA thing last
year. That was a huge draw, it was even a draw for guests, the celebrities and
writers wanted to get his autograph. We want this to be a destination Comic Con,”
we want Seattle to be thought of as a premiere convention. We want people to
think ‘that’s a really good Comic Con.’ (…) Everybody wants to be able to see
the people who do what they like and we’re trying to give them that.”

What benefit do you see for the talent that participates?
“I think they get their work out there. Maybe they make a new fan or two. It’s
promotion for them, it’s a chance to meet their fans, and it’s their chance to make
new fans. It’s good to see them outside of whatever element or movie or TV show
they’re working on, it’s good to see that person up on stage talking to the crowd
like “hey, we’re just chatting.” I think that’s the big benefit, that buzz, which
creates more fans. I’ve got friends with kids who go and their kids get into new
things, it creates a new generation of readers. It’s good for the businesses and the
vendors who come. I think everybody benefits, there’s no downside that I see.”
(Appendix B)
Brands such as Emerald City Comic Con rely on personal interaction with their clients,
which they build through annual conventions intended to give fans a truly immersive
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experience. Comic books may only be illustrated stories, but the world of comic books
comes alive through the actors, the merchandise, the costume contests, and the fan
community that comes together at the Comic Con. Kelly Bush Novak of ID Public
Relations further explains the benefits and power of the experiential event as a PR and
marketing tool:
“If the media is there and the fans are there, we want to be there, we want to be in
the conversation. You have to figure out the best way to show up, which makes a
positive impact, because you can also blow it if you show something that doesn’t
land, so everything has to be considered. It also gives the fans an opportunity to
connect with your project in a way that they wouldn’t from a TV spot, or a trailer,
or a magazine article or a talk show appearance, to feel like they were “in on it”
with a first-look, exclusive footage, exclusive Q&A and an autograph signing.
Those fans are going to be buying your tickets opening weekend, they’re going to
do advance ticket purchase, they’re going to broadcast to their social channels
how lovely somebody was or how funny somebody was. If you’re at Comic Con
and you’re watching in real-time the reaction in the room and how it’s resonating
- there’s no denying that impact and that power. So therefore, when you’re ready
to push out the next bit you’ve got automatically all those people wanting to
consume it.”

“It’s about a personal connection and you’ve got to be careful with that too
because people have expectations and they can be disappointed. I just got a letter
from a father whose son and him waited for seven hours in the freezing cold to
53
meet a performer outside of a hotel and they waited and waited and froze and
finally that person came out and security whisked them onto the tour bus and they
took off. The letter is very emotional and this person is devastated, obviously the
client has no idea and they don’t owe this guy anything but he had an expectation
based on the way this person speaks about how much they care about their fans
and he didn’t take that extra time to say “you know these people have been here
all day.” I blame the people around them who knew those people had been there
all day long to not say “you know what those people have been out here since
seven this morning you should take a minute to say hello and take a photo with
them or sign an autograph.” It’s a lot of responsibility so if you’re going to do it
you have to be sincere about it and know that very little goes a long way but you
also can’t turn it on and off when you just don’t feel like it.” (Appendix D)
g. Interview with Natalie Bruss, VP of Digital Strategy at ID PR

i. The Digital Strategy Shift

Natalie Bruss, Vice President of Digital Strategy at ID PR explains how she first
noticed a shift in Public Relations strategies, in response to the rise of the experiential
economy and the growth of social media, and how she turned her observations into a
successful experiential PR concept for digital technologies:
“I ended up getting a job at CAA (Creative Artists Agency) straight out of
college, I was there for a while and I was in a couple of different groups in CAA
but I ended up in the Intelligence Group (IG) which is their trend forecasting
group … no one was focusing on digital because it still wasn’t that big. So I just
hung my hat there and had relationships with all these young platforms. MySpace
54
was still much more prevalent than Facebook, which was still only open to
college students and maybe a couple of professional networks. We would always
refer people, saying “here is what you should do,” and one of the companies we
would refer people to was called Fanscape. (Later) I went to Fanscape and I was
able to actually learn the execution side rather than just ideas. I was there for a
year, then the guy who had run new media at CAA started a start-up that was
about non-profits and social networks, it was called Fanista. I came on to help him
because he had this idea to do the first PSA campaign that was going to roll out
on YouTube and I was able to partner with YouTube, and it was about Burma and
we did this great campaign that you’ve probably seen a part of.”
“And then we hired ID to be our PR agency and I met Kelly (Novak-Bush), she
said: ‘you need to come work at my company.’ I was so bamboozled, when Kelly
Bush tells you to do something you do it. That’s my ID origin story, I’ve been
here five-years and I’ve worked on some amazing clients. I have gotten access to
amazing people who are creative and done amazing campaigns and we’ve built an
amazing team.” (Appendix C)

Digital media strategies have shifted the ways in which individuals interact with
public figures such as celebrities or politicians. Social media platforms have given fans a
way to interact with stars directly, where in the past interactions would have been limited
to sending letters and occasionally receiving an autographed photo in response. Today,
celebrities can answer in real time. The downside of this immediate access is that Public
Relations teams must be prepared with new crisis management strategies for when a
55
celebrity inadvertently posts something that might harm his or her public image. One
example is ’‘Weinergate’, in which Representative Anthony Weiner’s lewd Twitter
photos were leaked, revealing that he had used official social media channels to solicit
women for personal purposes. (Parker, 2011) Other examples of failed attempts at direct
communication include designer Kenneth Cole’s controversial tweet in which he used a
reference to the Arab Spring to promote his new Spring line of shoes (Emmrich, 2013),
actor James Franco’s near-nude Instagram photos and apparent attempt to use social
media to pick up a 17-year-old girl, (D’Zurilla, 2014) or the time television personality
Glenn Beck ‘Favorited’ a tweet from a white supremacist group. (Terkel, 2010)
These Twitter disasters are not limited to the world of celebrities and politicians,
although those examples have attracted extensive attention in the mainstream media. The
banking firm JP Morgan Chase experienced its own Public Relations breakdown in 2013
when they aborted a Twitter Q&A, that had been intended to improve their online image.
Their campaign proved naïve when Twitter users instead unleashed a stream of sarcasm
and rage directed at the company. JP Morgan Chase cancelled the Q&A, but the damage
to its reputation had already been done. (Holmes & Sudhaman, 2014)
As Natalie Bruss explains, digital strategies encompass far more than just social
media tactics.
“When we say ‘digital,’ we mean digital partnerships, thinking about where the
space is going, how our clients have been a part of it. We’ve traditionally not
done publicity, although we’re getting more into that space. When we say
influence or marketing in the digital space, we always reach out to the press as
influencers but now we realize we can also pitch them the story too. (…) I think
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social media is just super narrow. It happens to be a lot of what we spend our time
talking about things that touch it, but what about mobile, what about media that’s
not social and things like Netflix? There’s so much that touches digital and I think
that saying social media is a really narrow way to look at it and I think that when
you see that I think “oh someone that manages your Twitter and Facebook
presence” and I think we’re a little bit smarter and try to think a little more
broadly than those people.”

What does “digital strategy” mean to you?
“Looking at something holistically and figuring out how we can build
distribution. My mom’s a math teacher and I always approach it as if I’m doing
proof, so if you tell me that your goal is to fund your Kickstarter campaigns then I
can tell you: here’s what we need to do to do that. And hopefully we’ve been
working together long enough that I’ve helped you build a set of distribution
assets that you can tap into to help reach that goal, but if not we, have to figure
out where are there big pools of assets that we can tap into and reverse engineer. I
think it’s fascinating how we solve for those problems.” (Appendix C)
Public Relations and marketing departments thus both face a shift, which, as Bruss points
out, relate not only to customer-facing interactions through various media, but also to the
ways in which businesses develop strategies for growth, and the ways an experiential
product is designed from the ground up.

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ii. Alienation and Isolation

The downside of the shift to digital strategies is that audiences may well perceive
a celebrity to be isolated and out of touch if they do not make use of digital platforms to
interact with fans. Despite the risk associated with allowing a celebrity to interfere with
their carefully curated image, publicists should encourage their talent to communicate
with fans, in order to maintain (inter)active relationships. On rare occasions, this effort
may not pay off. The result of a Twitter ‘scandal’ may in fact be the opposite of what the
digital media strategy was intended to accomplish, a celebrity may alienate fans and lose
credibility if they are insincere or careless in their communication. Ideally, all such
communications move through the publicist for approval to avoid crises, but immediate
nature of online communication makes this difficult to do without ruining the sense of
spontaneity associated with media such as Twitter. Bruss is quick to point out that a
digital strategy does not, in all cases, require direct participation, citing Jennifer
Lawrence as an example:
“You can look at the Jennifer Lawrence example in that she doesn’t use social
media and she’s the most relatable girl in America. I think it really depends on the
person. When you do not have an open, engaging personality, then it’s hard, but
there are ways to accomplish the same goal without using social media.”
(Appendix C)
There are cases where digital strategies can enable celebrities to avoid direct interaction,
yet as Bruss points out, those require the old-fashioned skill of having an open and
engaging personality, or charisma. Even then, it is valuable for a publicist to monitor
digital use of the celebrity’s name and image, in order to prevent misuse and tackle crises
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as quickly as possible. As Bruss points out, this also involves curation of media other
than social media, such as ensuring the celebrity maintains a good relationship with the
press.

iii. Leveraging Your Individual Brand

Natalie Bruss understands the challenges of building brand familiarity and
leveraging brands across intermedial platforms. New brands have a unique opportunity of
employing innovations in technology to get the word out without spending a large
amount of money on advertising. Experiential campaigns do not necessarily require the
creation of a costly experience such as Disneyland. With the proper Public Relations
strategy, a brand experience can come to life purely through well-planned and targeted
communication.
“I think being authentic is important but I think it’s probably in our best
practices,” Bruss says. “Authenticity and also gratitude are two of the things that I
think should be important to everyone. And knowing your audience and knowing
what you have to offer – not doing it ‘paint splatter’ approach. Understanding not
every platform is right for every person or brand and sometimes as a brand
especially you’ll get more… like the brands that jumped on Pinterest early, that
was such a niche platform at the time but a lot of brands put a lot of early
investment into it. Not going just where they thought the masses were, but where
they thought people would actually be engaged are. I think it’s a subtle but very
important distinction.” (Appendix C)
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Knowing a brand’s audience, and finding the perfect balance between authenticity and
carefully targeted information are key to crafting a brand image in an economy where
material commodities have made way for customer experiences as a primary revenue
source.
10. Experiential PR in Branding

a. Make or Break: The Value of Events

When Microsoft and Sony announced the next generation of their individual
gaming consoles in 2013, they chose two completely different approach to marketing and
public relations. Sony opted for a smaller, quieter strategy for launching the PlayStation
4. Their campaign involved an announcement of the specifications of their new console,
targeted primarily at gaming-oriented media outlets. The company also sent information
directly to their core player base, putting gamers “at the heart” of their brand, by reaching
out to them via existing channels of communication. Mark Bowles, Former head of
product marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, says that they wanted to
correct mistakes they had made during the launch of the PS3:
“We’re very conscious of who our audience is and what they want and I think
that’s been listened to throughout the development process of the console itself
and the games and the campaign. I think the market has progressed and there have
been other gaming devices that have done things differently and had great
success. (Joseph & Shields, 2013)”
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While Sony organized smaller events in major cities, the core of their PlayStation 4 game
console launch was not a widespread marketing campaign, but rather a PR outreach
campaign that was targeted directly at their known audience.

Figure 9: The Sony Launch Event in New York, on November 14, 2014. Sony focused on a small scale event directed at
gamers. The event included game stations where attendees could try out the newest PlayStation 4 games. (DeCrow,
Invision, & Sony Computer Enter 2)
Microsoft, on the other hand, used a very different approach for the launch of the
Xbox One. They withheld many of the details about their new gaming console, but
arranged a very public media spectacle to attract attention to the new device. They sought
to organize “one of the biggest entertainment premieres of the year.” (Joseph & Shields,
2013) This premiere took place across multiple launch events, with the biggest in New
York, where Xbox One advertising took over Times Square for the evening, under the
slogan “Own a piece of tomorrow.” The event was intended to be a full experience that
not only focused on games, but was complemented by other forms of entertainment, such
61
Figure 11: The Xbox One Launch Event took over most
billboards in Times Square. (Welch, 2013)
Figure 10: Gladiators and zombies were on hand to
celebrate the release of new games. (Welch, 2013)
Figure 12: Developers signed autographs for the
Microsoft fans who had waited in line for hours.
(Welch, 2013)
Figure 13: Macklemore performed at the Xbox One
launch, along with several other celebrities. (Welch,
2013)
as performances by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. They also dressed people up as
gladiators and zombies to celebrate new games, such as “Ryse: Son of Rome” and “Dead
Rising 3.”

Incorporating further ‘experience-oriented’ strategies from gaming and comic
book conventions, Microsoft’s Xbox One developers signed autographs for fans,
participants were allowed to preview games by trying them out in the gaming center, and
the final moments of the New York launch featured a countdown in imitation of the
famous New Year’s Eve event in Times Square. (Welch, 2013) Microsoft’s strategy
seemed to rely on the power of an extensive media circus, and what they perceived as the
inherent value of their brand, further hyped up by the creation of ‘mystery’ surrounding
the new console.
62
Both companies’ consoles doubled their sales in comparison with their previous
consoles, the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. (Byford, 2014) However, the results of the
launch strategies suggest that Microsoft’s efforts did not pay off. Even before the actual
launch date, interest and pre-sales for Sony’s PlayStation vastly exceeded those of
Microsoft at a ratio of 2:1. (Pace, 2013) Four months after Microsoft’s epic launch
experience, the company announced that it had shipped 5 million units, while Sony had
shipped 7 million consoles in the same time period. (Statt, 2014)
Overall, Microsoft’s shortcomings were likely the result of a poorly perceived PR
campaign, which involved too little technical information about the console itself, to the
annoyance of gamers. As such, this case study highlights one of the pitfalls of
experiential PR: no matter how comprehensive, grand, and interactive the experience is,
it must be carefully directed at the right target audience. Had Microsoft relied more
heavily on a public relations campaign than on simply bombarding the public with
entertainment events, they would likely have had a better understanding of their target
audience’s expectations, and may have released technical specifications the way Sony
did. This shows that experiential marketing and public relations must remain mutually
interactive, taking advantage of positive relationships between the company and the
consumer, and it must be directed through the correct channels in order to be effective.

63
b. Interview Heather Greenfield, Senior Vice President of Brand Strategies, ID
PR
Heather Greenfield, in charge of brand strategies at ID PR, offers several insights
into developing successful event experiences that meet a client’s objectives, starting with
a clear internal outline of end goals:
“Our primary consideration always is to identify what is the end goal – are we
looking to sell tickets to the event? If that is the case, pre-event press is key. If
the goal is to raise overall awareness about the brand/event, then post-event press
is key, where consumers may see great photos from the event, etc.” (Appendix A)
Greenfield explains the benefits of the types of events she organizes, and how to
encourage the kind of personal interaction that leads to positive memories of the brand:
“The benefit of events is the chance to get guests immersed into the cause (if it is
a non-profit/charity event) or with the product (if it is a product launch event).
This interaction between guests and my clients is crucial. … People always like to
have a good time, and if you throw celebrities into the mix, your event is sure to
be a hit.”
As part of event strategies, public relations teams must maintain social relationships
across platforms. This adds a new way to encourage media coverage, which can be
difficult to attain for events, and allows for what Greenfield calls the “two-way dialogue”
that empowers consumers and encourages brand loyalty:
“Social media has introduced an entirely new way for brands to speak directly to
their fans/consumers; it’s a more authentic way to communicate with them, versus
a third party endorsement, which is usually what traditional editorial coverage is.
64
… It is always better to have a two-way dialogue with consumers versus the
typical one-way conversation brands traditionally have with consumers via ads,
press, etc. Consumers feel empowered when they can speak to brands directly
and brands are held more accountable when speaking with consumers directly.”

b. The Apple Model

In addition to stand-alone conventions, launch parties, or vacation experiences,
the ‘experience’ can also exist as an ongoing model. We see this model applied most
commonly in theme parks or regularly occurring gastronomic experiences, such as ‘Dans
le Noir’ in London, which offers dining in the dark. More directly commercial versions of
this model have proven just as viable or more. For example, Apple Stores, which are less
a point of sale venue than an opportunity for customers to interact with Apple products
and specialists.

i. Experiencing the Product

When consumers walk into an Apple Store, they see no price tags or loud posters
enticing them to take advantage of this or that deal. Cash registers are non-existent. What
consumers find is a minimalist, modern, multi-sensory experience that subtly guides
visitors towards purchases. Employees roam around the store between customers, helping
them repair or understand their products, and answering questions. Unlike in large retail
65
Figure 14: This Apple Store in Soho offers an open, bright, welcoming space. Customers are invited to
browse around as though they were in a library, to sit down and use Where customers can browse and
experience all of Apple’s product lines and corporate lifestyle by interacting with the staff.
(Whittemore, Christine, 2010)
stores, every device is on and accessible, with internet enabled, so that customers can get
a realistic experience of what it is like to use the device. (Gallo, 2012b)

ii. The Store Environment as Experience

At Apple Stores, the customer is invited to participate in an experience in which sales
appear to be an afterthought (‘appear’ being key). There is no sales pressure, nor is it
possible to overstay a welcome. In fact, Apple’s staff has been trained to be so
welcoming and lenient, that recent years have seen a viral trend of videos in which people
record themselves doing unusual things inside Apple Stores. There have been videos of
people, such as YouTube’s ‘lifecaster’ iJustine dancing (iJustine, 2010), people
proposing to their partners, and stranger acts intended to provoke the staff, to no avail.
66
Like the steadfast Queen’s Guard at Buckingham Palace, Apple’s employees don’t bat an
eye. They have been thoroughly trained to deliver a positive and inclusive experience.
(Gallo, 2012a) This includes an innovative model of employee placement. Inside the
store, employees are not assigned to a single station, nor do cash registers exist.
Employees are expected to roam around to interact with customers, without making
people feel pressured to complete a purchase. When a customer does want to purchase an
item, the employee uses a handheld payment processing device. This means that, no
matter how busy an Apple Store gets, there are never lines for the cash register, and
nobody ever appears to be waiting. The visual effect creates a more welcoming
experience that makes customers feel positively about the Apple Brand. They leave with
the sensation of having taken part in a unique brand experience that has been carefully
constructed to give the impression that customers will continue to feel this happy if they
purchase the product and take it home.
11. Quo Vadis: Future Growth & Advice

a. Communication

Public Relations practitioners cannot treat their audience as a passive body of
consumers. The Experience Economy has raised expectations, and consumers now expect
engaging interaction with companies and celebrities. The company’s experience must be
unique and transformative in order to pull consumers towards a purchase, and the
experience must be carefully targeted to avoid negative consequences. This is especially
true in a world where 24-hour transmedial communication has complicated crisis
management and made it difficult for companies to recover from a failed experience.
67
b. Determining Goals

Companies must determine precise end goals and seek out the best avenues to exploit
them. Only then can they provide their audience with a valuable product in the form of a
unique experience that they cannot get from competitors. Public Relations practitioners
must therefore place themselves at the heart of the company where they can help build
the experience as a product from the ground up, using their knowledge of the public, and
their understanding of the needs the product must fulfill in order to be successful.
c. New Technologies

Companies must stay on top of new technologies, including but not limited to
developments in social media. These technologies offer certain advantages when
leveraged to create new opportunities. This is especially true in terms of mutual
communication with customers and the potential for viral marketing. Of course, it is an
integral part of the PR strategists’ job to not only master existing technologies but always
keep a pulse on new developments in this space.
d. Pitfalls of Technology

Companies also must be aware that the aforementioned technologies can pose serious
problems as well if they are not carefully managed and used appropriately. Creating an
‘authentic’ experience for customers is a difficult task that requires extensive PR efforts,
including new ways to leverage technology to create opportunities. However, being too
quick to jump into new spaces and failing to execute properly opens the door to criticism.
It is never in an organization’s interest to be a cautionary tale.
68
e. Empowering the Consumer

By listening to their audience and reaching out to them, companies can learn about
their own strengths and weaknesses, and thus improve upon the experiences they offer.
When customers see that an experience reflects their interests and their input, they will
feel empowered and valued, which makes them more likely to return to the same brand
for subsequent new experiences. Ultimately, company that is leveraging experience as
part of their brand promise must deliver what their audience expects (the familiar and
desired), but also more, in the form of innovative experiences that match the interests of
the target group.
12. Potential Downsides of Experiential PR

a. Cost
Experiential Public Relations can be cost prohibitive. On a practical level, a Public
Relations practitioner can use inexpensive methods to reach customers and profile their
interests, for example through social media. That form of community outreach, along
with viral marketing, have lowered the threshold for breaking into an industry by
lowering the challenges to enter the playing field. At the same time, a true experience-
based business will often have far higher operating costs than a traditional business.
Research and communications are only one element of the experiential product. To truly
create a transformative experience, the company needs to employ transmedial
engagement, take control of all possible channels to steer consumers towards a purchase,
and invest heavily in developing and staging the event or model through which the
experience is delivered, whether that’s in the form of a convention, a full vacation tour, or
69
the development of a chain of technology stores with a thorough training program for
employees to ensure brand consistency.
b. Relevance
Not all organizations can operate on an experience-based business model. When the
experience is not the primary product but only a complementary add-on to an existing
product, the company must carefully consider whether it is cost effective to create and
stage an experience surrounding that project. For example, floorboards will probably gain
nothing from adding experiential PR or marketing, unless it is a trial that can be extended
for a period of time. Contrary to what Gilmore and Pine argued, some products may not
lend themselves to experiential marketing.
c. Adverse Effects
As the Xbox One campaign and countless Twitter scandals show, an experiential
campaign or event done wrong could have an adverse short-term effect or even be
extremely damaging to the company or public figure’s reputation over the longer term.
The result could be an alienated customer base, or worse. This was especially visible in
JP Morgan Chase’s failed Twitter PR campaign in 2013. (Holmes & Sudhaman, 2014)
d. Hype and Disappointment
The nature of experiences makes it easy to overhype or exaggerate the expected effect.
Transformations may only be achieved if the consumer is sufficiently open to one, and if
the company has crafted the experience well. Celebrity-related experiences may fall short
when fans see the fallible human behind the romanticized ideal. This is a potentially
precarious position for companies to place themselves in, and an unsuccessful campaign
70
may lead to widespread disappointment. This is one of the greatest weaknesses of
Experiential Economies. Because experiences do not meet material needs, consumers can
choose to dispense with the product more easily, or they can seek out new experiences
with other companies. Consumers may become bored and lose interest if the experience
is not continually updated and renewed. This means a company cannot build a business
model on a single experience without risk of becoming irrelevant within a short amount
of time.
Conclusion

The future of the field lies in Experiential Public Relations, and this thesis has
emphasized the roles Public Relations practitioners can play in the Experience Economy.
While firms that do not embrace experiential methodologies may be left behind, the field
of Public Relations still has a long way to go in reinventing its traditional role and
positioning itself at the heart of the experience process. Nevertheless, the Experience
Economy offers a bright future for PR, which will become increasingly more important in
the production process, as companies seek new ways to communicate with its publics and
understand how people would like to spend their disposable income. Throughout all this,
experiential public relations must remain the guards of brand consistency and
authenticity.

71
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Appendix A

Interview: Heather Greenfield, Senior VP, Brand Strategies, ID PR

Please tell me about your career.
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania (where I majored in
Communications, with a specialization in Marketing), I was determined to work in the
entertainment industry. My first job was that of production assistant, reporting to a minor
producer at Warner Bros. Though I enjoyed reading scripts, handling production
77
schedules and the like, it was not something about which I was passionate, so when the
SVP at a talent PR firm recruited me for her firm, I changed course. She handled PR for
some of the top actors and actresses in Hollywood. I liked the PR part, and preferred
working with press and media, rather than talent. Subsequently, I moved to Universal
Pictures and worked in their film publicity department, where I was able to continue
working with media, though I was “representing” films and not talent.

How did you end up at ID?
While at Universal, I interacted with ID representatives on different levels. It was an
easy segue from doing film PR at Universal to move to ID, where I have been for almost
10 years. At ID, I run the brand strategies department.

What is your current role and what are your current responsibilities for the
agency?
Currently, I am Senior Vice President of the Brand Strategies department at ID. I
oversee a staff of 15 (split between the LA and NY offices) and handle topline strategy
and program execution for a slew of global clients.

What does the brands department do for their clients?
The Brands Department provides and implements overarching brand strategy
and marketing campaigns that leverage the power of pop culture and the entertainment
78
industry. We integrate brand appropriate talent into PR campaigns to create
entertainment/lifestyle legs around consumer based activations/programs and provide all-
encompassing media relations across all verticals within consumer and lifestyle press.

How many events would you say you throw in a given year?
On an average, we manage 15 - 25 events a year

What is the brands department role in these events?
The brands department works closely with the client to ensure the success of the event,
handling everything from concept planning/creation to management of production
vendors; securing guests and VIP attendees; securing press coverage surrounding the
event (both pre- and post-event), etc.

What are the key considerations when putting together an event?
Our primary consideration always is to identify what is the end goal – are we looking to
sell tickets to the event? If that is the case, pre-event press is key. If the goal is to raise
overall awareness about the brand/event, then post-event press is key, where consumers
may see great photos from the event, etc.

What do you see as the benefit of these events?
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The benefit of events is the chance to get guests immersed into the cause (if it is a non-
profit/charity event) or with the product (if it is a product launch event). This interaction
between guests and my clients is crucial.

What is the general feedback that you receive from individuals who attend these
events?
We are fortunate to receive strong, positive feedback after all our events. We work hard
to fulfill our clients’ needs and expectations, and go out of our way to ensure our events
are special experiences that are different from anything else our guests might go to.

Are journalists more likely to pick up stories that come through from an event or
a press release?
It depends, particularly re what type of event it is

Why do you think this is?
It really depends on the journalist…..some are busy and just want the facts via press
releases. Others like the experience and like launch events and will give coverage that
way.

How important are product demos/samplers when approaching journalists or
trying to get coverage?
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Very important

Does it make it easier do get coverage?
If you have samplers to send, do it. There is no guarantee coverage will be easier to get,
or that you’ll get better coverage, but it definitely increases your chances. If you have a
new beverage on the market, the press need to be able to sample that beverage. They
can’t “taste” the drink from a press release alone.

What do you think makes events so popular?
Popular with whom? With the brands who want to throw events, or the people who want
to go to events? It is difficult to get press to attend events (given their deadlines,
demands on their time, etc.). People always like to have a good time though, and if you
throw celebrities into the mix, your event is sure to be a hit.

How has social media changed the way branding/brand publicity is approached?
Social media has introduced an entirely new way for brands to speak directly to
their fans/consumers; it’s a more authentic way to communicate with them, versus a third
party endorsement which is usually what traditional editorial coverage is.

What value do you think having a direct channel to consumers gives an
organization?
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It is always better to have a two-way dialogue with consumers versus the typical one-way
conversation brands traditionally have with consumers via ads, press, etc. Consumers
feel empowered when they can speak to brands directly and brands are held more
accountable when speaking with consumers directly.

How does having access to so many departments under one roof affect the way
you approach your duties?
If you mean the different departments at ID, it helps tremendously with how I do my job.
I am exposed to a lot more information thanks to my colleagues, and this information is
sometimes very helpful when I am coming up with strategies and PR plans for my clients.

What is the future of branding/brand publicity?
The future continues to move more and more online… the ongoing shutdown of more
and more print newspapers or print magazines gives publicists a lot more space with
which to play, since we are not limited by inches of newspaper columns.

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Appendix B

Interview: Todd Jones, Celebrity Operations Director, Emerald City Comic Con
Date: 12/20/13

Please tell me about your career and how you became involved in this.
I have not been with Emerald City Comic Con (ECCC) from the beginning, although I
knew the organizer beforehand – Jim and I have been friends for a long time. I was a
customer in his comic book stores, and that’s how a lot of us kind of got involved. The
first year was a very small con, what’s now the Century Link Event Center, and it just
sort of kept growing.
I’ve been with the Con since 2007. My personal involvement and what I do now grew out
of the first year we had celebrity guests. We had Julie Benz and Jamie Bamber that year.
I was working registration at the time, and things were getting a little shorthanded. They
pulled me aside and asked if I wanted to assist Julie Benz for the weekend, and so a
couple of the volunteers and I handled the three guests. It was new to everybody, but we
found a way to make it work. The following year I was asked to come in and run what is
now this department. From there it just kept growing; the Con got bigger and the guest
list got longer. To cope, I recruited volunteers and implemented new programs. This way
as the Con grew, my department and I grew with it. I went from volunteer to director, and
now I’m on the board. It’s been good growth. This year I’m the one booking the talent.
On a deeper level, what is it that you do?
I negotiate the contracts for appearance, and I deal with their booking agents. There is a
group of agents that have them as clients and use them as bookers. Working through the
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bookers, I see who is available. Usually we have budgets to work with – what can we
afford and what can we not afford. However, it generally works out. Beyond that, I run
the department of celebrity operations. I have two department heads who work with
personnel and the staff. We all work together to make sure that our footprint is taken care
of – all of the tables setup and the signage posted. Those volunteers also act as personal
assistants for the guests throughout the show. They are the ones sitting at the table with
the guests, they get the photos out, and they escort the guests to the green room. I oversee
portions of different things like the photo opps, and I also work in conjunction with
various departments to ensure that what I need is done and where my guests need to go is
worked out. We have to get the guests to their panels and photo opps on time, and we
work that schedule out. It’s a coordinated effort, and you have to make sure that all of the
pieces get moved around.

Is the growth in terms of attracting more talent what led to the implementation of
VIP passes?
VIP passes is something we kicked around for a long time. The VIP passes are great in
terms of time management. That was something that was always in the works, and we
were just waiting for the right time to put them in.
What has the growth of the convention been like since you’ve been with it and
what do you think has led to that growth?
A lot of things. Last year we had 64,000, and this year we’re expecting around 70. We’re
2 - 3 years ahead of where I thought we might be. It speaks a lot for the show, and the
show’s reputations grows with it. You have these bigger shows like the San Diego Comic
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Con, the NY Comic Con, and the FanExpo in Toronto, and then you’ve got us. We’re
different from San Diego that has become a big showcase. The publishers and studios go
there to do big things, and it’s a fantastic show. I love San Diego. We are still a very
much comic book oriented, and we bring that crowd in.
We do celebrity guests, and while it’s a big thing, it’s not a main focus of the convention.
Even with the celebrities we do bring in, we want them to stay as much in genre as
possible. We try to stay as fan-oriented as possible, and that’s really our goal. The show
is not about us; the show is about the attendee.

How has the growth of the Con spurred change over the years and how have you
adapted to it?
We adapt every year. We’ve had to expand several areas within the convention center to
be able to accommodate bigger crowds. For example, we have moved our main panel hall
several times, and now we are in the biggest space possible which seats almost 3,000
people for our main panels. By growing into more space within the convention center, we
have been able to do more. We went from being in one big room to now having the entire
convention center. That room that we were in those first couple of years is where photo
opps are and where our registration team works out of. Last year, our show hall grew
immensely. The growth has not been prohibitive for us; it’s a good problem to have. Our
show grows every year, and we have to deal with that. The nice thing is the more we do
each year to make things better, the easier it is to adapt the following year.

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What would you say the brand of ECCC is?
I want people to make it a destination. We want them to come to Seattle to see comic
book writers and guests. We had an astronaut and our NASA focus last year. That was a
huge draw, even for the celebrity guests and writers who wanted his autograph. We want
this to be a destination Comic Con; we want Seattle to be thought of as a premiere
convention. We want people to think “that’s a really good Comic Con.”
For 2013 we were #4 in North America and #3 in the US, by attendance. San Diego is #1,
New York is #2, Toronto is #3, and we were fourth in North America. That’s in 11 years,
which astonishes us even. Everybody wants to be able to see the people who do what
they like, and we’re trying to give them that.

When does the planning process for the following year’s convention start?
It’s ongoing. Even when we were planning for 2014, we were still thinking about 2015.
We are always thinking years ahead. It’s a year-round fulltime thing.

What benefit do you see for the talent that participates?
I think they get their work out there. Maybe they make a new fan or two. It’s promotion
for them: a chance to meet their fans and make new ones. It’s good to see them outside of
the movie or TV show they’re working on; it’s good to see that person up on stage
talking to the crowd like “hey, we’re just chatting.” That buzz is the big benefit and
creates more fans. I have friends with kids who go and their kids discover new things,
creating a new generation of readers. It’s good for the businesses and the vendors who
come. Everybody benefits.
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As events like this have grown, do you see talent and people who normally don’t
do them participate?
I do. Some of that could be just because they look at it as a promotional avenue. It’s also
an opportunity for them to stay in touch with each other. You will see a lot of groups that
come together at these conventions. This is the biggest weekend for some people. I think
the guests do that too. You get dynamics like that because people truly like each other.
It’s a great place for people to touch base when they’re not on set, not holed up writing
three different comic books or drawing four different pages. I like seeing that too.
What do you see as the future of ECCC and events like it?
The future is bright. As we keep growing in reputation, we keep growing in attendance,
and we keep growing within the city of Seattle. We try to do more year-round events, and
we try to involve our minions in more things. I hope to start seeing more community
action types of things. This year a group of people organized a choir. It had great
attendance despite being the coldest day of the year. They got out there and sang
representing ECCC. That’s where I see the growth. I want to start seeing more direct
Con-related activities in spaces outside of the convention center. I see slow, steady and
positive growth, and hopefully it all works out.

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Appendix C

Interview: Natalie Bruss, Vice President of Digital Strategies, ID Public Relations
Date: 12/03/13

Please tell me about your career.
So, in college I was a sociology major and behavioral economics which is basically the
fancy way of saying marketing. I took a class my junior year, it was my junior year thesis
class called “Social Networks” but it was before Friendster and before Facebook. It was
actually about mapping people’s real life social networks – one of the books we had to
read was Mark Granovetter wrote this book called “Getting A Job” and it was about the
strength of small ties and sort of how strong dies actually don’t help you. I was fascinated
by this space – I was procrastinating writing my thesis at the end of the semester, it had
been six months and I googled “social networks” – this is a true story – and an article
about Friendster came up, it had come out two weeks before so while I’d been in this
class. I saw it, I clicked on it and I got it, immediately I got it and I was like “this is the
future.” And I wrote this rhapsodic twenty-page paper about social networks and the
power of online to transform social networks. It was the first paper written at Harvard on
online Social Networks.

And then I left, I went to Australia for study abroad for second semester and a week into
me being in Australia, Mark builds Facebook and launched it on campus. I had a really
visceral reaction to it, not only because I’d been on Friendster, but because I was halfway
around the planet from all my friends and it was really hard. I was super homesick, and
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so I got it more than even the people that were on campus did. And that’s where I became
fascinated by this space in general. I’d also done a lot of work on product placement and
marketing, I did an internship out here at a company called Feature This which was a
product placement company, one of the original ones that had the Everlast gloves be the
boxing gloves that Sly Stallone used in the Rocky movies. I did that internship the
summer before college so I knew I wanted to do something tied to entertainment and
marketing.

I ended up getting a job at CAA straight out of college, I was there for a while, I was in a
couple of different groups in CAA but I ended up in the Intelligence Group which is their
trend forecasting group. Somebody was focusing on fashion, somebody was focusing on
this, somebody was focusing on that but no one was focusing on digital because it still
wasn’t that big. So I said “ok this is my thing” and I just hung my hat there and so I had
relationships with all these young platforms. Myspace was still much more prevalent than
Facebook which was still only open to college students and maybe a couple of
professional networks. We would always refer people saying “here is what you should
do” and one of the companies we would refer people to was called Fanscape. After I’d
been at IG for a while I didn’t want to be an assistant anymore, I couldn’t see a clear path
for growth there and so I went to Fanscape and I was able to actually learn the execution
side rather than just ideas. I was there for a year, then the guy that had run new media at
CAA started a start-up that was about non-profits and social networks. It was called
Fanista but I came on to help him because he had this idea to do the first PSA campaign
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that was going to roll out on YouTube and I was able to partner with YouTube and it was
about Burma and we did this great campaign that you’ve probably seen a part of.

And then we hired ID to be our PR agency and I met Kelly (Novak-Bush), I met John
(Koch) first and John and I fell in love with each other – platonically from our brains –
and John said “you think differently from anybody I’ve met, I think you should meet
Kelly.” And I met Kelly just thinking that I was taking a meeting and in the room she
said: “you need to come work at my company.” I was so bamboozled, when Kelly Bush
tells you to do something you do. That’s my ID origin story, I’ve been here five-years
and I’ve worked on some amazing clients and I’ve been very blessed to be positioned as
the next big thing and I have gotten access to amazing people who are creative and done
amazing campaigns and we’ve built an amazing team.

What is your current role and what are your responsibilities at ID?
I’m the Vice President of the Digital department that means I manage the strategy,
growth and oversee all the accounts that are touching digital. When we say digital we
mean digital partnerships thinking about where the space is going, how our clients have
been a part of it. We’ve traditionally not done publicity although we’re getting more into
that space. When we say influence or marketing in the digital space, we always reach out
to the press as influencers but now we realize we can also pitch them the story too.

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It’s called the digital strategy department here, what do you think about agencies
that call it the social media department?
I’m actually campaigning that we be called the Digital Partnerships and Strategy
department. I think social media is just super narrow. I mean it happens to be a lot of
what we spend our time talking about things that touch it, but what about mobile, what
about media that’s not social and things like Netflix? There’s so much that touches digital
and I think that saying social media is a really narrow way to look at it and I think that
when you see that I think “oh someone that manages your Twitter and Facebook
presence” and I think we’re a little bit smarter and try to think a little more broadly than
those people.

What does digital strategy mean to you?
Looking at something holistically and figuring out how we can build distribution. My
mom’s a math teacher and I always approach it as if I’m doing proof, so if you tell me
that your goal is to fund your Kickstarter campaign then I can tell you: here’s what we
need to do to do that. And hopefully we’ve been working together long enough that I’ve
helped you build a set of distribution assets that you can tap into to help reach that goal,
but if not we have to figure out where are there big pools of assets that we can tap into
and revenge engineer. I think it’s fascinating how we solve for those problems.
How do you see digital strategy shifting the way individuals interact with talent
and brands?
I think people are more accessible, I think there is less and more of a role for the media
because they serve as a filter which is really valuable and incredible. I’m a news junkie
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and I love reading THR stories but I think the real time nature of it, the accountability
that that puts on people, the responsibility that they hopefully feel to their fans and the
audience they’ve created. I think it’s changed dramatically and hopefully even people
that don’t feel comfortable doing it themselves. I think our job, some of the more exciting
things that we get to do is when there’ somebody that doesn’t want to engage in social so
how can we amplify something that they’re doing in social.

What benefits do you see for audiences who are engaging?
I mean the access is incredible and the impact of an individual. If I wanted Alicia Keys to
see my thing the amount of gatekeepers that I have to go through to show it to her is
incredible. I can just tweet it to her and chances are that she’ll look at her @ replies and
she might see something that I as an individual created. The access and impact is both
sides of that coin.

Do you see any downsides to that access?
Yes, and I think that’s why there are a bunch of different levels to that. That’s why you
can’t direct message someone if they’re not following you back. I think those types of
things that the platform has put in place. There’s a lot of “crying fire in a theatre,” there’s
a lot of that that goes on that I think there’s no way to get around. In general I think the
platforms have tried to put in place as many measures as possible to make that flow
smoothly.

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Do you think a lack of perceived direct interaction can isolate talent and
companies from their target audiences?
Yes. But I think it also… You can look at the Jennifer Lawrence example in that she
doesn’t use social media and she’s the most relatable girl in America. I think it really
depends on the person. When you do not have an open, engaging personality, then it’s
hard, but there are ways to accomplish the same goal without using social media.

How do you think this type of interaction helps to build a brand?
Traditionally the only voice of the brand that companies had was through advertisements.
To me the biggest and most exciting is how important service and customer service has
become. Like if you think of the history of the Best Buy Twitter account or @DeltaAssist
which was an account I think before Delta was. It shows brands need to provide value for
their customers too and the smart brands are doing that. It’s different than “I’m going to
buy your product” but for you to choose to actively subscribe that it’s emails or tweets
coming to you from a brand they have to really show that… Why people subscribe to the
Orea Twitter account is because they provide something that actually adds value to my
day and it’s put a lot of accountability on brands to truly add value.

You’re credited with the revival of Paul Reubens’ career by putting him on social
media and transferring the whole Pee-Wee Herman brand into the digital space.
Which is huge because he had a wonderful comeback and that great HBO special.
Why did you think that was the best approach for him to take?
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We knew what he wanted to do but he didn’t have a megaphone to do it, he had scalded
his relationship with a lot of the press and we didn’t know whether or not they were
going to cover it. And if they refused to cover it he would have been DOA, we had to
build something that he could amass his own audience. The second part was - you grow
up loving Pee-Wee - so many people did, it’s this wonderful nostalgia, the people that
follow it re-tweet it like crazy, the content is perfect and the character of Pee-Wee is
perfect for social media and so that was a unique blessing that helped us do our job and
do it super effectively.

One of the other things that we did when we were launching this job – they announced
they first iPad during all this – and we thought of “imagine if Pee-Wee were to get an
iPad” – how would Magic Screen feel about that? We had the set of the show, so we
called Funny or Die and we said: I think we should do this video and if we can get it out
tomorrow it can be part of the conversation. We were lucky that he came of age digitally
in a time where so much amazing stuff was going on.

What are some general best practices that you would advise for both individuals
and corporations seeking to transfer their brands into a digital space?
I think being authentic is important but I think – everything that I’m going to tell you
here has been over said – and I think it’s probably in our best practices. Authenticity and
also gratitude are two of the things that I think should be important to everyone. And I
think knowing your audience and knowing what you have to offer – not doing it paint
splatter approach. Understanding not every platform is right for every person or brand
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and sometimes as a brand especially you’ll get more… like the brands that jumped on
Pinterest early, that was such a niche platform at the time but a lot of brands put a lot of
early investment into it. Not going just where they thought the masses were but where
they thought people would actually be engaged are. I think it’s a subtle but very
important distinction.

If you had it your way would all talent and brands have a strong digital presence?
No, because I think most of the brands that I engage with I would prefer but I think
there’s a beauty to brands having a mystery. I think there’s some… where we are right
now there’s a beauty to a brand that’s just “we’re this, we’re a mom and pop store.” I
think that there’ some beautiful nostalgia to that and I think the problem with everyone
having a presence is that we all sit on our computers all day and we don’t talk to each
other, or pick up the phone or see each other in person. I think that’s the part where
everybody is just wired to their computers and everything is possible via social media I
think you’re going to lose some of that. But I think it’s a good idea for almost everybody
who has something to say and wants to actually engage and not just broadcast one way –
then you should be where the conversation is happening. What’s frustrating to me is
people who stick their head in the sand and pretend that nothing is happening. Feedback
is a gift and even if you don’t want to participate just the feedback side of it is incredible.

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The digital head of Coca-Cola recently said that his goal was the death of the
press release within the next of the press release, replacing them with digital
newsrooms where the general audience has the same access to materials that the
press does. How do you feel about that?
I think it’s already happened. He wasn’t saying the death of the press release because he’s
just putting his press release on the same place. It should be about putting our things up
for everybody to have access to and that happens now. It shouldn’t be about when you
have something to say it having to be picked up or framed by X, Y or Z individual for it
to matter.

What are you currently excited about in the digital space?
I’m excited about Omaze, I’m excited about the digital space as it relates to philanthropy
because that’s always been a passion of mine. I wake up in the morning and I can’t wait
to go to work. Sometimes it’s not me going to the office that I’m excited about but I like
wish I had 10 more hours in the day so I can read about all the new incredible things that
are happening. I’m excited every time I talk to an entrepreneur and hear their vision for
their company. I’m excited every time Jeff Perry has a story for me about how a Twitter
follower... this just happened with Twitter, a campaign that Kim (Veazy) our newest
employee created for him got seen by someone at Twitter today, organically, and she
forwarded it to their whole TV department as an example of something that they should
be doing. And I’m just excited by the fact that we’re changing the world a little, a very
small and significant bit, but we’re moving the needle for people and I think…

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I’m also super excited but don’t think we’re taking enough advantage of big data and
analytics and we could be doing so much better work for our clients if we were. I’m
excited for somebody to figure out how to take the analytics and the data and actually
apply analysis to that and turn it into meaningful results.

What do you see as the future of digital strategy?
I think anybody that can answer that question is probably lying because it changes every
day. What was important six months ago is no longer relevant. I guess adaptability is the
future because we might tell everybody to jump on one bandwagon and it’s hot like a
comet for six months and It was good to be on it for that time and then we can’t be on it
anymore because they changed one policy. You have to understand that every day you’re
going to be changing the way you do your job and the things that matter to your clients
and that’s the only thing I can say is for sure.

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Appendix D

Interview: Kelly Bush Novak, Founder and CEO of ID
Date: 12/04/13

Please, tell me about your career.
So, I look at my career at starting when I was a pre-teen. I was introduced to martial arts
and because of my mother or because of my personality I approached it like a career or
like a job, to train and improve and advance and get better. I took it very seriously. It led
me to my first job which was teaching self-defense at age 15. So in the 10
th
grade I had a
forty-hour a week job and I’ve never looked back. I didn’t go to college, not because I
wouldn’t have wanted to but because it was never discussed with me, no one ever
approached me about it. Everyone probably just assumed I was well on my way and
doing what I should be doing. So I just kept doing what I was doing.

So the martial arts led to training, fitness, you know weights and aerobics and that kind of
thing and then very quickly – within months – I was selling memberships at the place
where I was teaching and when I got introduced to that world, I was hooked. I loved
setting goals, I loved beating everyone else and being the top sales person in the
company. I loved developing a reputation both within the company and externally as
someone that was trustworthy and reliable and had integrity and that if someone came
into my health club that I didn’t think was right I would refer them somewhere else and I
just was very driven and motivated very early. And I credit the martial arts for that
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because it’s very disciplined and very focused and it translated very well – for me
anyway – into business.

I stayed in that industry for eight years and then I segwayed into representing a
photographer and in that job which I did for three years from age 23 to 26, I got exposure
running a company. It was a small company, but I was still managing a studio, a photo
studio, booking a photo shoot so everything from: props to stylists to models to assistants,
rentals, equipment and also interfacing with the clients and doing the bookkeeping. I
really learned everything, so that set me up perfectly to be 26 and moving to LA and
pursuing a career in entertainment. So for two years I worked for someone else and then
at 28 I started ID. So that’s really the trajectory. I still feel like I’m learning, 20 years
after starting this company I still learn new things all the time.

Do you feel like a lot of that, your ethics and wanting everybody to get the best
representation carries through here where you’re happy to turn somebody away if
you don’t feel like they’re a good cultural fit?
Yes, and I had that attitude when I had no business having that attitude. I was turning
down business when I started my company and I desperately needed clients. But if I
didn’t feel it was a good fit either because of the agent, or manager or personality fit, I
would turn down the business. And I quickly got a reputation – there’s agents still to this
day that call me up and go: “I know you say no to anybody I ever suggest but...” and I
don’t mind that, I don’t mind that reputation.

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What were your initial goal and visions for your company?
World domination of course! So initially, I did a lot of networking my first year in this
business. And I had had lunch with someone who was an early mentor who had said to
me: “This is the town and these are all the publicists that are out there and what you
really want to be is one of these three that’s inside this circle when anybody is looking for
a new publicist or a publicist. People are either leaving where they’re not happy and you
want to one of these people. And to be inside that circle means: building your company,
building your reputation, having successes you can point to.” And so I was always very
focused on when X actor – it was only actors when we started only – is looking, I want to
be one of the first names that comes out of whoevers mouth who is going to refer them.
And of course getting in the room and getting a meeting, I was very confident that I was a
closer and had 15-years of sales experience already at that point practically – maybe more
like 12 – but it was about that. It was about: let’s build a company and let’s build a
reputation where we’re in demand, where people want what we’re selling.

What is your current role and what are your responsibilities in the agency now?
I’d like less responsibilities, please. I’m the CEO of the company and my role for many
years has really been to try to be outward facing, to see where we’re going, where’s the
future and now I have people in place here internally, a COO, a President and HR
manager that are inward facing, so that I can stay outward facing. Because for forever,
until really a year ago I had to do both and I still to a large degree do a lot of both. I need
to learn to say no more, because I also stay very actively involved representing clients
and in the last three months I’ve probably signed five new clients which I really should
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not be doing. I should really make it only about other people but it’s difficult to do that
when you’re in my position – everybody wants me. So I always bring a team, I always
empower my staff and eventually the clients realize that that other person is really
phenomenal and they don’t have to have me for every single thing.

My responsibilities are really first and foremost to my staff to keep the company fiscally
healthy and to make sure we’re in compliance with all the laws and taxes and all of that
and create an environment where people are excited to come to work every day and do
their best work and have a responsibility to one another and really to live that example, it
doesn’t matter if I say it if I don’t do it.

What was the role of the publicist when you first started?
Interesting. You know if you look up a couple of articles that ran during that time,
journalists’ perceptions were that we opened limo doors and pick-up dry cleaning. And I
find that so offensive obviously. We weren’t in the power position that we are now. We
weren’t necessarily well regarded and I think part of that was well deserved because I
think there were a lot of people doing this job that didn’t understand what the job really
should be and what the potential of it was. They were gatekeepers, the biggest firm at the
time was PMK, they had all the biggest movie stars and wielded their power – in my
opinion – not always for good, a very threatening approach “if you don’t comply we’ll
close off your access” kind of thing. And so here I came, very scrappy, not from this
world, no connections and it just didn’t feel right to me. So I took a very different
approach 20-years ago, I took the approach that my job was to be a collaborator and a
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bridge to my clients and either the studios or the networks or the media, and not a wall
and that’s what I believed at the time and I believe it even more so now. And of course
now that the walls are down because of social media, I was right. Now you have a direct
connection to the world as a talent, no matter what kind of talent you are. Why didn’t I
think of Twitter and Facebook myself? I had the foundation!

I think the job now is grown from that point where we weren’t necessarily always invited
to the table. Now clients call us before they make decisions about movies they’re going to
do or shows they’re going to appear on and people want and value our opinion. It’s
become a much more of a marketing job than a straight public relations communications
job.

What would you describe as the brand for this company?
I think that ID’s reputation, we lead with our reputation and that’s one of integrity and
respect and high-level results. A lot of skill, a lot of strategy, really smart executives that
are at the top of their game. A nurturing supportive, dynamic environment that is very
rare in this industry – it’s certainly rare in the field of PR – but it’s also rare in the
industry as a whole. So I think that beyond how good we are at what we do, just as much
of a priority is how we treat our people. Just yesterday I had a publicist at a competitive
firm stop me at the hallways of the Ellen DeGeneres show say: “Congratulations on your
20
th
anniversary.” They all saw the social media posts, I got calls from Warner Bros. the
next day saying you know “our company PR meeting this morning was half of it about
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your retreat and I think I’m getting all my people here wanting to leave and come and
work at your company.”

I think our brand is really about the people and not about me which is by design. I started
this company and it was called Kelly Bush Public Relations and a few months in I
realized I wouldn’t be able to grow if it was about me and I needed to make it about
everybody other than me. And that’s what I did, I changed it to ID and it’s been 20 years.

The rise of social networks has made it important for talent and brands to engage
with their audience in a two-way relationship. You’ve established a very forward-
thinking digital team within ID, why has this been so important to you?
When I first started to hear about social media - I immediately got it - this was going to
be the future. There are still people here who are reluctant to jump in. For me, we didn’t
have a choice. Either we get ahead of it or we’re going to be left behind. I saw it, I got it,
it made complete sense to me, I immediately integrated it into everything I did for every
client right away. I embraced almost every new platform and tried to come up with ways
to take advantage of it to broadcast a message and engage with people whether it be press
or fans and now it’s part of our everyday routine.

It’s a powerful tool and why would anyone not want to take advantage of the most
powerful tools available to engage and share content and to celebrate great works? I can
remember not that long ago when clients were all about creating websites for themselves
and it never made sense to me, even before Twitter and Facebook. Why would fans –
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unless you’re a diehard fan – you’re going to go seek out this website and spend time on
it. I guess it was more of an electronic fan club at the time. And now with social media
you’re part of the conversation in real time when it’s happening, something everybody’s
talking about and I think if you’re not in the conversation you’re completely missing a
huge opportunity.

What was the response you saw when talent first started using social media?
People were all over the map, either they were scared or skeptical. Right away, traditional
Hollywood types were “who’s the buyer, how are we making money?” And we said: we
don’t know yet but we want to make sure we’re building this and engaging and getting a
following that would be passionate about supporting whatever message you’re putting
out there. Whether it’s philanthropic or a movie or a book or a TV show or a cause you
care about. For us it was clear that we could control and the clients could control the
message without the filter of an editorial, without the filter of a talk show host or a
produce. You can put out there exactly who you are and how you want to be portrayed
and the message is unfiltered. If you don’t have skeletons you’re fine, if you’re going to
tweet after three glasses of wine and call people names, probably not a good idea for you.
And that’s up to us also to say: this is something you should stay away from or this is
something you should embrace. And people made mistakes, even some of our clients
made mistakes. We feel our job is to really guide them.

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How does the feedback that you receive when you’re monitoring social media
posting help you define your client’s brand and how you’re going to position
them?
It’s a powerful tool. I look in real time - and right now there’s emails flying in based on
the top ten lists that have just been announced today from Rolling Stone, Time,
Entertainment Weekly, and National Board of Review. All the social media chatter from
the press and fans is determining next moves with how we’re positioning these films. All
of a sudden this morning Spike Jonez’s movie “Her” is back in the game, it won the
National Board of Review and Best Director. So it’s all of a sudden - it’s game on! Based
on the feedback that we’re getting we’re making sure we’re hearing it and we’re paying
attention to it and we’re making appropriate decisions.

With all of its departments ID is a full service agency, what value do you see in
having so many different and interconnected departments under one roof?
Well, in order to achieve my plan of world domination you have to be able to do
everything. I very consciously didn’t diversify the company for many years. It took seven
or eight years before I was willing to take a client on that wasn’t an actor. I wanted to get
known for that one thing and become the best at it and then after that I felt confident, we
took on filmmakers, composers, producers. Honestly - it organically grew - because of
what we were doing in the talent space there were certain brands and certain kinds of
companies that wanted what we do for our clients to translate it for their needs. You
know Starbucks Entertainment was one of the first. So we’re leveraging our reputation
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and our relationships on behalf of our clients. So no matter what the client, who the
client, there’s a through line to how we do business that is making an impact for them.

We diversified based on an authentic growth path but also financially it makes a lot of
sense to not have all your eggs in one basket. There was a moment when there was a
SAG actor strike right at the same time there was a write strike and there was a worry
actually that all of the actors in the union were going to not work and therefore not
publicize their projects that they’d had in the can for six months to a year but because we
were a company that had diversified and had film and had brands and had events we
weren’t too worried but there were firms that were really worried they’d go out of
business if all their clients put them on hiatus because of a strike.

You have several clients who are involved in major franchises that require them
to go to events like San Diego Comic Con. Do you see large scale events like that
as a benefit?
Absolutely. The amount of footprint you get from an event like that where there’s
100,000 dedicated, passionate fans. It draws the worldwide media in the same way a film
festival does which maybe doesn’t get as much attention as Comic Con but you know
Toronto or Cannes or Venice. If the media is there and the fans are there we want to be
there, we want to be in the conversation. You have to figure out the best way to show up
which makes a positive impact, because you can also blow it if you show something that
doesn’t land, so everything has to be considered.

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It also gives the fans an opportunity to connect with your project in a way that they
wouldn’t from a TV spot or a trailer or a magazine article or a talk show appearance to
feel like they were “in on it” with a first-look, exclusive footage, exclusive Q&A and an
autograph signing. Those fans are going to be buying your tickets opening weekend,
they’re going to do advance ticket purchase, they’re going to broadcast to their social
channels how lovely somebody was or how funny somebody was. If you’re at Comic
Con and you’re watching in real-time the reaction in the room and how it’s resonating -
there’s no denying that impact and that power. So therefore when you’re ready to push
out the next bit you’ve got automatically all those people wanting to consume it.

It’s about a personal connection and you’ve got to be careful with that too because people
have expectations and they can be disappointed. I just got a letter from a father whose son
and him waited for seven hours in the freezing cold to meet a performer outside of a hotel
and they waited and waited and froze and finally that person came out and security
whisked them onto the tour bus and they took off. The letter is very emotional and this
person is devastated, obviously the client has no idea and they don’t owe this guy
anything but he had an expectation based on the way this person speaks about how much
they care about their fans and he didn’t take that extra time to say “you know these
people have been here all day.” I blame the people around them who knew those people
had been there all day long to not say “you know what those people have been out here
since seven this morning you should take a minute to say hello and take a photo with
them or sign an autograph.” It’s a lot of responsibility so if you’re going to do it you have
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to be sincere about it and know that very little goes a long way but you also can’t turn it
on and off when you just don’t feel like it.

So you encourage – if you have time at a red carpet premiere – to have talent go
and sign?
Absolutely.

Many practitioners would say that we’re currently seeing the biggest
transformation in public relations since the inception of the profession. How do
you feel about that statement?
I think it’s an exciting thing to hear as I feel we’re at the forefront of it and I feel we’re
leaders in this regard and I’m excited to what the future holds. It’s changing at lightning
speed and I’m confident we’ll be nimble and ahead of it and ready to embrace whatever
change is coming. It’s exciting to think that a couple of years from now we could be
doing our jobs even differently that we do now. That’s exciting for me – probably scary
to other people - but not scary to me.

What do you see as the future of PR?
I think that the lines between what an agent does and what a manger does and what a
publicist does are going to continue to be blurred and I think the smartest strategic
creative minds will win in the end. I was just having this conversation with someone
yesterday about endorsements and brands and it’s a murky grey territory because we help
people’s image rise and style and image and how they look and get them on magazine
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covers and all of a sudden they get an endorsement for a perfume or a fashion line or
whatever, most would argue that has everything to do with what we did. But in the
structure now we don’t benefit from it, the agent and the manager and the lawyer get their
percentages and the actor gets their millions of dollars of fees and they do an add
campaign. We don’t get any part of it, although half the time we get the phone call going
“can you now set up the photo shoot, set up the ad campaign, set up the commercial” and
all of that and we ask to be compensated for that and there’s always the big push about it
and back and forth and a lot of drama. Because we get a retainer and it’s a relatively
small retainer when you consider the amount of work that we do. So I think the future is
that our value will continue to increase which means how we’re compensated will get
more in line with the results we deliver.

Tied to that what is your vision for the future of this company?
I think that to maintain everything that I’ve talked about and who we are is a big
commitment, it’s a lot of work. I want to continue to strive for excellence and for the
future I want to just build on the great foundation that we have and the future I see people
like you and other staff growing and achieving their personal and professional goals via
the company. So when you talk about the future it’s really about who’s bought a house
and who’s had a kid and who’s gotten promoted and who’s now leading a team and
who’s a department head. Thinking about where some of these people started and where
they are now and so when I think about the future I think about that. I know that we’ll
continue to be successful, I know we’ll continue to be profitable. I’m confident we’ll be
part of whatever’s next.
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Appendix E

Interview: Craig Byrne, Founder of Kryptonsite
Date: 02/26/13

Tell me about yourself and your career. (Feel free to brag)
My "secret origin" - I kind of got into the whole journalism thing the backwards way.
While yes, I did want to do journalism in college and beyond, I found myself to be a bit
disillusioned with it all once I actually got to college and faced assignments that I would
have loathed. "Interviewing math professors" was on that list, and they didn't seem to
have much interest in my writing movie reviews. An interesting look back at my output at
that time, though, included, ironically enough, an article about television on the internet
that included interviews with then not-so-well-known TV personalities Tom Bergeron
and Jeff Probst.

As a child, my favorite way to get attention was to make little newsletters for my friends.
In high school, I was heavily involved with my high school newspaper, and I became
Editor-in-Chief by my junior year. It was an outlet for me.

Moving forward, I got to college, kind of fell out of it all for the reasons listed above, but
I did it for fun, mostly starting with a newsletter devoted to the TV show "Lois & Clark"
when I was only 17 years old. It had a few hundred subscribers on AOL, but it was seen
by many of the right people. Those formed my early interactions with showrunners and
actors, and I had even been able to visit the set a few times. Interestingly, that Lois &
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Clark experience led to my second major experience with covering TV online…

How did you found Kryptonsite?
When the unnamed "young Clark Kent TV project" was first announced, I had a small
fan page set up about it, hosted on AOL of all places. Hey, it was 2000. I had managed to
get a hold of some actors' "casting sides" which is what people use to audition.
Somewhere along the line it got the attention of someone who sent an anonymous e-mail
who knew way too much about the project. Doing some research, I admit I figured out
who it was, played dumb, and a few phone calls later, I ended up doing the first interview
with the Smallville Executive Producer that ever appeared anywhere. I did learn quickly,
though, that people took a small fan page on AOL less seriously, so I bought my first
domain name. I wanted PlanetKrypton.com but it was taken; "KryptonSite," a play on
"kryptonite," was the best alternative choice for me. It was probably the first of many
mistakes I would make as far as domain names would go.

How has Kryptonsite grown since you started?
KryptonSite got to be pretty big. You have to realize, in the pre-Twitter, pre-TV Line
age, there were a few years there where I was one of the only websites covering
Smallville stuff. As a result, KryptonSite became THE place to go for fans of the show.
Daily traffic was in the hundreds of thousands.

What sort of traffic do you see?
At the time? As I mentioned, it was in the hundreds of thousands. Now that Smallville is
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off the air, and I cover television in general, being one of hundreds of sites dedicated to
television, it's usually in the "tens of thousands daily" range. Still nothing to scoff at, but
nothing like it once was. I do have a good reach. Twitter followers are a good number
and my Quantcast rankings show that the site seems to be appealing enough.

How do you engage audiences to move that brand forward?
When Smallville was winding down, I used the KryptonSite brand to spin off KSiteTV, a
site with news about many, many shows. The name came from the notion that people
called it "KSite" anyway, and this is "KSite's TV Site." Unfortunately, though, I feel like
it's hard to say out loud. OOPS! But, I do hope that the branding continues the same
general philosophy that I had with KryptonSite - that the people writing on these sites are
fans too, and that I will ask the things that I, as a fan, like to read. The second my
personality doesn't come through in my writing is the second that the site's content
becomes irrelevant.

I still have some "fan portals" for specific shows, and those do very well, but it's a tough
line because you want publicists to take you seriously. "ScandalFan.com" would
probably be denied access to a press event unless they knew the publicists personally,
whereas "TVGossip.com" will not. (Site names are fictional) Sometimes, that is not the
case, though. I do have a portal for The CW's Arrow, GreenArrowTV.com, but in that
case the publicists -- many of whom know me from Smallville and KryptonSite -- are
well aware of what I can do for them with a domain like that. Is it still "fan-site like?"
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Absolutely, but that does go back to my philosophy of "I'm a fan too."

Obviously you are involved in working with publicists for both talent and studios
in order to provide content for your site – how would you describe the
experience?
It REALLY depends on the publicist. Sometimes and in some cases it can be like walking
on egg shells. If you post something that ticks them off, you could be done. Blacklisted. I
had an incident once where I made a Tweet making fun of an actor's hair, and got an
immediate threat from a publicist that if I snarked like that about another show "we will
have a problem." (What the very sensitive actor didn't realize is it was actually a back-
handed compliment, that my point was that his character was supposed to be hideous and
he was anything but)

On that same note though, and even with some of the overly sensitive publicists that I just
mentioned - if you play their "game" and by their "rules," there is reward and help, and of
course, access. When they know they can rely on you and trust you to put out good
coverage, they will come to you with interview and media opportunities. They remember.
I've even had publicists or publicity managers flat out say "we look out for the people
who always work with us." I don't know how that works as far as criticism goes,
generally because I let my other writers handle the reviews. I do try to be honest, though,
even if it means a good amount of sandwiching.

In other cases… it can be difficult. I know some publicists who are impossible to get a
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hold of, to cover their shows, and that can be frustrating. Fortunately, as more networks
and studios become familiar with me, the opportunities seem to grow. As an example,
some face time with a NBC publicist a few weeks ago is surely the reason I was able to
cover the recent press tour. She knows who I am and she knows I have covered NBC in
the past. Likewise, another publicist, also with NBC, seems to recognize me at places and
will send e-mails asking if I've checked out a new show, and if I'd like to cover it.

Maintaining a good relationship can also be difficult in the times when you know you
have a "scoop" but know you might not be able to get away with posting something. In
those cases, I do try to run it by the studio and/or network. Sometimes it means I lose that
opportunity, but sometimes it means I might be given something later. With TV publicity,
they really have a lot of control.

What are some traits that you see in a publicist that you enjoy working with?
A publicist should never be considered your "friend," but they should be friendly.
Including you on a junket or a press trip are also always appreciated. It's frustrating if,
say, a press event for a show you cover often is going on a block away and they failed to
send an invite -- that gives the impression that you're not on a very high tier of
importance for what they do, and it becomes very obvious and frustrating.

In any field, though, people play favorites.

The other thing I find lately, is if they are clear with what they want, it can also be
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mutually rewarding. A perfect example happened earlier this year with the new CW
series The Originals. The series premiere ratings probably disappointed the network a bit.
The show itself, honestly, disappointed me. The network and studio still persisted,
though, and they sent out the show's 3rd and 4th episodes for advance review. I might
have ignored it, but the publicist personally e-mailed and asked that I watch them to share
what I thought. I felt valued because someone cared. And you know what? The episodes
were a great improvement -- something I would not have noticed if they had not gone that
extra mile. The same goes for the publicist who gave an extra nudge from NBC to see
what I thought of a new program. I'm seeing that a lot, lately. I'm not asking to be
showered with gifts or screeners, but if I know what I can do or how I can make my
coverage better, it makes my content better.

What about a publicist that you do not enjoy working with?
I hate, hate, hate it if I e-mail to confirm something and get ignored. I don't like it when
people play favorites, especially with outlets that are smaller than mine that just happen
to kiss up better than I do. It's also very frustrating to e-mail a publicist or a network to
try to see if there are opportunities available only to be ignored.

I also had an experience with an outsourced publicity firm that flat-out lied to me a few
times… that was NOT cool. (See #12)

How important is access to you?
Access is everything, and I feel as I've become more experienced with all of this, my
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access is growing. There are still a few spots that I desperately need to get past. It's
frustrating to not get into the Television Critics Association, for example, when I meet all
criteria, but at least now it seems I can get in through most of the networks. But as
another example: So many people are covering TV these days, that you need to have that
extra chance to stand out. I feel like I can ask unique questions, so if I have the access to
ask those unique questions, people notice my work and my website.

If you were approached to cover a new show, what sorts of materials would make
you more willing to consider the pitch?
Most important of ANYTHING is usually a screener -- I can't write about it if I haven't
seen it. If it's more than one episode, that's even better. TNT lately has sent some
beautiful press kits to go with their new shows. Again, that may be costly, but it shows
they are going the extra mile to make sure people cover their product.

As I mentioned before, just asking goes a long way with me. If I see a network or studio
is interested in my coverage, of course I am more prone to covering. As another example:
I received an e-mail this morning from the Sundance channel about one of their pending
panels at the Winter press tour. I'm not sure I would have made the effort to go, but the
notion that they *asked?* Of course I will go. [Note: I answered this question in January]

This might not go in this section either, but at the last press tour, Discovery/HUB had an
event at the Universal lot, and I ended up engaged in a conversation with the person who
is the head of Discovery Channel publicity. I didn't really cover their stuff that much, but
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the notion that he took the time to talk to me, showed me how much they care about
getting the word out about their product. He gave me his card, and immediately had me
put on the list to get their press releases. I don't cover a LOT of their stuff, but I certainly
cover more now that I had that contact and impression.

Beyond that, what I cover is usually selected by myself, but if someone wanted to pitch
me, I'd probably want the first question answered to be "how does this appeal to my
audience?" If a publicist knows that when they come in with it, then I know how I can
help them, and we all win.

How important is access to information and materials to you?
If I don't have press site access, my coverage won't be as exhaustive. For example, I
couldn't write about CBS pilots this year because I didn't have access to any of them. I
didn't even get access to their press site until recently, so I wouldn't do any episode
previews with images for CBS. Now, I do, and I think my coverage for CBS will be
greater. (All of the other networks let me in years ago)

What is your reaction when you do not get the information you require?
I get really pissy. Somewhat kidding. I actually do get very frustrated though, because
here I am wanting to get the word out about their product, and sometimes I feel like what
I'm doing is not appreciated or wanted. I also had an experience with an outsourced
publicity firm that flat-out lied to me a few times… that was NOT cool. I mean, I do get
that there are "tiers" of sites and some are more of a priority than others, but don't tell me
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"we're out of screeners" and then go around and send a copy to a comic book podcast,
you know?

Regarding access - I had an instance this past summer where I was rejected for the press
room for MTV's Teen Wolf - a show I had been covering since before anyone cared.
Another friend was in the same situation. What was worse was that that publicist had
known and worked with me for about ten years, originally coming from a studio. My
reaction to that? Especially considering that the Teen Wolf fandom is not much fun to
deal with anyway, I just don't cover it anymore. Their loss. It also didn't help that their
fan base is annoying as hell.

Since the shows you cover are very genre specific, you constantly attend junkets
and events like San Diego Comic Con. How important are these events and why?
And what are the benefits and downsides to events like SDCC for a reporter?
First of all, SDCC is a great opportunity for networking above anything else. The studios
and networks often have parties that press end up invited to, for mingling purposes. It
also is a nice opportunity to get interviews and content in an easy way. To be honest,
though, it's a bit of a zoo. Big announcements are often made at the panels, so the only
real opportunity to get good "scoops" is if the press rooms happen AFTER the panels.
Everyone and their mother gets press credentials now, which means, more times than not,
that you're at a table with 9 other people all getting the EXACT same material -- which
also means, once one of those nine posts something, the other eight are less valuable
because the die hard fans have already seen or read it. We do often get the opportunity to
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use flip cam at tables, which can give a little bit of uniqueness.

Still, for a medium sized site like my own, it is a great opportunity and chance. I would
be lying if I said I'm not nostalgic for the times when talent rarely did interviews at the
Con, and if they did, I'd be one of a small handful of people who'd get to. Online press
was a lot less "pre-planned" back then.

From a financial standpoint, Comic-Con isn't totally worth it. But I do get some
good videos that people can see, and if I didn't cover it, then my readers would
wonder what the heck is wrong with me.
How do your experiences with a certain show/talent affect the way you write
about the product?
Well, I mentioned the Teen Wolf thing above. Another very negative experience came
for me with the creator of the TV series Veronica Mars. We had met in person, I had told
him if he had any problem with my coverage to have an assistant or someone like that let
me know… yet, when something was up that he didn't like, he sicced Warner Bros. Legal
on me. Very uncool. As such, you won't see me gushing about Veronica Mars or a
Veronica Mars movie.

When doing the Smallville official companion books, I had a problem in that Tom
Welling, the series' lead, was not doing press at all. It wasn't just a ‘me thing\; it went for
anybody. This continued for a while, though he said he'd do an interview for the Season 7
book and then flaked. Another cast member had to explain to me that he gets anxiety.
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But, my initial reaction there was to not cover Tom and/or his character Clark much in
the books as a result. However, friends who read the book complained, so I made the
attempt to talk about Clark/Tom… and any lack of anything for him that would come
later, would be the producers' fault for not talking about him enough.

On the flip side, if someone is nice to me, I'll likely cover their work frequently. Again
with the Smallville thing, Laura Vandervoort has always been amazing to me, so I will
always tell people when she has new projects lined up. That interaction can work well,
too, because then I will get retweets from her.

Another example happened a few weeks ago at a screening for an upcoming NBC sitcom.
One of the young, new actors from the show spotted me in a crowd as someone who had
interviewed him weeks earlier and we had a great conversation. He was a super nice guy,
and because of that, I will be sure to remember him. When we like interacting with
someone, it makes the product better for all involved. If we, as press, have a good rapport
with the talent, the interviews come out better too.

How has social media changed the way you do your job?
Social media has changed everything in multiple ways. For one, before the age of Twitter
and Facebook, etc., if people wanted to see what was new and happening with, say,
Smallville, they'd have to go to the KryptonSite home page to see what's up. Now, they
could just check the Twitter feed to see if there have been any updates. Back then, one
could even sit on a piece of news because things weren't so easily spread. Now, if you
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don't tweet about something within an hour of it happening you might as well not even
bother.

There are some helpful things from social media, though: It's a great way to promote new
articles (and sometimes the talent spreads it by retweeting and sharing), and in some
cases, the followings of the social media pages become so large that that can really drive
a lot of traffic. So, it is certainly beneficial, if anything.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This paper argues that experiential public relations are the future of the field of public relations, partly due to the growth of experiential economies themselves. Drawing on the literature in the field and on primary sources such as interviews, the thesis emphasizes that public relations is in and of itself about creating a certain experience and selling that to an audience, so therefore, the notion of the experiential economies best reflects the refinement of the field of public relations in the 21st century.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Munt, Andres Alberto (author)

Core Title One more thing: experiential economies and the future of public relations

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Strategic Public Relations

Publication Date 11/11/2014

Defense Date 11/11/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Comic-Con,convention,economies,Entertainment,experience,gaming,OAI-PMH Harvest,PlayStation,PR,PS4,Public Relations,publicists,publicity,service economies,video games,Xbox,Xbox One

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tenderich, Burghardt (committee chair), Floto, Jennifer D. (committee member), Jackson, Laura Min (committee member)

Creator Email munt@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-515742

Unique identifier UC11297432

Identifier etd-MuntAndres-3078.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-515742 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-MuntAndres-3078.pdf

Dmrecord 515742

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Munt, Andres Alberto

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA