I spent an evening this month at the Classic Car Club, surrounded by cars most people only see in magazines, watching an audience of the right sort of people handle watches they might one day buy. As the person who mostly lives in spreadsheets and ad accounts, my first instinct was to ask what it was all for. By the end of the night I’d more or less answered my own question.
You are not going to sell a luxury watch with a banner ad. You can advertise it, you can retarget the people who looked at it, you can do all the digital work I do every day, and all of that has its place. But the actual decision to spend serious money on an object whose entire value is how it makes you feel is not made by clicking a display ad on the way to reading the news. It’s made somewhere more considered than that.
Experiential marketing is the industry’s word for putting the product into a world the buyer already wants to be in, and letting the two associate. Classic cars and fine watches share an audience; they share a set of values, really, around craft and provenance and the idea that some things are worth keeping. So you don’t stand up and pitch. You get the watches, the cars and the right sort of people into one room, and you stay out of the way.
What struck me, standing there with a drink and no dashboard to look at, was how much of the value is impossible to measure in the way I’m used to measuring things. Nobody scanned a QR code. There’s no clean line from “attended the evening” to “bought a watch eight months later”, even though I’d bet money that line exists. This is the part that frustrates a digital marketer. My whole discipline is built on attribution, on being able to say this pound produced that outcome, and experiential gives me nothing to attribute.
What it gives you instead is harder to log in a spreadsheet. The product borrows the room’s values, which is really just brand-building done slowly and in person. The people who turn up are worth knowing, and you learn more watching how they handle a watch than you would from any survey. And then there’s the bit that actually connects to my world: the photography, the film, the posts, the stories. An evening like this feeds the digital machine for months; the footage alone will carry the social calendar well into the summer.
Truth is, I still can’t put a number on it, and I’ve stopped trying to force one. What I can do is make sure the night doesn’t just happen and evaporate; my job really starts the morning after, turning one good evening into a season’s worth of content and a warmer list of people to talk to.
