Activate Your Audience!

Brad Jackson - Turning Overwhelming Projects into Impact-Driven Experiential Marketing Campaigns

• Imperial Branding Agency • Season 1 • Episode 23

Share episode

If you've ever wondered how to turn overwhelming projects into impact-driven experiential campaigns, this episode is for you. We're thrilled to have experiential marketing maestro, Brad Jackson, founder and executive producer of Out of Office, with us to drop his wisdom and insights. Brad takes us on a wild ride, from his early days producing concerts in college to mixing it up with big brands and celebrities in the experiential marketing arena.

In this chat, we uncovered quantifying ROI in experiential marketing and dissect the challenges and unravel the complexities to reveal how leverage around customer experiences can boost your brand. We share our triumphs and our learnings in transforming customers into fans. Learn about the invaluable growth tools for freelancers, agencies, and brands in this bustling industry.

As the episode wraps up, we venture into the world of freelancing and its impact on personal branding. Here, we share our unique experiences and insights, discussing the thrills and spills of working for oneself. Brad steps up with some golden nuggets about using LinkedIn for networking and promoting your work. We also offer a glimpse into our upcoming trend report, featuring industry standard rates and top trends for the year ahead. Join us for this enlightening conversation and don't forget to share your thoughts!

Want to produce brand activations you are proud of? Learn more about our I3BA package, a THREE IN ONE DYNAMIC Brand Activation SUPPORT service for experiential teams, agencies, and brands. 


Subscribe to stay up-to-date on new episodes and join the conversation on Instagram, @beimperial let’s activate your audience!


Subscribe to the podcast for more great episodes!

Activate Your Audience!

Share and comment below to let us know what you think.

Need help and support activating your audience? Check us out here

Learn more about IBA

If you are part of an events team, brand, or agency seeking support to leverage your experiential projects, email us at hello@imperialbrandingagency.com

Connect on LinkedIn

See our work

Luis Felipe:

Today we speak with Brad Jackson. He is the founder and executive producer of Out of Office, a game changer in the experiential marketing scene. With over 15 years, brad has the expertise and is here to share our insights, stories and the secret sauce behind transforming overwhelming projects into impactful campaigns. Out of Office has recently collaborated with brands such as Xbox, uber, google and Barstool Sports, to name a few. We're excited to chat with you, brad. Thank you so much for coming on.

Brad Jackson:

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Luis Felipe:

So let's jump into it. Why don't you, if you don't mind, give us kind of a little bit about your origin story? How did you start to now finding and working Out of Office into right? Have you guys already been launched officially?

Brad Jackson:

Soft launch this month and then full on fresh platform launch in January, which I'm very excited about. So, yeah, my journey started back in college. I went to the University of Iowa, grew up in Chicago. I started there producing all the concerts that would come through at the university, which led to some internships with Live Nation in Chicago, and then that ultimately led to a job with Live Nation after leaving school. So I was a assistant production manager for a couple of the major venues in Chicago and really cut my teeth in big concert logistics, touring, all that kind of stuff.

Brad Jackson:

I always wanted to live on the West Coast, so I decided to pack up my car, moved out to LA with no game plan, didn't know anybody, just knew I wanted to be out in LA on the West Coast. Live Nation had told me that there was a couple of roles open. That would be a good fit. But once I got out there and met the team, it just I wasn't feeling it. So at the time that was like 2014-ish this term, experiential marketing was getting tossed around and I was like I've got a love for marketing and branding and business, but also this love for events and production. What is this world? Who's doing it and I ended up stumbling across a agency called NVE and at the time there was only like six of them in Hollywood, like right in the middle of Hollywood. I stalked the owner, brett, on LinkedIn and figured out a way to just get in the door and have a chat and they were basically like we're not hiring right now, but we want to work with you and figure this out. So I ended up starting as their first production coordinator ever.

Brad Jackson:

Road the wave of growth with those guys for four or five years, worked my way up to senior producer, but also stayed really close with Brett and some of the other executive team members and I call that my kind of MBA. It was just amazing. Learned how to do everything from, like, the sales pipeline process and pitch to the creative production, closing out projects, account management, just all of it. And then that agency grew to like 150 people New York office, london office and went from working on somewhat small, fun kind of red carpet campaigns or marketing campaigns to, when I left, we were doing multimillion dollar projects with huge brands and a lot of celebrity events, like I produced Jimmy Kimmel's Oscar party and Seth MacFarlane's Christmas party and it was really like it was the full blown LA startup business experience like I could have ever hoped for. So I left there about four or five years ago to go on my own journey.

Brad Jackson:

I always want to start my own business and do my own thing, so the kind of easy path that most of us take is freelancing. So went out freelance and then over four to five years, rose up to executive producer level as a freelancer with my own book of business with brands and agencies and got to a point doing that just within the last year where I was like what's gonna be next after? Like working alone as a solo contractor, which is awesome. It provided me a lot of open time and flexibility to pursue other passions like music and travel, but like what's next for me?

Brad Jackson:

And that's kind of how out of office in this new format was born earlier this year, which is now becoming like a industry hub where I'm gonna provide a bunch of business resources and support and personal development for the freelancers in my world and then provide consulting services to other people who have never done experience before and they're looking to get into it. They don't know where to start, so we put together a bunch of research and action plans for them for a 12 month strategy and then we can plug them in with specific experts out of our freelancing pool to tie into projects. So that's been the last like six to eight months of this brand new kind of like emerging business where now all of a sudden I'm operating like a SaaS platform and a consulting service and all this stuff. But it's so exciting and it's all just kind of unraveled in the last like eight months.

Luis Felipe:

Yeah, it sounds like, with you know that vast experience of obviously working with agency side of things as well as being, you know, at the front of the actual experiences in production, now you've kind of delved into sort of perfect formula for what is needed now. You're now in this very special position, very valuable position, to kind of merge those, those value points. So why do you believe, in your experience, that experiential marketing should be a crucial part of every businesses or brands brand strategy?

Brad Jackson:

Yeah, it's. It's interesting to see the evolution of experiential since I started in this world, which is going on almost 10 years, but it used to be very focused on like the physical brand pop-up or we showed up at Coachella or you know, like the a tangible pop-up experience or an event. And what I've realized is, especially within the last year, experiential is Now more of a 360 approach. Like you're, you can experience something through content, you need to experience something through digital, and then there's obviously events and everything.

Brad Jackson:

So what I'm seeing talking to friends in the advertising industry is that these big ad agency conglomerates are now Paying a lot more attention to experiential and offering it as a service. They don't necessarily know how to Like, operate it and do it well, but they're offering it as a service to then figure it out later because the brands are asking for it. So in my eyes, it's like the real life experience is a non negotiable anymore For brands in terms of a marketing strategy. Like it's just it has to be experiential, has to be part of the 360 approach, and when we do a 12 month plan for a brand, we often will identify Maybe for key events they should be at or should do, and then we use digital and content to kind of tie it all together in between.

Luis Felipe:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense with, as you mentioned especially and this has been a through line post, covid, post a lot of just the increased demand from a human, a consumer, need to connect.

Luis Felipe:

There's definitely more of a quantifiable value behind experiential that, as you mentioned, larger Agencies you know all the top five, whether it's in consulting or an actual creative, any sort of market. They have no choice but to understand the value of experiences and what it is to have a consumer engage, especially with how much more Educated and aware they are of being bombarded with advertisements. Now it's like this is a value offering that is a mutually beneficial thing, I think, ideally right in theory of the consumer, the experience, the brand, obviously, the parties and stakeholders involved. But you're right, there's not a lot of clear ways in which a lot of these agencies have been able, or even the brands themselves, actually Execute on it. So that's that's valuable. I think that you know there's there's challenges and, as you guys are doing right now, solving that, so kind of the spin-off on that Would have been maybe some example of challenges that you've seen brands face as they've tried to expand their marketing into experiential. And maybe how does out of office help navigate that sort of problem.

Brad Jackson:

Yeah, I think the the biggest challenge in the industry right now is the, the inefficiencies that exist from just it being so traditionally rooted in like advertising agency models, the biggest one being RFPs. It's just like it's such a time suck from all directions and that it's just. It's so inefficient and that leads to a lack of strategy in the upfront phase, which ultimately Steers the ship for everything. So, as a producer, longtime production person, even my choice of materials and how I'm gonna lay something out on site roots back to the ultimate like strategy goal from the beginning. So the the biggest hang-up that I see with brands is One where are you going and why are you going there? And that's a really important question of just like are you gonna show up at Coachella because your executive team would like some tickets and they think it's cool? Or is there actually a reason why you're going there to target a certain type of consumer or Garner, some press and media around being there? And if you're gonna go there, is that the best place for you?

Brad Jackson:

And I think what ends up happening is like the the brand is Approaching the agency with a brief and the the brief itself isn't rooted in Experiential strategy, because they just don't know much about our world to begin with.

Brad Jackson:

So they end up shotgunning out 10 RFPs.

Brad Jackson:

Maybe the one Agency who happens to be a friend of a friend is awarded the business, but they only they had the prettiest Pitch it's.

Brad Jackson:

They don't necessarily, they're not the exact right fit. So, yeah, where we're trying to really shake things up is like let's bypass that whole process, which ends up burning sometimes a month or more, and let's just be real and say let's figure out the upfront action plan and the strategy for all 12 months of the next year coming and let's just set that precedent, first using our experts in our network, and then let's look and decide if you're gonna go the agency route for operation. Let's pick two of the best agencies that will for sure fit your campaign because they specialize in what we're recommending to you. Or maybe you can do this with just a freelancer or two, because they specialize in this particular thing that we're suggesting as well. And then we kind of step out of the operations and hand it over to the experts. But now you've been kind of we play matchmaker, of setting them up with like the perfect partner to operate with you, and you have that strategy playbook to always reference whenever you might get off course a little bit.

Luis Felipe:

Yeah, man, that's beautiful because there are a lot of inefficiencies that have been turned into, as we both know, just a way of doing business and it is a very outdated way of working on all sides. And it also like you said, maybe whoever gets it is just based on the prettiest deck or connections and that's sometimes the way of the world, right, but it's not going to at the end provide the most value. So it sounds like you're definitely not only shortcutting a wasteful process that really has kind of been accepted unnecessarily right, like this has been a long time coming. So it's definitely an exciting moment for the industry, for you guys. But I mean, I think about it like when, say, we're hiring, or whether we're working with vendors as producers or even, say, as an entrepreneur, hiring their first few, say, virtual assistants or freelancers.

Luis Felipe:

There is this sort of like throw a spaghetti to the wall and see what sticks approach, and that, especially when you have something as complex as, say, building a sales pipeline or producing an experiential concept that has maybe some complexities, or even if it's simple, it does take its sort of labor of love and not wasting energy on that sort of approach, why wouldn't that definitely bring the end experience and the actual production of it a lot more value, because now you're not messing with a lot of just that wasted once time, but also money and also just people who could be valuable, maybe not being seen, or offers that could be a match kind of going wasted right.

Luis Felipe:

So I think that's awesome. Thank you, yep. Now, with given the variety of sort of experiences that there are, as you mentioned, there's not just this one physical approach Now, it's more of a 360 approach. Within those you can double click and go into your brand pop-ups, your gorilla styles, all sort of experiential. How do you suggest tailoring a brand's or a project's approach to meet kind of diverse needs of either the audience or the brand? So how do you select, within all those diverse options, into the most effective campaign for the most effective approach?

Brad Jackson:

So really it's a good question and it's something that I'm thinking about a lot because the nature of events and experiences is like it's hard to quantify the ROI when you are looking at it versus digital marketing, and the fact is board members and executives like to see the hard numbers that digital marketing can provide. We spent this much, we got this many eyeballs, this many conversions. It's very black and white, easy to justify budget. What I see for a brand that is moving into an experiential world is like you hit a point in your brand journey where you have to just start showing up at places and it becomes more of a brand affiliation and a longer term relationship with your customer and I like to say turning your customer into a fan of the brand versus like a transactional type thing. That's happening on digital. So that's where you know it takes a bit to get a brand to that point, but then, once they cross that point, they see the ROI show up in many, many other ways. You know there's reasons why some of the biggest brands running tons of experiential campaigns, like Nike and Coach, has been doing so good this year, like they keep revisiting experiential because it is working for them. So I think, keeping that in mind, but also like content right now is king and we all know that. So a big thing that we've been pushing for clients is every single experience should have a content component, and that helps me justify the ROI to a client as well, saying that you know you're gonna spend a million dollars potentially on this event. You're creating a million dollar film production shoot. You might as well use it as a backdrop as if it was a set. So let's bring in the film crew and while we're there for two days and most likely some of your stakeholders are there CEO, cmo, whatever we can pull them aside for quick interviews, we can get guest interviews. We can get the content around the space. Like, let's really tie in film and experience. So then you walk away with 40, 60, 90 days worth of content, which will ultimately kind of drag you out to the next experience that you do. So it's kind of thinking about all those different factors and how we can tie it in.

Brad Jackson:

But one of my most successful experiential campaigns from last year was with Rockstar Energy. We went to Waco Surf Ranch, flew in 15 of their pro athletes from around the world. They got to spend four days at the surf ranch. We had an interview room set up but then really the film team was just running around with these guys filming everything they were doing surfing, weight boarding, motocross, skate, bmx and then they'd get pulled away for some interviews. But they were able to walk away, they had this epic VIP experience and then they got a bunch of this content to use for themselves and then the brand ended up having like 60 days 90 days worth of content for all their different platforms from this one experience. And now we're thinking about how can we redo that and do like a winter version and a summer version where there's also like a private event incorporated or a public event incorporated into the whole thing. So that's kind of like the approach I'm seeing start to develop with these bigger brands.

Luis Felipe:

Yeah, that's, I think, very tactical as well as, again, people have been doing that before, right, but it hasn't been a, I think, standard. That seems like it could be. As you mentioned, you're already putting this much effort into this thing that wasn't quantifiable. I think there's newer metrics nowadays and ways to try to quantify it Still not as beautiful, as pretty or as in demand, as you mentioned, as digital analytics, but there are ways, as you mentioned with your post event engagement, obviously, sales track out all of the components that also feed into whether it's digital or any other marketing campaigns can be stacked on top of experiential. So what I heard is using, again, starting from the ground level, from the foundation that you mentioned of a clear proposal, a clear strategy, and then what sticks to that and whatever means and whatever other sort of tactics and tools are used within experiential, outside of experiential, in collaboration with all other forms of your digital in-live, out-of-office everything that is marketing.

Luis Felipe:

There are so many moments within, say, a brand activation to include those and make it live. On that not only quantify the return on the investment for the books, but also, as you mentioned, net promoter scores are going up on brands, which do influence the long-term play and, as we've seen, the name of the game is Longjevich. We're going to see the ups and downs in the markets. We're going to have black swans like a COVID-19. We're going to experience things. But those brands that really invest in sort of building their brand at a level that resonates with fans, that is what makes these brands actually truly activate their audience and live for the test of time. So I love that approach of just a real long-term thinking With the upcoming launch. Can you share maybe a little bit about some of the growth tools as you mentioned in the beginning, whether for freelancers, the step-by-step blueprint, anything that out of office will kind of offer for both sides, right, say, the freelancer, the agency, all three sides, I should say and then the brands and maybe larger agencies themselves.

Brad Jackson:

Yeah, absolutely so. The manifestation of the platform started earlier this year. Since I am an executive producer and I've been in the industry for a while, I get a lot of calls from agencies and brands asking for referrals to talent so a creative director in New York or a producer in Miami, that kind of thing and I was just thinking to myself I need a better roster or directory of freelancers. So I put a form on my website, pretty simple, and then just started hitting LinkedIn really hard this year and I made it like a mission of mine to post daily if I can, and the payoff of doubling down on that has been incredible, incredible, so quickly this form went from like 10, 20 people to 500 people from all around the world. Now it's up to like 750, who are all basically on the wait list, but they are freelancers in specifically experiential, so not like events runs the gamut of wedding planner, all the birthday parties, everything. These people are really experiential experts that have a marketing background and from there I ended up talking to about 80 of them on the phone just asking questions.

Brad Jackson:

Freelancing changed my life and the name of the business is out of office. It just opened up all these ideas and lifestyle changes and everything for me. And so I wanted to talk to all these people and figure out, like, where are you struggling and when are you trying to get to, and then really think about how can I help them Accomplish that. So the platform ended up becoming this like personal branding and like growth tool. So we've got the personal Profile builder, which is like your website, so you no longer need to do Squarespace or any of that. And then we've got a vendor, a master vendor database. That's like an AI co-pilot for producing an event. And then we have a community aspect where people can pass gigs to each other. They can ask for support and just talk to other industry pros.

Brad Jackson:

And Once I built that out, then the brands and agencies started asking, like, what is this, what are you doing? And then that's when I quickly had to decide am I gonna do staffing and gig type platform marketplace or am I gonna try and do something different and new? And I Really don't like the model of like fiverr and upwork, of just like smashing the freelancers, hourly Rates as low as you can and just trying to go for volume. So my approach was like let's get the best of the best freelancers who want to build their personal brand on the platform and Really support them. And then let me develop this like consulting arm. That taps into the fact that I have all of these experts and gets them paid properly for like their level of expertise.

Brad Jackson:

Yeah if you've been in the industry for 10 plus years, like you start to graduate up Above just being a cog in the machine like you.

Brad Jackson:

It's wasted knowledge for you to just be filling out spreadsheets.

Brad Jackson:

So let's let's find the brands that want to get into experiential and get into the express lane and link them up with like the exact expert that you're looking for and Build a plan for them to get into experiential and then, like I said earlier, we can match, make for operations and all that. That's great, but let's focus there and right now I purposely don't have an offer for agencies because I Don't think we're going head-to-head with agencies. But I've been in the agency world for so long and I know how it works and I think the brands are the ones that'll Pay for and value the expertise of the talent, versus the agencies are gonna come in Very transactional and just wanting people to fill the role so that they can get it done and impress their client. I think at some point they'll be able to roll out where I can incorporate them into this whole ecosystem, but for now I'm just trying to do the brand to freelancer expert level, like research Trends, you know, advisor type role for the industry.

Luis Felipe:

I love that. Yeah, there's definitely a, as you mentioned, it's a disruptive space for the fact that you know there are parties that have benefited from the old model and, overall, just like you know, your taxi drivers before Uber, a lot of these things that worked, that still work to this day but did kind of waste a lot of potential, possibly did waste a lot of Just time and money for everybody involved. So it sounds like you know you're definitely building this sort of value and knowledge connection that has been ripe, as I said earlier, for disruption and I love the fact that you know and having this sort of Understanding from both sides, like being out on the field and being within the agency side, you get to see what really glues and, at the end, the the most important thing is that the people who are having these experiences the end consumer, obviously the client are having the best experience possible. Right Like you mitigate a lot of just the basic, like safety issues. A lot of, you know, just with having competent, we're having a well engaged people, people who don't feel you know they're being taken advantage of, who are, you know, like a lot of freelancers starting out like you are sort of a starving artist right, like you're committing a lot to just like the entrepreneurial journey, just like any of these things. You're committing a lot to Proving yourself, but once you prove yourself, maybe it wasn't seen as important, but it seems like it is important to you which is amazing to then find these opportunities that match your level of skills here, so it's not just wasted knowledge. So then, kudos to you for that approach and I'm definitely excited for what's to come.

Luis Felipe:

So with that, I'm gonna kind of just highlight a lot of what I would stood out for me.

Luis Felipe:

So, starting from the beginning, I want to kind of put out a bookmark on the experiential as a 360 approach.

Luis Felipe:

Now we see that experiential in it of itself is maybe not new, it's the norm, but there's also a way to kind of compound it and compound other aspects, like digital, with it. The second point is the efficiency of the way we work, specifically with RFPs, for having this sort of more Effective way for all parties to be less wasteful but also get to a completely effective strategy through and through. The next point is the ROI and Kind of using whether the content that is king, that could be built off of experiential or, vice versa, the Digital itself that could, you know, build over the long term to then be actually Qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed. I think that's a beautiful thing to Implement and again, as we just finished off, sort of the value of using knowledge to both connect Talents, brands and kind of have an intersecting goal for them. I think that's, you know, an extremely valuable Position to be. Is there anything else you would add on anything you want to highlight as far as takeaways from our chat?

Brad Jackson:

No, I think I think you nailed all of it. I'm just Back to your point of kind of the freelance journey it is. It is tough and it took me a long time to take the leap. It's been the best decision I ever made to work for myself. But it's not for everybody, but those who are Fired up about it and motivated of about creating their own path. I want to be there giving them all the tools to be able to do that, just based on what I wish I had at that time.

Luis Felipe:

I love that and so where can people learn more about out of office and kind of follow your journey?

Brad Jackson:

Yeah, so live out of office is the website. We have a new trend report coming out next week which will actually have Freelancer rates in there, kind of industry standard rates from all over the world, and then also like our top trends for the the industry moving into next year. So you can download that for free over at the website. And then come find me on LinkedIn, brad Jackson. I, like I said, anybody who wants to dive into, like content or self-promotion for next year. Linkedin has been absolutely incredible. I could not recommend it more.

Luis Felipe:

Thank you. Yeah, that's how you and I connected and I'm so glad we did. I'm excited, looking forward to our next chat and definitely what you're building I think is very valuable. So thank you excited and more to come.

Brad Jackson:

Yes, absolutely, thank you. Thank you, brad.