An Interview with Louis Marino on Experiential Marketing and Kicking Ass

This afternoon, I got the opportunity to chat with MKTG INC’s creative leader, Louis Marino. Marino is new to the agency side of things, but after nearly 20 years working in fashion and music--including a 2-year-stint as Diddy’s Creative Director, he’s found MKTG to be a natural fit.

The last two years, he’s handled some notoriously fun but demanding big-boy clients, designing campaigns for NIKE, Diageo, FedEx, Google, Mattel, Nintendo, Tiffany & Co. Mr. Marino was kind enough to take a half hour out of his day to jam with me on Diddy, Zuckerberg’s star power, and kicking ass.

JL: How has your extensive experience in the music industry prepared you
for your position at MKTG? In other words, how does music continue to
influence your creative direction?

LM: The music industry is a very kind of vapor, hyper based industry. It’s based on a lot of things that are done on impulse, through a lot of things that we plan for as far as album release dates and stuff like that. But things get pushed back and you have to be ready to act on a moment’s notice. That kind of thinking, from a creative perspective or a strategic perspective, really developed my ability to be able to come up with ideas.

As far as how it continues to influence my creative thinking, music has always been a passion of mine. I will never stop listening to all kinds of music and continue to be inspired by artists and their stories and the mediums they create. And being able to have been in an industry where you really know what’s going on in the background, seeing an artist’s career blossom, it’s wonderful to be able to experience that.

I also think it’s very relevant to what I’ve learned in the music industry about branding and about strategy, about positioning bands in a very similar way that advertising agencies go about handling their clients. It’s really no different. Some are more emotive than others, some have long track records, some are brand new, so you have to approach them from a different perspective.

You look at businesses, and you see founders of businesses and spokespeople for businesses that have been influential in its growth, at the forefront of their business as well. Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, they’re the face of their brand, they’re the face of their company, they’re the founders of their company.

JL: What’s the difference between branding a celebrity and a businessperson?

LM: There are a lot of similarities depending on the person. So you have someone who has a start-up, who’s extremely successful, super smart, probably pretty damn good in a boardroom and communicative to their employees, but they’re not media savvy at all. You never want to put somebody in that position, or in the forefront as the “spokesperson” of their brand unless they know what they’re doing and they can handle the pressure of being the face of their brand. Celebrities--that’s one reason to have great media training. I think we’ve seen these—especially with Twitter—we’ve seen a lot of celebrities and politicians, people who are put in the limelight, acting as if they’re talking to their friends when they’re tweeting something. But if it’s inappropriate or can be misconstrued then they can be in big trouble.

JL: The hot trend right now for all brands is to have community managers to manage social media accounts and the public perception of a brand. A lot of times celebrities are very similar to brands that way. Do you think some celebrities need community managers?

LM: I think that some definitely do. But some are actually quite good at being their own community managers as well. Take Taylor Swift, for example. She insists on posting on her Facebook page, she insists on doing her tweets. She has the responsibility to do them, and has a sense of responsibility towards what she’s communicating. The passion is there. When you’re passionate about something and you really want to convey to your fans or to the media what you’re thinking, you have to be careful on your ability to control your impulses. From a community management standpoint, I think it’s healthier for them to do that.

They’re saying less and less to the media itself and they’re asking people to help them craft their story. It really is a balance.

JL: Is star power behind a brand important?

LM: Yes, if the person created the product and the person stands behind the product and is a good communicator and is in it for the long haul. Let’s take Ralph Lauren, for example. When he first started decades ago, he used to appear on quite a few of his ads to really be representative of the look and feel and style of the brand. He was the brand. He embodied the brand. As time went on, he appeared less and less in those adverts. Only when there was a real reason to bring him out did they do it. But in every ad, regardless of whether or not he’s in them, you know that it’s a Ralph Lauren ad.

JL: What do you see as the future of experiential marketing right now?

LM: Experiential has gone through quite a history. Being that I spent the vast majority of my career outside of experiential, I’ve been able to really draw upon a great deal of experiences that help me to view this industry from a fresh perspective.

Since this industry is based on events and physical contact with folks, you know right away whether or not something is working. Coming into it two and a half years ago, there was a tremendous amount of learning that they already knew worked and didn’t work. Moving ahead, I think the idea of customization for consumers is definitely continuing to grow. I think that, as far as experiential is concerned, we not only need to intensify the on-site experience, but also the pre- and post event communications that you have with them. Different kinds of buyers can be targeted with different kinds of messages.

Technology is a huge boon for our industry. Technology saved experiential marketing. Because no longer are people looking at an event or a series of events or series of experiences as the solo experience. You can amplify that digitally; you can include digital as a tool. Digital now has become part of the narrative. So in order for you to tell the story, if you have an experience that’s physical and you’re able to show everybody online what happened, that’s the essence of why you have such amazing viral videos out there that get millions and millions of hits. It’s intriguing, it’s fun and again, it can be very meaningful to a consumer’s daily life. There are certainly limits to that; you don’t want to bombard them too much. It will turn them off. But if you do it in a way that’s mostly fun and entertaining and interesting, it adds to the overall experience of the product. Technology has been huge in that sense.

And now you can go global. Something that happened in a small town in Texas, now that can be seen all over the world. It doesn’t get any more powerful than that. And it’s only going to get more powerful as smart phones become smarter and technology enables people to customize their content, like I said before, but also be able to park themselves in any part of the world and almost walk in their counterpart’s footsteps on the other side.

There are many things that are changing it now. From the computer to the Internet, anything in a nation that happens from a technological standpoint that gets applied to our industry, you have to use it as a tool. You cannot make it just for itself. I have this debate with augmented reality. Augmented reality is really cool, but if you’re just doing it for its own sake, then it doesn’t make any sense. It becomes wallpaper; it’s not meaningful.

A good example of that is when Pixar became synonymous with amazing movies. It wasn’t because of the animation that they became amazing movies, it’s because of the stories that they created that were so great. They treated the animation no different than any other animation studio would, they just used technology to get there. They look great, but you remember the story; it’s not so much the graphics. Flip that around, and you see a movie that has all kinds of special effects and it’s shit. You see it and you’re like, this was a horrible movie. You just wasted your money. All the technology that is available today is very intriguing. We need to stay on top of that stuff. You just have to make sure that you don’t overuse it or go to the well too much, because then it’s not going to resonate very well.

JL: I have to ask: What’s it like working with Diddy?

LM: I was able to learn so much in the two years that I worked with him (each year is like a dog year, so you might as well say I worked for 14 years for a guy). It was an amazing experience, I don’t regret a day that I worked for him. It was incredibly, incredibly challenging. Also incredibly exciting. If you think about the industry that he touches…I worked on and developed a fragrance, I worked on and developed, marketed and sold vodka. I worked on a fashion line with sixteen different licenses. There was certainly no shortage of things to work on, but in terms of a brand umbrella, in terms of having kind of creative ADD and loving a variety of different brands, coming from one person and different personas, it became a lot of fun to work with that.

JL: How would you explain MKTG’s objectives in three words?

LM: Be kick ass.