In Part 1 of this series, we looked at why marketers are moving budget toward in-person experiences as AI floods digital channels. Our second installment of the AI and Experiential Marketing series is about the most important advantage of digital marketing that is hard to replicate in event marketing: scale.
One great activation is a big challenge, so replicating it across ten, fifty, or two hundred locations can seem that much harder. Different staff, different audience, different venue. However, excellent multi-location brands and organizations do not shy away from building the best experience every single time. We are lucky to witness so many of our customers demonstrating excellence on all fronts despite the real-world variables that do not exist in digital.
The best marketers know how to borrow from different industries, and there are plenty of examples of controlling for the outcome of public events.
What Broadway Figured Out in 1914
For most of the twentieth century, no major musical opened cold in New York. It opened out of town first. The most famous testing ground was the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, opened by the Shubert brothers in 1914. Because the Shuberts owned both the New Haven house and many of Broadway's theaters, the path from out-of-town tryout to New York premiere was clean and deliberate. Over the decades, the New Haven Shubert hosted more than 600 pre-Broadway tryouts, including over 300 world premieres, earning the nickname "The Birthplace of the Nation's Greatest Hits".
The logic was simple: lower stakes, lower cost, and a real audience while you are still learning, so that everything goes perfectly at the premiere. The same applies to a multi-location event program. The instinct is to launch your new experience at your biggest, most visible location, but running your pilot somewhere smaller and relatively unnoticed, where you can actively observe, take feedback, and make mistakes cheaply, gives much higher rewards.
During the pilot, watch the details that never show up in a planning document. Where does the line form? How long does each participant actually take? Which prize gets the biggest reaction? What questions do people ask your staff? Write all of it down. This is the raw material for everything that follows.
Turn What You Learned Into Documents Anyone Can Run
Once the pilot proves out, translate the experience into a written program with a few distinct pieces:
- An overall event plan covering goals, timeline, content, and success metrics for the marketing team
- A staff toolkit for each location covering setup, game rules, prize odds and inventory, talking points, troubleshooting, and teardown
- A one-page quick reference someone can absorb ten minutes before doors open
This is a place where AI genuinely earns its keep, because iterating documents is what it does best. Adapting one master toolkit into versions for a mall kiosk, a trade show booth, and a sidewalk event. Generating checklists from your pilot notes. Rewriting the same instructions for a first-time seasonal hire versus an experienced event lead. Let AI handle the versions.
Rehearse, Record, and Replay
Another lesson from the theatre industry is the time and resources shows spend preparing for the actual performance. An in-person event needs an in-person team and real-life attention. The toolkit gets every location to the same starting line, but the experience itself is delivered by people, in the room, in the moment. That is why this channel works when digital does not.
Humans are creative, emotive, empathetic, and humorous: all the qualities that bring the best result in your event! But naturally, we are not great at repetition and following procedure. You never want your best host to be distracted by checklists and guidelines while the floor is hot and the audience is engaged. Those are for rehearsals!
Use the basic techniques that improv performers and game show runners frequently adapt. Rehearse for different outcomes and reactions, record the "out of town" events, give the team an opportunity to monitor, and apply those learnings to other event team members by training.
Standardize the Physical Fixtures
Everything is cheaper at scale, and that applies to your equipment and fixtures, too. Test your design with a prototype, and once proven, set up and replicate it. The same prize wheel, the same signage, the same table footprint at every site means your materials are accurate everywhere, replacement parts are interchangeable, and staff who transfer between locations already know the drill. You might even be able to handle repairs on your own, if something breaks during the event or transportation!
A practical note from our side: we offer volume discounts on orders of 10 or more wheels, and we can spread delivery across different dates and ship to different locations, so units arrive where and when each site needs them. We offer service for ALL products we ship; some are covered by warranty, and some are not, but even if it falls out of our warranty scope, our service and parts are available for a fee.
Next week, in the final post of this series, we look at the other side of AI in our industry: what happens when AI-generated artwork meets a real, physical game, and how to get from a beautiful rendering to a wheel that actually spins.
Rolling out a program across multiple locations? Email us at sales@spinningdesigns.com and we will help you plan the fixtures before you commit to anything.
