Traffic versus demographics is the biggest question when it comes to picking a location for your sponsorship or experiential marketing activation.  On one hand, you want as many impressions as possible. Naturally, that suggests a highly-trafficked location. The downside would be if those impressions come from individuals outside of the target demographic. How valuable can that foot traffic be in that case? The most obvious answer would be to find a location that skews towards being able to deliver both - and this is where Tandem becomes an asset.  Over the years we’ve vetted so many properties and placed an array of activations this critical data is at our fingertips (or at least living in Dropbox). We’d like to highlight this by sharing a couple activations we’ve placed, showing how we've been able to capture the specific audience desired.

Beech Nut

In Orange County we recently worked with Beech Nut baby food. Beech Nut was looking to capture the attention of young families and the OC Fair seemed a natural fit.  The Fair attracts over 1.3 million visitors every year. Digging a bit deeper into who those 1.3 million+ visitors are, we find the average age of a visitor is 32 and 58% of those guests are female. With these simple pieces of data, we can ascertain that a good portion of those 1.3 million is going to be someone who may be interested in Beech Nut.

Smash cut to the opening of the Fair: Beech Nut was the beneficiary of high volume foot-traffic numbers of over 50,000 guests/day. A high percentage of those guests were part of the target demographic. Adding an umbrella so parents could get their infants out of the Southern California sun helped as well.

Red Vines

In the second example, we want to stress that in many cases “foot traffic” can be a bit of a lazy number and often needs to be broken down further to be useful. When we place an activation at PIER 39, we know that on any given weekend day we will see roughly 15,000 visitors. Going deeper, we know the PIER operates from 10am - 10pm and when the sun goes down the traffic plummets.  This information was particularly useful when working with Red Vines to place an activation at PIER 39 highlighting the launch of its California Mix. Armed with 4,000 samples to distribute and a budget that wouldn’t allow for a typical day-long activation, we had to get creative. The goal was to get the product into the hands of the targeted family demographic the PIER caters to. After doing a little extra research, we ended up selecting a three hour window at peak traffic time that would both work within Red Vines' budget and allow the brand to distribute all its product to its targeted family demographic. The results were phenomenal and Red Vines was able to achieve its goal of both handing out samples and creating a very family friendly “Instagrammable” activation, which lived on social media much longer than the contracted three hour window.

Traffic versus demographic doesn’t need to be an "either/or" question; one shouldn't automatically be sacrificed for the other.  Information is available but sometimes hard to come by. Using a company like Tandem, with a long standing track record of successful venue sourcing and property connections, can get your brand the information it needs to make an informed decision.  In the cases of both Beech Nut and Red Vines, we were able to deliver captivating venues that delivered the targeted audiences the brands wanted to engage with in high volume numbers.