Roll Up Roll Up

At Jack Morton, we like to think that we are the inventors of the term “experiential marketing”
Indeed when we started to use the phrase if you typed experiential into Google it came back with “Did you mean experimental?”
However there is another guy who deserves some of the credit.
You may not have heard of him, but his impact and influenced transformed the movie industry back in the 1950s.
William Castle was a film promoter, director and producer, who found that outrageous stunts were a cost-effective way of promoting low budget movies. The key, he believed, was creating something that would get people talking, the power of advocacy and word-of-mouth.
At first, he came up with promotional stunts like an insurance policy for $1,000,000 for the first audience member to die of fright whilst watching his film Macabre.
Next it was ‘Emergo’ – a 12-foot glow-in-the-dark skeleton that swooped over the audience’s heads during the movie.
But as Castle saw his popularity (and fan club membership) grow, he realised that the way forward was to stop using these ‘gimmicks’ as promotional devices, and to start incorporating them into the experience of the movie itself.
So audiences were given special glasses that enabled them to see the invisible spectres in Thirteen Ghosts, and random seats gave moviegoers electric shocks as they watched The Tingler, about an electro-powered parasitic monster.
These novelties might sound hokey and old-fashioned today, but they transformed movie-going from a passive to a participative experience.
The great work we do for our clients should never be the icing on the cake – it’s the very heart of the experience.