The Power of a Pivot

As part of the CMO Reboot Playbook: Activating Brand Purpose, Mike Wente, Head of Verizon's In-House Agency, 140, discusses how they pivoted The Met's experiential event to a fully virtual one during the pandemic with purpose at the center of it all. Check out more plays from top CMOs and brand leaders here. This transcript has been edited by Adweek and may not reflect the video-recording exactly. THE CHALLENGE 140 is the in-house shop and works on all aspects of the Verizon brand from the owned channels to the retail footprint. We work across 7,000 US stores, the digital channel and help drive that customer experience through Verizon.com, social, and at major events like CES. What I want to take you through is an example of an active project that we did with The Met (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), which also talks about the power of the pivot. It was a project that we were already underway with, in the workings of a year, that was meant to be very much an experiential event in the city of New York, bringing art to the streets of Manhattan and letting people experience celebrate The Met’s 150th anniversary. At the beginning of last year, the pandemic hit and the last thing people were going to want to do was go out and visit some sort of experiential event at a physical installation and see artwork. In fact, The Met closed for a good period. So, it just became a question around—where do we go from here? Do we just put the entire initiative on pause or do we really think differently about how we want to bring it to life and pivot it? THE APPROACH If you look back at the purpose of Verizon, we create the networks that move the world forward. We are really selective about each word around being able to help society, people, and institutions (like The Met), but also the networks, infrastructure, technology, and connectivity that can help move it forward. At the end of 2020, Verizon 5G was going nationwide and this was a big deal for the brand and also for a lot of our customers. Looking at this in conjunction with our purpose led to an idea for The Met: as the network that helps move the world forward, let's use 5G as it goes nationwide to bring The Met with us across the US in a virtual sense. https://twitter.com/Verizon/status/1349068826575515650?s=20 This was the social post that kicked off the entire program and introduced The Met Unframed, a specific virtual curation of The Met Museum like you've never seen it before. It was an immersive art experience brought to you by Verizon and, unlike the physical version of being able to walk into the gallery, it was a very bespoke, specific, curated experience that you could have. It was created as a mobile-first experience, which further connected the role Verizon plays within the experience. And if you weren't on a 5G network, there were different experiences that you could access. But if you did have a 5G network and device, you could unlock different pieces of artwork and different interactions of that artwork that you can explore. You could have that great exploration and interaction, being able to learn as well as a gaming element and the educational aspect to learn more about the pieces of artwork. Another feature as you were exploring and interacting was you could take pieces of the artwork on loan to virtually put them up into your environment anywhere around you. The sharing component was critical with this to where it was engineered into the core of the idea, because we did want organic, earned engagement to be able to bring others into the experience. This was more than just a virtual version of The Met—this was a curated experience. Our team worked with The Met to dive into the show that they wanted to put on in a special exhibit, so this had as much attention to detail than any show would ever have at The Met. We created four themes that allowed us to move art in and out as the project evolved: home, nature, power, and journey. Since we were virtual and leveraging VR and AR, we were able to bring different pieces of artwork and experience them where you could never really do in a physical sense, so we were able to really create a one-of-a-kind experience. Interaction and Gamification Another critical component of it was the interaction and the gamification we wanted to be able to make within the experience itself. You could use a magnifying glass that would show up [on the screen] and you could use infrared and get deeper into the painting and look at the pigments. You could also look behind the initial colors on the surface and get to know the paintings to get deeper into the experience and unlock other pieces of artwork to take. The gaming was critical to the engagement and the participatory marketing that we wanted to have with the customers as we were bringing this to life. The 5G art examples that you could take home or put into your own environment were critical to some of that as demonstrations of what you can get with 5G. We worked with The Met to bring The Unicorn Tapestry and the Cubiculum to life, which if you have been to The Met, you realize that there is a velvet rope that prevents you from getting into the actual room itself to be able to see it. With our virtual experience not only can you go into the Cubiculum and be able to see the details, but also access a 5G version of this space that explains the different aspects of the piece. Using the entire experience and all the different artworks as content to post and share the program with The Met really created a lot of mileage and is how we atomized the entire experience and drew people into the program and educated them about what it is that we're doing. We made sure that Verizon was front and center in the partnership with The Met. A key proponent of that was creating what we're calling these gallery openings. We had friends of The Met and certain influencers help create that groundswell of sharing engagement and people posting. This was a physical crate that was created. There was a QR code to unlock that with the mobile experience, as well as other goodies you would expect with a real gallery experience. The engagement of people that we sent it out to and the content that they came back with was produced incredibly well. THE IMPACT The results have been incredible, The Met Unframed got more average daily visits than the physical Met would get pre-pandemic and over 22,000 hours of gameplay. Obviously, we're most proud of what it's done for Verizon and 5G leadership and those who have experienced and interacted with The Met Unframed. There has been 140% increase in that perception of 5G leadership. We are incredibly proud of that. KEY TAKEAWAYS The Power of a Pivot: Every challenge is an opportunity. Don't be shy about taking a step back and looking at how to reframe an idea of a partnership or a piece of engagement and being able to use it to your advantage. Embrace the challenge.Experienced Driven Marketing: Don’t talk at people. Involve them in the conversation and experience and leverage technology to do that.Idea and Medium Harmony: None of this would have been possible if it wasn't for the mobile device to be able to help do it or the network for it to run on. You really can't do one without the other.Don’t Get Lost in the Partnership: When you're working with a partner, it's easy sometimes to get lost in the partnership and really lean heavily on who you're working with or the kind of entity that you're sponsoring. It's important to make sure that there's always a role for the brand and why you're doing the partnership and what it is that you're looking to get out of it. Make sure you're not getting lost.Embrace Uncertainty: This was a new experience for Verizon and being able to gauge the risk, but also I think the opportunity is to learn that we could take into other experiences in the future. Moving from a Transactional Sponsorship to Transformative with Women’s Sports Foundation CMO