I learned not to use movie theatres as experiential marketing sampling locations. Having worked several activations on this promo campaign personally (I was literally the brand ambassador handing out drinks) I can tell you from firsthand experience that there is a rush of people going into the theatre and then it’s dead for hours so your reps are just standing there twiddling their thumbs. Unless it’s a premiere, I always recommend against having reps do samplings at movie theatres now.
Nobody from the experiential marketing agency was there with us for this activation. They had shipped the activation kit to the location in advance, and then it was my job to set up and tear down. I actually recall for this event I recruited the other girl that I was working with. I think a lot of people would be pretty surprised to know just how little work their experiential marketing agencies are actually doing in terms of coordination and having been the person in field. It’s now one of the reasons why I almost never work with experiential marketing agencies because I know how bloated the costs are.
I will also point out the absurdity in this activation of them thinking it was good for optics to have a Bacardi branded umbrella indoors (numerous people commented on that ). I would expect an agency would have thought about that.