What happens when a food truck tour becomes more than just a stop along the way? For Kodiak, year five was about turning street-level buzz into nationwide awareness.

After four years of Newbridge leading Kodiak’s experiential Food Truck Tour, we doubled down on innovation to make each stop more impactful than the last. A primary focus for this year’s fifth tour was to integrate media impressions with our event partnerships. While we specialize in the impact experiential marketing can have in connecting consumers to our brands with in-person engagements, our agency has been expanding on opportunities to amplify the activation experience through media promotion with the intent to bring in even more consumer awareness and attendance to our activation.

As we go through our work in sourcing the best opportunities for our client, we have begun introducing media packages into our contracting negotiations with our event partners. This helps us build an opportunity for our client that not only brings them the best onsite experience with footprint visibility and sample distribution, but goes beyond the physical event site and expands our digital footprints.

Over the past year we have built media package offerings for clients that include paid social and utilizing Newbridge’s extensive college databases and partner databases to send out targeted email sends, however most recently we have been working with the events themselves to lean into their event-specific offerings. This can include ad placements on jumbotrons and race fencing, and announcements during the race events. We’ve also leaned into our internal design teams to produce unique creative that our event partners can use on social media. The accumulation of all these efforts over the course of an experiential program really helps take us the extra mile for the client.

The Kodiak x Kilby Block Party sponsorship activation is a stand out example of these extra efforts on this year’s tour. Knowing that Kodiak and Kilby Block Party are both iconic Utah-based brands, we thought it was obvious to bring these two brands together in a more impactful way. Traditionally when working with our clients, we opt for vendor and exhibitor partnership opportunities compared to a full sponsorship. However, when we invest in a sponsorship, we open the door to receive a robust media package.

In addition to fueling concert goers with over 12,000 pancake samples from the food truck activation, additional media impressions totaled in 18,735,282. And while attendees were waiting for their favorite artists to come on at the two headliner stages, they were encouraged to visit the food truck by the four digital screens on each side of the stage. Attendees who downloaded the festival app, received push notifications that reminded them to visit the food truck. And the opportunities didn’t stop at the festival; Kodiak became the official sponsor of six official after parties that included additional sampling at satellite venues and instagram posts calling viewers to “Fuel your night the Kodiak way”!

This year’s work on the Kodiak tour has inspired me to continue to find new ways to utilize all of our resources when working with event partners to bring the best value to our clients. And while I specialize in experiential strategies, it’s exciting to learn how to couple digital media to my programs to really amplify our activations and go beyond the physical footprint.