Alternative marketing campaign ideas & examples
Updated: Sep 18
Outmaneuver the competition by marketing your brand through exciting, less cluttered channels.
Popular advertising channels like CTV, e-commerce, paid search, and paid social media can be noisy and cluttered with competition. How can your brand possibly stand out without the biggest media budget?
Adding alternative, experiential marketing plays to a paid media mix help brands to stand out from the crowd and reach people in exciting, memorable ways. There's a shift happening toward IRL events; people are hungry for community and friction.
Brands that think outside the screen and meet consumers in the real world are building memorability and long-term loyalty.
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What is alternative marketing?
Alternative marketing involves any media channel or tactic outside the traditional advertising mainstays of TV, Radio, and Print including out-of-home, experiential, cinematic, and guerrilla marketing.
One theme has emerged clearly this year: bigger and more technologically dazzling doesn't mean more effective. The real differentiator is coherence: whether an experience emerges from what a brand stands for, or whether a logo has simply been applied on top of it.
What are some examples of alternative advertising?
The creative possibilities are endless, but a few effective examples include:
Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) Media
Buying DOOH inventory programmatically (Programmatic Out-of-Home, or pDOOH) lets advertisers trade impressions in real time through demand-side platforms, layering in dynamic creative optimization, 3D creative, and hyperlocal, weather-triggered messaging that integrates with retail media for a halo effect.
When we took over Times Square with Annie Leibovitz's portraits for The Chosen: Last Supper, the DOOH media activation worked in harmony with the campaign's digital, video, and earned media strategies to lift brand awareness by 4.6x the Entertainment category norms! And most importantly, The Chosen: Last Supper sold 6.1MM tickets, grossing $50MM in theaters and setting a new record for the brand.
Experiential Marketing
Ads can be more than just visuals; they can be fully immersive experiences. Whether it's a pop-up event, a branded installation, or an interactive campaign, experiential marketing brings people together in the physical world, where they can touch, feel, and sense the brand in a tangible way. These activations explode on social media, lead to higher brand recall, and instill customer loyalty. Strategic organic and paid media efforts also lead to more earned media coverage.
Rather than simply sponsoring the local baseball team, Habit chose to set up shop inside Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles and make a nearby restaurant location into an official fanbase before and after games. This helps consumers feel like less like - well, consumers, and more like participants in a local, cultural experience.
Contests, Sweepstakes, & Giveaways
In a cookie-deprecated world, few tactics get a consumer to willingly hand over their information faster than the chance to win something. Entrants opt in, share their contact or preference data, and often generate organic reach by tagging friends to boost their odds. The mechanic also travels well, living just as easily inside a DOOH activation, a social campaign, or an in-store display.
Here's an example of a successful contest we ran for Stella & Chewy's in 2023 that collected zero-party data and led to an 84% surge in revenue directly attributed to media!
Cinematic Advertising
Imagine your ad on the big screen, impossible to ignore, in a theater near you. Despite taking a hit during the pandemic, cinematic advertising is clawing its way back with digital strategies and box office hits, providing a much-needed jolt.
The CPM for cinematic advertising is competitive with CTV and avoids many of the problems in search and social like signal loss and data privacy. An Exverus client who advertised in-cinema increased unaided brand awareness by 12x as a result of the campaign!
Guerrilla Marketing
These tactics show up in unexpected places, sneaking up on people out in the wild -- think pop-up art installations, flash mobs, interactive street games, or messages appearing on unlikely canvasses like sidewalks and buildings.
Pardon the obvious pun here, but there was a truly "guerrilla" campaign for the latest Planet of the Apes movie in 2024:
What are the pros & cons of alternative marketing?
Thinking outside the box has its advantages: alternative and experiential media build lasting brand recall, deepen affinity, and drive measurable purchase intent, especially when a brand designs the conditions for an experience rather than a one-way message.
Giving audiences some agency over what to explore, share, or post is what makes an activation travel, and creator amplification often turns one activation into millions of earned impressions.
The trade-offs are real too. Event budgets are climbing across B2B and consumer categories, so more brands compete for the same limited windows of attention. A highly produced, highly branded activation can still feel hollow without something distinctive to say. These channels also demand more lead time and cross-functional coordination than a standard digital buy, and CMOs are increasingly asked to deliver disruptive, immersive work while staying fiscally responsible — a few massive tentpole moments giving way to more, smaller, sharper bets.
How do you measure the success of alternative marketing campaigns?
While it's true that alternative advertising campaigns are less directly attributable to sales than performance marketing channels like e-commerce, there are definite ways to measure their impact. Effective ways to quantify impact include:
Brand lift studies, before-and-after surveys, and focus groups to track recall, favorability, and purchase intent
Dwell time, foot traffic, and heat-mapping to see which elements of an activation actually earn attention, plus trackable coupons and app downloads tied to that specific activation
Marketing mix modeling (MMM) and AI-powered predictive analysis to connect activations to downstream conversions, and increasingly to predict where and what an activation should say before it launches
Earned media value and branded search lift. Our Times Square campaign for The Chosen drove branded search to 3.8MM in a single month. Experiential agency Six+One's $2,000 trashcan activation in New York generated an estimated $28 million in earned media!
The bigger shift: start with the outcome a client wants and build measurement backward from there, rather than treating attendance as the goal.
How do you integrate alternative marketing into an omnichannel media strategy?
No earned or paid marketing tactic, traditional or otherwise, can yield steady, long-term growth in a bubble – they have to work together! A good media agency can help your brand build a holistic, omnichannel media plan that incorporates upper-funnel tactics like experiential activations or OOH with mid- and lower-funnel tactics like paid search and retail media, respectively.
Focusing too narrowly on lower-funnel tactics at the expense of brand-building is a common trap known as short-termism. The immediate, traceable performance effects can be enticing, but without upper-funnel brand building in the mix, your audience won’t grow, and your business won’t either.
Get your brand outside in the real world and create outstanding, memorable experiences for your customers. Show them a good time, and they'll stick with you.
This piece originally appeared in our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter. For more tips, research, and analysis; subscribe for free here.
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