How Grandesign creates experiential marketing

The San Diego-based marketing agency’s ideas generate buzz money can’t buy

Ten years ago, when Grandesign was still a fledgling company, they were promoting Dole bagged salads at a food industry convention in Anaheim. Instead of billboards and taxi toppers, Dole got promotional pedicab rides and gigantic forks digging into leafy green treetops around the venue. It was a hit. “We were ‘the famous fork company’ for a while,” says CEO Aaron Gaeir.

That kind of out-of-the-box thinking continues today in their bright, spacious office behind the brick facade of the East Village’s Wonder Bread building. Teams of idea people and production specialists are continually generating new and innovative marketing campaigns or refining the concepts dreamed up by the brands that hire them, then they make them come to life.

Grandesign refers to campaigns like the famous fork as “experiential marketing,” a strategy that aims to engage audiences on a deeper level and rev up a kind of buzz money can’t buy. Gaeir says “it’s like gasoline to all the other traditional media.” The execution can be chaotic, as there are often many moving parts, but the results are nothing short of sensational. For instance, Grandesign’s terrifying promotion for the 2017 remake of IT, a tourable replica of the movie’s Neibolt House, attracted about 35,000 thrill seekers to its location at Hollywood and Vine and was shared on social media over a billion times. The company, which has regional offices scattered across the US, is also responsible for the party island seen floating along the coast last year to promote the TBS series Wrecked, a pop-up theater at JFK airport that entertained weary travelers the day before Thanksgiving (the biggest travel day of the year), and the ultra-popular Experience at Comic-Con (this year’s edition featured a 40-foot-long Sharkzilla).

The key, Gaeir says, is “creating the engagement to participate, to touch, to feel, to smell, to be active. Immersive experiences are the best.”

So, with campaigns across the country, why keep Grandesign headquartered in San Diego?

San Diego is a great place for business, especially those in the creative space, including advertising and marketing. Experiential marketing is driven by millennials, which San Diego has in abundance. “Millennials are gravitating toward urbanization. They don’t want a car. They don’t need a big house. They want to work, eat, play, and live in their community. That is San Diego,” Gaeir says. “New York is the center of finance. Silicon Valley is the king of tech. San Diego has the perfect climate and landscape to house millennials and entrepreneurs.”