I Have An Idea… Crash A Party

“It’s easier to crash a party than it is to throw a party.” – Me.

I admit it. I love quotes. I love clichés. And I love the proverbial old adage. I believe in them and I live by them because, typically, they’re true. A marketer can only hope to one day be preserved through what his or her peers consider to be a wise, valuable and original quote. To be immortalized by way of a typographical (digital) poster bearing the author’s name. Sitting next to other greats, all being celebrated via simple graphics and a clean typeface; living forever in the Pinterest Hall of Fame.

Okay, I’m being a little facetious. But, I do believe in short, succinct statements that inspire and educate and if I was to be known for a phrase or idea, I hope it would be this: “It’s easier to crash a party than it is to throw a party.” It’s an expression I’ve used throughout my career, across multiple industries; most recently within sports.

The concept is as simple as it sounds, and the lesson is this: stop wasting your energy trying to bring people to your party, instead focus on disrupting someone else’s. Why? Well, think about it. What takes more time, money and effort: throwing your own party or doing something disruptive and memorable at someone else’s? I can tell you from experience, it’s the latter.  

Let’s break this down. What do I mean by party? In marketing terms, a party is an event or moment of mass scale; emphasis here being on the word mass. If you truly want to make noise, you need to do so during moments in which the entire country, and in some cases the world, is watching. As it relates to sports, I’m speaking to events like the NCAA men’s basketball national championship (the 2016 final averaged 17.8MM viewers), the women’s world cup (the 2015 final averaged 25.4MM viewers), and the Super Bowl (the 2016 Super Bowl averaged a staggering 111.9MM viewers). Bottom line, the bigger the party you crash, the more noise you make.

But, how does one crash a party?

My definition of “party crashing” is to insert a brand in a disruptive and relevant way. The focus here is on disruptive and relevant.  If you’re going to crash a party, you need to interrupt the regularly scheduled programming by doing something unexpected and jarring. So much so that viewers turn their attention (and their tweets) from the event itself, to your brand instead. Moments like Michael Johnson’s Olympic Gold spikes (brand: Nike), Ellen’s star-studded selfie (brand: Samsung), and Pharrell’s now infamous Grammy’s hat (brand: Pharrell).

In each of these cases, at the time of the activation, the event itself and the conversation along with it, took a backseat to the brands involved. More importantly, the way in which each brand executed was pertinent to the moment, and it paid off. In the case of Samsung, one expert valued their stunt at between $800MM and $1BILLION. Samsung could have never generated that level of value from an event they themselves built from the ground up. That value comes from leveraging an existing culture moment when everyone was watching and inserting the brand in a disruptive and relevant way.  In other words: crashing a party.

Stop spending your time throwing parties and start spending your time crashing them. Your brand will thank you…and I might get one step closer to that coveted Pinterest quote Hall of Fame induction.     

“I Have An Idea…” is a series written for College AD by the author of Brands Win Championships, Jeremy Darlow.