• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, June 6, 2016

Since the dawn of MySpace and even as far back as, well, the birth of the Internet, pre-Web, people have been vomiting forth...oh, excuse me...sharing their innermost thoughts and experiences on every last, mundane topic. This, of course, has given rise to the use, by brands and their agencies, of social media, content marketing and experiential marketing strategies to take advantage of humanity's recently activated oversharing gene. 

A recent study, the EventTrack Study, fielded by -- naturally -- experiential marketing agency Mosaic found that, OMG, the practice of experiential marketing has become a front-and-center tenet of most brands’ marketing efforts. 

According to the study:

• More than half of marketers (51%) plan to invest more in experiential content this year.
• 98% of consumers capture content at live events, and 100% of those who capture content share it across their social media networks.
• Marketers are putting more emphasis on cultivating consumer-created content than their own brand-created content. And almost a third (32%) use content from live events as content for their traditional above-the-line media campaigns.
• More than three-quarters (77%) of brands use content from live events and experiences across their social networks. And 83% of consumers share content from events up to 15 times — some 47% of them would prefer to share content they capture versus content fed to them by a brand.

Of the dovetailing between experiential marketing and social media, Mosaic President Jeff Stelmach said: "Using live experiences to create content for the rest of the marketing mix is one of the fastest-growing trends in the world. Experiential marketing has become the modern CMO's content factory. And consumers themselves are, more and more, creating, capturing, distributing content across their own social networks." 

So yes, marketers might as well make use of the endless supply of content barfed up by consumers as they shoot and record every last detail of every last event they attend rather than actually putting the phone down and truly absorbing the essence of the event. Because you know, posting all those images and videos of that cool event is just a means to prove to one's friends just how much cooler you are since you got to attend the event and they didn't.