Justin O'Heir on measuring what experiential marketing actually does

Justin O’Heir, founder of Ether, joins Vishnu to explain how his company measures the emotional response people have at live brand activations and turns it into data that proves experiential marketing ROI. The conversation runs from Budweiser billboards and a Guinness World Record with KISS to why Justin is bootstrapping his way toward an exit.

Transcript

Vishnu: Hi everybody, my name is Vishnu. I’m the host of this podcast. We have Justin here. He’s the founder of Ether. Ether does measurements on experiential marketing. Welcome, Justin. How are you?

Justin: Hi Vishnu. Nice to meet you, and thanks for having me on. Doing good today, can’t complain.

Vishnu: Awesome. We can just dive right in. What do you do? Tell me a little bit about yourself, tell me about your background, and we can go from there.

Justin: Yeah, so I’ll rewind back. Early on in my career, most of it actually, I’ve been building online audiences for entertainment brands: the music space, the film and television space, and the art world as well. Around the pandemic, I was brought into the experiential space. We had been building these massive audiences on the digital side and being able to track everything they were doing and understand consumer behavior across the whole board.

So when I got into offline events and experiential, it blew my mind. I was in meetings where I’d say, “Hey, do you want to measure this experience?” This was a half a million to a million dollar project, and they said, “No, we’re good.” I almost fell out of my chair, just losing it over this. So that’s where Ether comes from: understanding consumer behavior and how it shifts throughout an activation for brands.

Vishnu: Pretty cool. How do you actually do that? Let’s say there’s an event happening. What are the KPIs you’re measuring? What are the tools that you use to measure those KPIs? And is it tying back to revenue, tying back to impressions? What is the process behind that?

Justin: Yeah, so where it kind of starts is impressions, and that’s a standard measurement that’s happening now. We notice a lot of our competitors have sensors, or they’ll have signups, things like that, to understand who showed up, what they did, what the dwell time was. We call these presence metrics. Those are foundational to understanding step one: was somebody there, and how long did they spend their time there?

The next step is looking into their behavior. So what we do is we integrate sensors, cameras, or interactive experiences to measure how the behavior happens throughout that experience. Then in the end, we process all that data and transfer those signals into an understanding of: okay, are they a buyer? Did we build confidence in the customer? Did we earn their trust? Are they ready to make a purchase? Those are the key goal endpoints that we’re after.

Ultimately, we’re helping experiential brands extend their budgets. So when you go into a CFO meeting, you’re not going empty-handed. You have a bunch of defensible data that says, “Hey, we actually shifted consumer behavior, which is going to lead to more sales.” There are so many aspects of attribution in marketing, whether I saw a billboard, saw a commercial on TV, or was watching an influencer on social media. All of those are tied together, and everybody has their own influence in the attribution pipeline. What we want to do is have enough metrics and defensible data so that marketers can go in, extend their budgets, and get longer activations to drive more value for the brands.

Vishnu: Is it specifically events that are happening live or in person, or is it also digital? Do you focus on both, or how does it work?

Justin: We’ve done both. Right now, the whole world is really focused on in-person events. I think with the wave of AI coming in and dominating the internet and taking over, people are starting to push back. Touch grass. Everybody wants to get out and really enjoy these actual in-person moments. So we’re really focused on how we capture that, but over the years we’ve done some really good campaigns that were purely digital as well.

A good example: we worked with Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser, with Salt XC and Animal, both great agencies. We did this Budweiser campaign where people could submit excuses. They would send NHL hockey tickets to their friends. So I’d send you, Vishnu, tickets and say, “Let’s go see the Ottawa Senators.” I know you’re in Ottawa. And if you were like, “I don’t really feel it tonight,” you could submit an excuse to say, “Oh, I can’t make it because of X.” We got excuses like, “My cat’s sick,” or “My dog ate my homework,” kind of funny excuses. We took all those excuses and plastered them on billboards all across the city, so a lot of people called their friends out. We really looked at how that behavior online led to people actually building this community and feeling of belonging, integrating that connection between the brand and their friends and calling out their friends. Really detailed behavior moments. So that’s a good digital example.

We also go offline. We did a campaign with TurboTax and the team. We had an activation that had a bunch of physical games integrated into it, and we sent it to southern US colleges. Each game had its own individual touchpoint that allowed us to track how consumer behavior shifted. Because we were at colleges, these students learned how to do their taxes, became more confident in doing their taxes, and became TurboTax customers. One of the touchpoints was a digital interactive screen where you would look at a messy dorm room or office space and have to go find the tax write-offs, like a nice spy, Where’s Waldo experience. We noticed that as people went through the activation at all these different touchpoints, their confidence built up over time, and they started to understand, “Okay, I can actually do my own taxes with TurboTax.”

So right before tax season, along the way, we were understanding who those customers were. We built these psychographic and demographic profiles for each of those customers while they were playing the games. Then right before tax season, we sent them a game that was tailored to them. We found out they’re mostly 18 to 25 year olds, really into sports and things like that. We used that data to build out, “Okay, we’re going to give them a basketball game that ties into the accuracy of your taxes.” So right before tax season, they got a basketball game that led them into the subscription page for TurboTax. It was a last-minute fun little game that drove attribution all the way to the subscription page for the brand.

Vishnu: Beautiful. I mean, doing taxes for myself, at least the process of it actually seems quite simple. It’s just getting myself into it that is the hard part, where it seems like a daunting task. Once you get into it, it’s just plugging the numbers into the right place and it takes care of itself, especially if you have the right software. I feel like having that game supplement that barrier of entry, and having them just interact with the product in a fun way, it makes sense. It’s absolutely fascinating.

Let’s go back and talk about what brought you to this. What brought you to marketing, what brought you to measurement from marketing? Tell me about your early career.

Justin: Yeah. Right out of university, before I even graduated, I was brought into this publicly traded company called Interactive Media, or Entertainment Media, sorry. What we would do is buy technologies and then partner with celebrities and entertainment properties to help bring it to market. We were building these audiences based on the celebrity status and helping build these products up, and the reputation. One of the things we had was Ortspo. We did this event with the band KISS and did this online experience we called Live and Global, where it was a full chat where we could have immediate, instant translation with the superstars. So it was Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley from KISS. We got a Guinness World Record from that for the most nationalities in an online chat. We had a lot of engagement, built these great audiences that were super engaged.

That was kind of the foundation of, “Oh wow, there’s something cool here.” After that, we looked at the measurement, and we had all these people coming in. Obviously the Guinness World Record was looking at our metrics and understanding who was coming through, but going beyond it was, “Okay, how do we monetize this, and how do we get this audience that we engaged available into conversion?” So we actually built this social feed aggregator that allowed everybody who attended to get more content, and then it fed them into a merchandise website so we could sell all the KISS merchandise, shirts, whatever their thing is. They got coffins and condoms. They got you covered whether you’re coming or going. But yeah, that whole process opened my eyes.

Following that, I started a music company, and we were building an audience around that. We had our own platform for music fans to watch video content of their favorite bands in an intimate studio setting. Building that audience really let me understand that there’s a lot of value in the metric side, because we were running ads and understanding how that grows. Then I also have a virtual reality company, I’ve done a lot of augmented reality stuff early on, and I was like, “There’s a lot of value in this immersive technology and these experiences, and there’s a lot of data coming out of it, but nobody understands how to capture that and really identify what that opportunity was.”

Then when I was in the experiential marketing space, I was working with Salt XC. I helped build their digital department from the ground up, and they gave me an opportunity. We were building these activations and did a lot online during the pandemic, obviously, because real-life in-person wasn’t happening. So we shifted that whole understanding, got through the pandemic, into, “Okay, how do we connect this offline and online?” Eventually I got to the point where it was, “There’s a lot more to dig into here to understand. How do we actually understand someone’s behavior? What makes them make a purchase? How do we build that emotional connection with them, and how do we measure that emotional connection?” That’s where Ether came together. We’ve spent the past couple years really diving deep into what I already did at Salt, but bringing it to the next level on a measurement perspective, building these moments and understanding how to measure them.

Vishnu: Pretty cool, very interesting. Do you have any specific projects that come to mind that have been tricky or quite interesting that you can share?

Justin: I think one of my favorites was when we were working with RBC. They were sponsoring a music festival, and in previous years they hadn’t had any understanding. Nobody really went to their booth. You have a music festival, nobody wants to go talk to the bank. So how do we, one, understand how people use the music festival grounds and who they are and build that connection, but on top of that, how do we engage them and get them to come back to the booth and learn more about the bank?

From there, we found a Pokemon Go style activation that we could integrate into the whole music festival. We built this whole augmented reality experience. You check in, you log in, and then you have all these micro games throughout the whole music festival. At each microgame, we’re understanding who the customer is, building these relationships, and they’re having these fun interactive moments where we can go, “Okay, Vishnu checked in here, then went over there.” We could really track how he was using the whole music festival grounds. Then the fun part was, when you played these games, you’d get points and build up your points, kind of like Chuck E. Cheese or Dave and Buster’s, and then go back to the booth to exchange for prizes. So we were just feeding people into the booth through this whole experience.

My favorite part was that we were kind of manipulating the audience a bit, where we could drop pins and you’d see hundreds of kids start running towards where that pin and game was. It was kind of cool to have that effect on a big audience at a music festival. The value that came out of it: we extended it over multiple activations, multiple festivals, and multiple years. It did really well.

Vishnu: That’s great. It hits the right target demographic as well. I remember a bank came to my campus, day one I set up an account, and I’m still with them. Those things, you catch them young, and the game aspect of it, young people like that best. So I get it.

Justin: Yes, it’s quite interesting. Some of our partners have done massive studies, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on research, understanding at what point do you actually capture that audience from a loyalty standpoint and have them become lifelong advocates of your brand. It’s at a younger, evolving age, like the 10 to 13 kind of range. If you look at anything you’re buying nowadays, 10 to 13 was kind of that window. All the brands that got me when I was 10 to 13 years old, I still wear regularly. A big one is New Era hats. I’ve worn the exact same type of hats. I change teams all the time, I’ve got Jays and Yankees and all the different teams, but consistently I’ve loved the New Era brand and I will probably have them for the rest of my life.

Vishnu: Yeah, I agree. Let’s talk about the music industry that you’re part of, because that’s quite fascinating to me. What similarities do you see between the music industry and traditional marketing or traditional media? Put it in the perspective of marketing, maybe.

Justin: Yeah, so the music industry was a passion of mine. I had an artist management company, we built our own record label, we built this platform for viewing music videos, kind of like our own Netflix. It’s about building an audience. The perk you have from the music side is you have built-in celebrity. So when you’re working with these artists, they have a tool as well. Music is a good tool for building emotional connections with people. In most cases, you’re going to enjoy and fall in love with the artist because of that emotional connection you’re building to the music. That’s what marketing is all about: building that emotional connection with consumers. It’s a lot harder when you don’t have music or some sort of art form, other than a branded experience, to really connect with those customers and build that emotional connection. So music has a bit of a leg up. But they also have a lot of other issues in the underbelly of the way the industry works.

There are a lot of parallels. I have friends from the music industry that I worked with, and a lot of them have moved over to marketing. That’s usually the next step in the career path. Music is a really cool industry to work in, a lot of fun, a lot of excitement, but that’s not always sustainable for everyone. Some people stay in and have lifelong careers in music, but it’s usually the younger generation that are the backbone of the industry. After five, ten years in the industry, they need to pay their bills, they want to have kids, they want to buy a house, and you’ve got to move on to find another opportunity. I think marketing is very similar, where a lot of the backbone is the younger generation from a creative perspective. There’s a good tie between the two in that sense, but there are a lot more growth opportunities in marketing. It’s not like finance, where you start at the beginning, work your way up, and have a full long career path laid out for you. Marketing is very similar to music in that sense.

Vishnu: Yeah. Tell me about your entrepreneurial journey, about Ether specifically. How has that been for you, and where are you looking to go next?

Justin: Yeah, so Ether is my fourth company I’ve started over my career, maybe fifth. I started making my own company in high school. I used to design websites for bands and stuff like that, and then moved on from there, started an artist management company, which led me into the music space more. That eventually got an acqui-hire scenario. Then I started Arc Gate, my virtual reality platform. Now I run Arc Gate, Ether, and I have a dog walking company as well with my wife.

But Ether is interesting because it started off as just me as a consultant. I was consulting for a few agencies, helping them build out projects for their clients, starting to integrate measurement and understand where it can fit in the spectrum of things. It was always one-off experiences, doing one here, one there. It was inconsistent revenue, really difficult to manage as a business. So that’s where I said, “Okay, what is going to be my solution to having consistent revenue instead of these one-off experiences?” And the solution was to build a platform that had ongoing value. That’s where Ether came from.

I didn’t want to take the traditional raise-money route, go for a pre-seed, seed, Series A. I’ve been through Y Combinator’s startup school with Arc Gate, we were in accelerator programs, been through all of them. The VC money raising path has always seemed awful to me. You lose a lot of freedom. You’ve got to continue to build your company around what the VC wants or driving towards an exit. So with Ether, when I started, it was, “Okay, this company has a goal, we are going to exit, we’re going to sell, but we’re going to do it on our own. We’re going to bootstrap along the way.” That’s made it harder, but I haven’t had to report to anyone. I have a board of directors that I do report to just to keep myself accountable, but it’s advisors, coaches, and people who are really helping me along the way to drive this company forward.

Backpedaling: I was starting from the consulting side, and 2024 is when we started Ether, so still a fresh new startup. On the consulting side, all that work trailed off and things started to get really quiet. So I said, “2025, we’re going to put our head down and build this platform.” I built up enough runway beforehand to allow us to work through it throughout the year. By the end of 2025, we had a rocking solution for our clients. Then 2026, the beginning was still really quiet, but we’re starting to get some traction, having the right conversations in the right meetings. Now we’re getting things rolling, starting to see good traction, getting consistent clients, and things are coming together. I’ve seen this a few times with my other companies. It’s great to finally have a lot more vision on where we need to go because I’ve been through it multiple times. Lots of ups and downs, lots of moments where I’m like, “How am I going to pay people? Okay, let’s go find a loan, let’s go find something to keep things afloat.” But we’re surviving and keeping it moving along, which is really great.

Vishnu: Yeah, that’s the fun of entrepreneurship, right? You learn everything from every business that you’ve built. I can relate to that for sure: the difficulty of getting your first customer. And you see this very often, that you’ve moved from consulting to building a product based on what you’ve consulted on, and then growing that because you already have that clientele you can use for part of the building.

If you want to describe a little bit deeper how the platform itself works, I know we talked about sensors and tracking tools. If you want to go deeper into how that works, that would be super helpful.

Justin: Yeah, so without getting too technical and detailed on it, basically we have three tiers of measurement tools. The first is interactive experiences, short and quick. We call them glimmers, where it’s a tool to capture a glimmer of information from the ether. They’re quick, swipe-based, taking surveys to the next level. Nobody answers a survey correctly. Even the “is the toilet clean” question, you still kind of fluff around it. But we can give you a moment where it has a little bit of time pressure. You have less thinking, more reacting, and you’re going to get a lot more honest answers. So that’s where these glimmers come in.

Right now, the platform allows you to create basic glimmers, but we’re moving it to the next stage with a lot of AI integrations where you can use the LLM integrations to go, “Hey, build me a glimmer that does X,” and it’ll build it out for you. Then, “Okay, change the color here, change the logo here, make the logo bigger.” Kind of like a Lovable or Base44 kind of experience. So you get this plain builder.

The next phase is full interactive experiences, where we have AI and our API available that you can plug into through our dashboard. We’ve got over 250 connections where you can send data into different CDPs, CRMs, or data platforms, wherever you want to send it. That allows you to connect full interactive experiences. We’ve also got a library of over 150 games that we can plug in. Take one off the shelf, put a fresh coat of paint on it, and launch it while tracking that behavior data from the experience.

Finally, we have all of our sensors. They’re Wi-Fi mesh sensors that tap into the Wi-Fi systems that are around, or they put out a Wi-Fi signal, and they can track people: their position, their pose, and where they’re looking. Now we’re working on pulling out biometrics from it too. We’ve got face-scanning tech that can understand your emotion. Facial emotion, or facial expressions, is not really an emotional connection, but it’s a signal that we can recognize and use. Additionally, body posture. If somebody’s walking around confident and happy, or their hands are up all the time, we’re looking at that and understanding the behavior to go, “Hey, that person’s having a great time,” versus the guy who’s got his shoulders down, his head down the whole time, who isn’t having a good time. Then we can use that to track impressions and dwell time and things like that.

So it’s a multitude of sensors that plug into our system. You get your dashboard. The way we’re shifting it is, we want it to be a dynamic report builder almost, because everybody has a different question they’re trying to get answered. We’re just helping capture all that data to give you that answer. So the next step from an interface perspective is to just send Ether an email and you’re going to get that report back from our AI.

Vishnu: Pretty cool. Who is buying this? From my perspective, I see that anybody who has events going on, any booth that you walk into, they’re probably a potential buyer. Do you see anybody outside of, let’s say, stalls, anybody outside of events buying this? Who will be your ideal customer in a sense?

Justin: Yeah, so our ideal customer obviously is consumer-facing brands looking to build an emotional connection with their customers and understand the value of their brand activations. But really, our ICP is the agency. If we go direct to brands, we’re going to get one or two brands out of it. Whereas if we go to one or two agencies, each one of them has at least five brands they’re working with, up to hundreds of brands. So it’s a better channel for us. Now, from an operational standpoint, we would prefer to work directly with brands because it cuts out a lot of layers of bureaucracy and makes it a lot easier. But we work with agencies mostly, and they’re all great. They allow us to do what we need to do, and everything’s been great working with them so far.

We’re also looking at different areas, like the sports space. We’re working with some companies that do sports and fan engagement, and there are really great opportunities there. As we mentioned, music is a great opportunity for us, understanding if a band can know how many of their fans were right up front and really into the concert, versus everybody else who showed up and is kind of floating around, and understand their behavior at the concert and where they are. It really will amplify that experience. So the ultimate goal is to track behavior at offline experiences, and that’s the ultimate offering from Ether.

Vishnu: Awesome. Pretty cool, man. If you want to share where people can find you, please feel free.

Justin: Find me mostly on LinkedIn. It’s a great channel to connect with me. Justin O’Heir on LinkedIn. And then our website, intoether.co, has lots of great information on how we work. Really, we call it emotion intelligence. That’s our product and what we’re offering to experiential marketers.

Vishnu: Beautiful. Awesome. It was a pleasure speaking with you, Justin. Let’s keep in touch.

Justin: All right, thanks. Take care. See you.