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The media company Gallery Media Group, which operates a portfolio of editorial titles and social handles including PureWow and @cocktails, has unveiled an experiential model with a structure that blends influencer marketing with the offerings of a content studio, according to chief revenue officer Chris Anthony.
Known internally as its Events for Content strategy, the model aims to increase the value of an event sponsorship by yielding two sets of deliverables for brand partners: on-site influencer content and evergreen creative assets.
“The idea stems from two core theses: That the creator business is core to GMG, and that events are expensive for clients,” Anthony said. “With our Events for Content strategy, we pop up creator-led houses in massive consumer moments, but build them so that they can produce content at scale.”
Events are a bright spot in publishers’ ecosystems, and many firms capture content to repackage for social distribution. The GMG model takes this further, hosting in-person events to generate social and branded content.
According to Anthony, the strategy has helped GMG grow its experiential business, which is on pace to make up 15% of its total revenue in 2024. Last year, its experiential business grew 40%, and through March, it has already grown 50% compared with 2023, although GMG declined to share specific figures.
The strategy loosely resembles the Hype House model in its practice of assembling influencers in a luxury location to capture content, according to Wieden+Kennedy senior social media strategist Sarah Hayes. In recent months, similarly lavish influencer activations have provoked negative reactions.
But the models differ in substantial ways: The GMG concept is far more structured, and the content studio ensures that brands will take away professional assets. As such, the real challenge will be for the company to create experiences that influencers feel compelled to share.
“In fashion, these concepts are invite-only and come with very little expectation for influencers to post,” Hayes said. “You want to engage because the experience is so chic, so share-worthy. If the Events for Content strategy can recreate that kind of experience for brands, it could be worth paying attention to.”
Extended timelines, evergreen content
GMG first experimented with its Events for Content strategy last year, hosting a monthlong activation in the Hamptons over the summer and taking over a house in Art Basel in December.
This year, it is expanding the program from two activations to seven, beginning with the Gallery Innovation House it hosted at South by Southwest (SXSW) in early March, before popping up at Coachella, Stagecoach, Formula One’s Miami Grand Prix, Pride in New York, the Hamptons again over the summer and Art Basel again in December.
In each instance, GMG takes over a luxury residence for an extended period—several days at minimum, a month in other instances. The company outfits the spaces to feature sponsored products, brands and experiences, and then invites influencers to visit the space and experience the activations.
While the influencers capture spontaneous social content, a separate team of GMG creatives uses the same space to capture hundreds of images and video assets for the brand sponsors.
For instance, at the recent Gallery Innovation House at SXSW, a group of influencers was invited to a house in East Austin for two days of programming, where they participated in panels, drank at a happy hour sponsored by Rold Gold and saw an early screening of Tubi series Boarders.
GMG pays a small number of influencers to create content for sponsors, but the majority of creators invited are not compensated, said Anthony. This lets the company deliver social impressions more reliably with little expense, although it limits any regular consumers from attending.
While the influencers captured and shared content over the weekend, the GMG marketing team captured content set against branded backdrops and in designer kitchens. In previous houses, brands have walked away with around 300 creative assets, each designed for specific social channels. GMG even recommends how brands can best use the media.
GMG bakes these costs into the price of sponsorship, although the company wouldn’t share the margins on these events or their cost. It offers an efficiency rate for brands that sponsor more than one house, as Patron and Infiniti have this year, because the commitment lets GMG produce a greater volume of more thoughtfully integrated content.
The model extracts a lot of value from a rented residence, but the logistics of this kind of residency are often what prove discouraging for events operations, said Greg Privett, co-founder and chief creative officer of experiential firm Makeout.
“I would think of this as a content studio first, which makes sense because this needs to be a content play to work,” Privett said. “But the longer anything runs, the more complicated it becomes.”
