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Marketing Academy · Field Work●Events & Experiential Marketing
All projects·From: Experiential Activations: Building Brand Moments People Remember
CoreSimulation· 50 minutes

The $15K Decision: Running an Activation on a Real Budget

Chewy

Objective: Play out a 4-week activation planning window for a $15,000 regional budget, making the seeding, artifact, and measurement calls the lesson frames as the difference between a 3:1 and a sub-1:1 return.

You're running experiential marketing for Chewy at a regional pet-adoption partner event. You have a $15,000 budget, four weeks of lead time, and a mandate to beat the brand's historical 2:1 earned-media-to-production ratio.

Make four sequential calls (artifact spend, seeding budget, participation format, measurement plan) and see how each choice compounds into the final earned-media ratio.

Before you start

What you'll need

Free path (everything below is enough to finish)

Google Sheets
FreeTrack budget allocation and earned media value ratio across the four weeks

Free, sufficient for a single-event budget tracker

Paid upgrades (optional, faster/deeper)

Canva(optional)
FreemiumDesign the artifact's printed or shareable output template

Faster templated design than a from-scratch tool for a small production run

No access? Google Slides for a simpler printable template

The process

Simulation

Week 1: Artifact Budget Split

Week 1 of 4

You have $15,000 total. The vendor pitch offers a $9,000 elaborate photo-op stage build, or a $4,000 interactive artifact (a scan-and-print pet portrait booth) leaving $11,000 for seeding and staff.

Sample output
Total budget: $15,000 | Spent so far: $0 | Weeks remaining: 4
Spend to date:$0
Budget remaining:$15,000

Which artifact do you fund?

Final deliverable

A four-week budget allocation log ending in a reported earned-media-to-production ratio, with the reasoning for each spend decision.

See a reference example
Sample output
HelloFresh Regional Pop-Up, Budget Log (excerpt)

Week 1: Artifact — $4,200 on a build-your-own-spice-box interactive station
Week 2: Seeding — $7,300 across 14 micro-creators, briefed to post within the first hour
Week 4: Measurement — earned media value $58,000 vs. $15,000 production cost = 3.9:1
Headline metric reported to leadership: 3.9:1 earned-media ratio, not foot traffic

Success criteria

You're done when you can:

  • Chooses the interactive artifact over the static backdrop in stage 1
  • Funds seeding within the lesson's 10-20 creator range in stage 2 or 3
  • Reports earned media value against production cost, not foot traffic, as the final metric