The Marvelous Mrs Maisel Carnegie Deli Pop-Up Serves Up Immersive Experience

It takes a certain deftness and eye to launch a nostalgic, historic pop-up experience. The group charged with creating the Carnegie Deli pop-up as part of the launch for season two of the Emmy award winning Amazon Prime original series, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, had their work cut out for them. 

I was able to gain entrance to the November 30 pre-opening of the pop-up, located at 201 Lafayette Street in Manhattan and experienced “The Susie Sandwich” of turkey and coleslaw on rye with a Cel-ray soda while my husband sampled “The Maisel” sandwich of pastrami, salami, coleslaw and secret sauce. This all served by wait staff dressed as if it was 1958. The experience was not exactly like the original Carnegie Deli but it did create a fun 1950s vibe that sets the show. 

The menu is full of nostalgia from the 1958 prices - 99 cents for the sandwiches, 75 cents for the mini knish, 50 cents for either the black and white cookie or the cheesecake and 50 cents for pickles and the beverages. The venue has a 1950s jukebox, photo booth, photographs, telephone, signage and even a cash register. 

Experiential experiences have been more popular among brands as a way to more fully immerse audiences within the essence of a program, service or product. As Retail faces challenges from technology and online shopping, consumer expectations and desires are shifting to more immersive experiences, especially among younger consumers. Notably, millennials are seeking experiences, not material goods and this has had a spillover effect to other groups and generations.  This trend is not slowing down as more established brands try to capture the experience by creating a more unique environment. 

In fact, companies such as Conde Nast, are buying live event companies to facilitate the creation of immersive events. Recently, Glamour magazine, going completely digital, added that they see a great new revenue flow coming from events. Major decades-old brands are pivoting to capture the momentum as much as newer brands.  

According to publicist Emma Wolfe, the Maisel team worked with an activation agency called Tool which “wanted to integrate Mrs. Maisel with the Carnegie Deli which has been a New York City institution” and create synergy. According to the Tool website, the agency worked closely with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel production team and the owners of the iconic Carnegie Deli, which shut its doors in 2016 after serving New Yorkers for 79 years. The response has been amazing according to Wolfe where the reservations to dine at the pop-up filled up within 12 hours.

The Carnegie Deli pop-up opens officially to the public on December 1 and runs one week. Unfortunately, dining is by reservation only but there is also a take-out line for those who didn’t book early. Continue the nostalgic experience by tuning in for the second season,  scheduled to be released on Friday December 5.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

The Premiere of the Maxxcom Collaborative Alliance

The first Maxxcom Collaborative Alliance which made its debut this June, focused on digital media and featured speakers from Conde Naste, ESPN, Time Warner Medialab and Fordham University as well as speakers from Mitch Oscar’s Media Dadaists from Collective, Rentrak, Trendrr and TVB. All in all it was a spirited forum that spawned new ideas across print, television, mobile and cross platform.  Two videos from the Maxxcom Collaborative can be viewed here:

Participants in the June 2013 Collaborative share their insights here:

Steve Farella and Mitch Oscar discuss the Collaborative - the past, the recent and the future:

The Collaborative has an illustrious history. Mitch Oscar’s vision to ignite the “Televisual Revolution’ began with his quarterly Collaborative Alliance events which launched in 2004. Oscar has set the futuristic pace since then, offering prescient insights into set top box data before it mainstreamed, addressable advertising before it became a cogent business model and multi-platform advancements before it hit the zeitgeist. He tries to keep pace with the ever evolving media landscape and is often ahead of the generally accepted wisdom. Even his title of Televisual Application Executive is a bit ahead of the media curve. I don’t know anyone else in the industry with that title!

“Fragmentation is happening and continues to happen” says Steve Farella, CEO of Maxxcom “But today we featured a number of different vendors and a number of different pieces of technology who illustrate that not only is television a strong medium but that digital video is a great complement whether to extend a reach of a campaign or add to the frequency of a campaign.”

 “What we tried to do with the Maxxcom Collaboratve was address video across platforms, second screen, social TV. These are things that we think about all the time” says Oscar. He put together a series of panels to more deeply explore the impact of digital media on social, print, television, advertising and measurement.

Whether extending the influence of print and its second screen with Scott McDonald’s Conde Naste presentation or combining digital media with set top box data to extend the reach of television, as Justin Evans from Collective did or describing live broadcast mobile television as Stacey Lynn Schulman did, it is clear that digital media has a strong role to play especially in conjunction with other forms of media. But what about measurement? Glenn Enoch of ESPN offered a solution in the form of Project Blueprint which combines five platforms – TV, Radio, PC, Smartphone and Tablet – and Arbitron and comScore data into one integrated measurement.

Turner’s Howard Shimmel presented The Five Principles of TV and Social Media and Second Screen Engagement with a neuroscience based study from the Time Warner Media Lab. Through the use of biometric monitoring including heart rate, skin resonance, fidgetiness and eye tracking, Turner was able to ascertain unexpressed yet biological consumer reaction to media stimuli and cross platform. They also included a quantitative survey to measure branding and were able to find the right combination of on-air and digital touch-points for specific tested programming and their viewers.

Closing the forum, Professor John Carey of Fordham University discussed the history of mobile phones. His entertaining presentation took us down memory lane from the heavy and cumbersome shoe box size mobile phone and the early modes of car phones to today’s pocket size entertainment center. In the span of 80 years we have gone from carrying a contraption in one’s car that needs to be wired to a telephone pole to something that fits in your pocket and works anywhere in the world.

This just goes to show that digital media is still a moving target. Technological advancements make it critical that we as an industry always try to keep up, if not ahead of the consumer.

The Collaborative is open to all in the media. Contact Mitch Oscar if you want to get on the list.