437 Ruthie Schulder: Experiential Marketing

Ever found yourself immersed in a brand experience so seamless it became hard to know you were being sold something? It was an experience so positive, so helpful, so rewarding that you forgot it was marketing…

MELINDA

I’m Melinda Wittstock and today on Wings of Inspired Business we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who is reinventing marketing as we know it.

Ruthie Schulder is the co-founder and CEO of The Participation Agency.  Ruthie is busy turning the traditional marketing and advertising agency model upside down … by creating radically experiential campaigns. We’re going to get right into what that means in practice, and what we can all learn about the best ways to attract, add value and excite our clients and customers without being salesy.

Ruthie is one of Adweek’s Disruptors – a list of 39 women spearheading the revolution in advertising, media and tech.

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Now back to the inspiring Ruthie Schulder

As co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Participation Agency, Ruthie is reinventing marketing by bucking the trend of conventional pay-for-play opportunities in music and art. She and her partner create what she calls “radical experiential campaigns” with brands as partners—not clients.

Focused on the idea of placemaking, Ruthie pioneered Outpost—a series of sophisticated rest stops for creatives in developing markets. Serving musicians on tour, Outpost, and its sister Basecamp locations, route culture and arts through emerging markets across the US, invigorating cities with world-renowned talent and giving brand partners organic exposure.

With an international portfolio of clients, Ruthie’s work has helped drive multi-million-dollar campaigns for Fortune 100s, tech startups, and cities seeking innovation through experiential. Ruthie was named Inc.’s Millennial CEO Rising Star and under her leadership, The Participation Agency has won a CLIO, an Ex Award and consecutive placements on Inc.’s Fastest Growing Private Companies list.

Ruthie is one of Adweek’s Disruptors – a list of 39 women spearheading the revolution in advertising, media and tech. Ruthie and her co-founder are also behind “Let’s Work,” a monthly gathering for women to rethink networking and forge professional alliances, developed in partnership with the Soho House.

Let’s soar with Ruthie Schulder.

 

Melinda Wittstock:         Welcome to Wings, Ruthie.

Ruthie Schulder:              Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited for our conversation today.

Melinda Wittstock:         Me too. Well I’m intrigued by this idea of reinventing the agency model. I want to start there and understand what you’re doing for your clients’ that’s different from every other agency out there.

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah. I would love to tell you. So when we say reinventing the agency model, it definitely applies to the way that we approach projects and the way that we build campaigns. But it also really applies to the way that we’re structuring our business. So I’ll start with the first piece of that. I think that especially in my world of experiential marketing, a lot of people, a lot of agencies and teams are really, really focused on just this activation, in-person portion of their event or campaign, and our approach is much more holistic and much more robust. We say that if you don’t have a full digital strategy and a full either earned media plan or partnership media plan and a full influencer strategy built into your experiential plan, then your kind of just wasting a lot of resources. Experiential is a really, really great way to achieve impact. It’s also a really easy way to earn dollars.

Melinda Wittstock:         So tell me a little bit what you mean by experiential?

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah. Sure.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah.

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah. So, we’re a marketing agency and we build marketing platforms that are rooted in some form of live experience. So there’s some sort of physical touch point that a certain group of people get to have with a company’s brand or their product or, honestly, even their values. Then we build off of this live experience with a whole digital strategy, and influencer strategy, and a media strategy, to make into much more of a 360 plan.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s cool. So give me some examples.

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah. We’ve been running a program for five years, it’s called For Those who Tour, and it’s a series of houses across the US where emerging musicians get to stay for free in exchange for essentially Instagram posts that shout out and give love to the brands that sponsor these houses. We use the houses as the experiential portion, so the house itself, they’re so beautiful. Every single inch is a backdrop of inspiration and meant to be a backdrop for content creation, and these incredible, incredible people of influence are coming and living in these spaces for up to a week at a time.

Ruthie Schulder:              We’re giving them this amazing experience for free, and so they are then so happy to go on and go onto Instagram and to take a photo of a product that we’ve had placed by a brand partner in the house, or some piece of recording equipment that’s been sponsored that’s helping them to record some new music. And they are so happy to take a photo of that or just talk to their fans about how this program and these products are really, really fueling their career and giving them love and value and amenities and resources that they’re not otherwise getting. So we have all of these different pieces working together to create this beautiful, visually driven, very, very effective digital strategy, told directly from the artist to their fans, because we’ve created this amazing experience for them.

Melinda Wittstock:         I think that’s so brilliant, because at this time we crave connection. I have never seen so much isolation when apparently we’re so connected on social media, and yet there’s this, I don’t know, this craving for authenticity, a craving for real, like something that you can actually really connect with. This is a really brilliant model. What led to the spark of innovation that… Sorry. What was the spark of innovation that got you into the experiential space?

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah. So my business partner, Jessica, and I were both graduating from business school. We went to NYU, and she and I both had had entrepreneurial backgrounds and we joined forces and said we really want to start a business and we’re both marketers and we’re both business people, so let’s actually look at the industry and see what this next phase of marketing really is and where brands are increasingly spending their dollars. So when we started the business about eight and a half years ago, saying experiential at the time was like saying social media 10 years before that, where-

Melinda Wittstock:         Right.

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah, companies knew that they had to do it, but they didn’t really understand how to do it successfully, and honestly didn’t really know why they were doing it or what they were driving towards. So we said if we can come in and really come and have a point of view about this, we think we can really build something and make a name for ourselves in the industry. We live in New York City, we are going to events and experiences all the time, and when you’re able to rally sit in this world of intuitively knowing how to create a brand experience that not only resonates with consumers, but that differentiates itself on the marketplace, you’re in a sweet spot. That’s what we figured out we were able to do, and so we really built the business from there.

Melinda Wittstock:         Fantastic. That’s great. I love this. I could just picture musicians just staying in beautiful places. When you’re creating in a beautiful space, you’re going to be so much more inspired. You’re going to just create better work, where there’s sort of a sense of abundance I guess that comes from that.

Melinda Wittstock:         I want to get another example of something experiential. Do you, for instance, do things in the retail space, where going to a store, you’re not necessarily going to buy from that store anymore, you might buy online, and so now the experience becomes more important. What’s the experience you have interacting with the brand? Do you do like retail pop-ups and things like that as well?

Ruthie Schulder:              We have definitely in the past. Our focus is not so much on pop-ups right now because we prefer to build out very long-term programs, like the music program that I mentioned has been running for five years in six different cities.

Melinda Wittstock:         Okay.

Ruthie Schulder:              We have another big program for a big tech client that’s been running for three and a half years.

Melinda Wittstock:         Tell me about that. What’s that about? I’m in tech, so.

Ruthie Schulder:              Oh, cool. It’s under NDA, so I can’t give too many specifics, but it’s a big tech brand who came to us and said because you guys are the masters of long form experiential, help us figure out what it means to bring our brand to life in a private, sort of home setting. We took over an amazing, amazing, out of this world, residential space in Manhattan three and a half years ago. We essentially gave them the home of this brand where they’re able to showcase all different kinds of products and host all different kinds of B2B events, and this is one that’s really interesting for us because it is fully B2B. There’s nothing consumer facing at all about it, which is super cool because we were very in a consumer facing world.

Ruthie Schulder:              This company, we work with about 20 different business units of theirs on any given day and they’re all coming in and using this space for various product demos and media briefings and things that really just range from immersive product showcases to executive dinners and things like that. We’ve really given them a space where they just weren’t able to do any of these things before, because they were constantly renting venues and we give them the one stop shop.

Melinda Wittstock:         I love it. I could see it working really well with retreats. For instance, I do high-end retreats for female entrepreneurs, seven, eight, nine figure businesses. And we go to these beautiful locations where it can be really immersive and it’s part business learning, it’s part woo, it’s a lot of fun. Sometimes it involves costumes. It’s just really unusual. There’s not really anything else like it. It’s kind of very masterminding. Our whole thing is how can women show up for each other, like buy from each other, mentor each other, promote each other, invest in each other. I just had this download just now thinking wow, wouldn’t that be really cool, these beautiful locations we take over to be able to highlight products or sponsor products in a retreat setting.

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         Is that the type of thing that you would do?

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s interesting, going back to your first question of how we’re innovating within an agency model. Jessica, my partner, and I have… We know that we are people who add immense amount of value to spaces. We’re actually starting to buy real estate in various beautiful locations throughout the US and doing them up and making them so cool and fun and beautiful, but also livable where we are renting them out either just as rentals or for retreats and things like that. For artist retreats and for photo shoots and things like that, so we have increased value of space exponentially for so many of our clients, but let’s start actually doing that for ourselves and for our business.

Melinda Wittstock:         That makes sense, because that’s a great valuation driver for your business. When you think of something like Starbucks, what’s the value of that business? It’s not the coffee; it’s the real estate.

Ruthie Schulder:              Right, totally. Yeah. So we’re always thinking about it of like how can we own some more of the work that we’re doing for our clients? What’s the model that makes sense for us to reap as much value off of it for the growth of the business as possible?

Melinda Wittstock:         When you were a little girl, I’m intrigued by this, is this something that you did as a girl? Were you entrepreneurial or were you putting on, like were you hosting experiences and things like that as a little kid?

Ruthie Schulder:              No. I definitely wasn’t. I don’t think I realized… I was always a leader. I always had a lot of leadership qualities, which is something I didn’t know then, but definitely know now. Actually, I take that back. I think I did know it then, I just didn’t have the language for it.

Melinda Wittstock:         Right, yeah.

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah. But when I was in my second job out of college, I was the assistant to a director, like a commercial director, and actually spent a lot of time babysitting his teenage daughters, and I realized that their approach to fashion, which is so different from what my approach was not 10 years before, growing up in the same metropolitan area. And so I started thinking about it and I came up with this whole business concept that made very little money, but got a ton of press, and I think my entrepreneurial brain just really kicked in in this very sort of sudden way. I’ve always been an incredibly proactive person. I spent my college and 20s traveling the world and I’ve done lots of, I would say, fearless things, but I didn’t have a business lens for that until I was in my early 20s and actually starting my career.

Ruthie Schulder:              I just realized that I had some ideas that I really felt passion about and had a huge, huge, huge conviction for. I guess I’m the type of person who once it’s in my head, it’s in my head, and I have to do it. If I believe in it, I have to see it through and bring it to life. I really just started getting into that at that time in my career.

Melinda Wittstock:         Sometimes I think we do see the clues. Like you say, we don’t have the language for it, but we see the little clues or these little pieces looking back in our lives. As Steve Jobs kind of famously said, “You can connect the dots looking backwards, but not so much looking forwards.”

Ruthie Schulder:              Totally.

Melinda Wittstock:         You have been honored so many times. You’re Inc.’s magazine’s millennial CEO rising star. How did that feel to win that? That’s awesome.

Ruthie Schulder:              It’s actually a really interesting question because I think for years I just was like, this is weird. I get very imposter syndrome-y about it all.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s funny.

Ruthie Schulder:              I’m like [crosstalk 00:25:30], I don’t know what I’m doing. And now, of course, I’m so proud and I’m so excited and it’s fun to know for myself that those things are out there and that I’m being recognized, but when Jessica and I made… Last year, we made two really, really amazing lists and it led to an ah-ha moment where we made the AdWeek 39 female disrupters and media as it relates to inclusion and diversity and then I made the Inc. top 100 female founders. On the Inc. top 100 female founders, it was me and then next to me on the website was Brene Brown.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s amazing.

Ruthie Schulder:              [crosstalk 00:26:14] Reese Witherspoon was on both of those lists and I was just like, what is happening? I don’t understand what’s happening. It was hard… Not hard, it was amazing. I’m not going to say that anything about that was hard, it was so cool. When I was sitting with it and saying what does this mean and what have I done to deserve this, I wasn’t fully understanding it. The way that I look at it is like, yeah, part of it is a pat on the back and part of it is a yeah, you’re going in the right direction and that’s awesome.

Ruthie Schulder:              But for me, I was like I actually see this more as like a premonition of yeah, I am this. I am going to do all of these things that I think is worthy of this kind of honor with these kinds of people in my network now. It was really, really motivating for me, because it was less of you’ve already done it and more of the confidence to just keep going in this direction and to know that I am a part of this story, for my own story and for the way that it’s going to bring other people in, and that’s really cool to me.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, it’s such validation and confirmation.

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         I’m intrigued by this idea as when it first happens, that trigger of imposter syndrome, because I think so many women, no matter what we do, we always kind of think, “Oh God, someone’s going to find me out,” right?

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         And where does that come from? Why do we not, oh, I don’t know, value ourselves enough? What is going on there do you think?

Ruthie Schulder:              I think a lot of it for me; it’s less of value, because it wasn’t really self-worthing. I think I was more like, “Oh, but I spent half my day sitting at my desk, responding to email.” It was more of like, it wasn’t always adding up to my day to day and I just… It was sort of I think like that for me. But of course, there are many days that I have where I do feel so amazing about what I’ve accomplished and so productive and I have these meetings that are so inspirational and those are the incredible moments.

Ruthie Schulder:              But I run a business and it’s growing and it’s grown quickly over the years and we’ve slogged through many parts of that growth of hardship and making tough decisions and having to refine the vision and refine the vision and refine it again to get where we want to go. Being an entrepreneur is incredible, but there’s not always glamor in the day-to-day. Certainly you’re in some of time or a lot of the time, but when you’re at my level of where my business is and still very much a part of it and I’m still very much a part of the day-to-day. It’s definitely, it’s all part of it.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. No, it’s true. So when you think of the formula, I guess, for your success, or what made you and your partner successful in this endeavor, when you look back and you think, what are some of the things that you did that were pivotal or game changing, or led to your success? Can you kind of identify or quantify or isolate those?

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah. I think so. I mean I’ll try. I think first and foremost is that we have a… My partner and I have a really, really, really amazing partnership, which I think is very rare. She and I both had had other small businesses with partnerships that didn’t work out, and so we knew I think what we were getting into and we had done a little bit of work together before we decided to start this thing. And we’re also very aligned on goals, which his very helpful. People ask us a lot, how do you have such a successful partnership, and my biggest answer is we fight fair and we fight clean and we fight [crosstalk 00:30:18]. We honestly don’t fight often, but when we do, we figure it out, we move past it really quickly. So there’s zero toxicity there, which is amazing and I feel very… We’re incredibly aware of how unique and how lucky we are to be in such a strong partnership. So that’s one.

Ruthie Schulder:              I think another thing is, I’ve tried a couple of things that didn’t work before this, and so I also had a sense of what I was wiling to do and what I was willing to tolerate. Selling a service versus selling a product, what kind of partnership. There are things that you learn and you take with you. I think in terms of the success of this business, a pivotal thing is that we never took funding. We talked about it a few years ago. We were like maybe we should build a product that supports our business and raise money because that’s what all of our friends in tech are doing, and decided not to. So we are the sole owners of our business and the sole owners of our destiny, which is incredible.

Ruthie Schulder:              And the last thing I’ll say is we really didn’t skip any steps. We’ve had amazing growth and we’ve grown quickly, but we’ve grown also slowly and we’ve grown in levels… Some years we catapult and that’s great, but never in a way that we can’t keep up with our growth.

Melinda Wittstock:         That you can’t sustain. Yeah.

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah, they can’t sustain. I see that with so many of our colleagues, yeah, in the agency model, too, but honestly, everyone we know that has taken funding, they don’t know how to keep up with their own growth and we didn’t skip any steps, and so we’re very just marching, marching, marching, marching, and it’s getting us further and faster.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. There’s a lot of having gone down the Angel and VC funding route before, and actually in the middle of doing it again, because it’s kind of necessary for what I’m up to, I always liked to be in a position, certainly if I’m going to take money, where I’ve advanced the business enough that the money’s only for acceleration.

Ruthie Schulder:              Right.

Melinda Wittstock:         It’s only to support accelerant on something that’s already kind of proven, right?

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         But you do have to really know yourself and your vision and if you are taking in outside money, be able to qualify those investors so they share your vision. And it’s always tricky, that thing between when you’re too rigid on a vision, because you need to be flexible, but knowing what you want. What’s non-negotiable. And being able to say no to money, which is something that’s really hard. But on that growth thing, I think that companies can scale and grow too fast just for growth’s sake.

Ruthie Schulder:              For sure.

Melinda Wittstock:         If your personal growth is not keeping up to the number of zeros you’re adding, you can easily get into trouble. So I think that… Yeah, personal growth is a prerequisite of business growth, or the two are certainly hand in hand. Has that been true of your journey as well?

Ruthie Schulder:              Oh yeah. Big time. [crosstalk 00:33:32]

Melinda Wittstock:         It’s kind of like if you want therapy, just become an entrepreneur, I mean first off.

Ruthie Schulder:              Totally. Totally, and I do a lot of self work, but I also started working with an executive coach about two years ago, and I literally say to her, you’re going to be buried next to me. I don’t know how I did it before. I’ve leap frogged my own everything, which has helped the business leapfrog through the work that I’ve done with my executive coach.

Melinda Wittstock:         We all need coaches.

Ruthie Schulder:              It’s been unbelievable. We all need coaches, yep.

Melinda Wittstock:         We do, and yet I see so many women toil away in isolation, and it’s almost like, oh god, having… It’s almost like, like my mom used to be, where she’d clean the house before the housekeeper came, you know?

Ruthie Schulder:              Totally. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         And not ask for help early enough or not co-create with customers, you know?

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         Did you have to get out of your own way at all on those sorts of issues? Like learning how to ask for help?

Ruthie Schulder:              I think I have other issues. I don’t necessarily think those were my issues, but probably. I guess, yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         I don’t know. Well, if they’re not, they’re not, that’s great.

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah. I have other big issues that I had to really work through, which is… Not just internalizing the stress, but thinking of things in a different way. Something would happen and it would really set me off and my coach will just be like, “Okay, well those are just your thoughts, which are creating your feelings, which actually have nothing to do with the facts.”

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh, God, right.

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah, yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yes, because our brains are just making up stories.

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah, and she’s like, “So these are the facts and you’re looking at it one way, but I’m looking at it this other way, which actually sounds really fun.” She just doesn’t let me get into my ball at all, which is amazing, because you do… It’s the thing you’re making of it in your own head because we’re all coming to every single situation with so many already written stories and pieces of baggage. To have somebody else be like, “You’re actually making a mountain out of a mole hill, and how can you look at it in a way that’s positive and fun?” That’s not true for every… Of course, you can’t do that for every situation, but the eight out of 10 she’s able to do it with me for, is so helpful because then you just stopped whatever spiral you’re going into of this is hard, this isn’t the right thing, this sucks, whatever it is, and somebody just totally takes you off of that ledge and brings you out of that conversation into something else. It’s so helpful.

Melinda Wittstock:         So the other thing that you and your partner are involved in, which I’m really intrigued by as a host of retreats for women in business, is Let’s Work, this monthly gathering for women to rethink networking. So tell me a little bit about that. I know it’s with SoHo House, which I adore. What are some of the things you guys get up to?

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah. It’s kind of an interesting story. SoHo House came to us about two years ago, two and a half years ago, and said, “We want to do something for women. We don’t know what that means or looks like. We’re going to give you the room and copy and stacks and invite whoever you want and do whatever you want and let’s see how it goes.” And we’re like, “Okay.” We go to a lot of conferences and to a lot of networking events and we found so many of them to be unproductive and uninspiring.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, exactly.

Ruthie Schulder:              We weren’t getting out of it what we needed, which was business contacts that actually help our businesses grow.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s why I did Wings of The Empowered Woman, which is an offshoot of the podcast. That’s exactly the same motivation. Yeah.

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah. Yeah. So we host an event monthly in New York in one of the SoHo House locations there and the quarterly in the L.A. The format is actually really simple. No matter if we have 50 people in the room or 200 people in the room, we go around and everybody says their name and their company and their title, because we really want that networking portion of the event to be as productive as humanly possible. We also created a very open Rolodex community, so if people are asking you for contacts or questions or connections, the sort of implicit buy in into the community is that you’re going to pony up.

Ruthie Schulder:              Women have certain businesses together, gotten each other jobs, which is amazing. We always we interview a guest speaker, just for about 10 or 15 minutes and we select these women who are in our network because we think there’s some sort of interesting thing to their… It’s really not about their job, it’s about their path. And something really interesting always comes out of those conversations. So what we do is we split the room up into smaller groups and we actually pose questions to the groups that are somewhat provocative and also coming out of what our guest has said was kind of the theme of their career journey.

Ruthie Schulder:              The reason why we do that is because having these women connect over something deeper instead of just like, “Hi, how are you? Where do you work?” But really getting them to kind of dig in, just makes the networking so much better and so much more effective, and you feel like you know somebody and you feel connected to somebody in a way that doesn’t feel so surface level. Then we let people at it. It’s like a really simple format, but it really, really, really works.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. That’s great. We’re doing similar things. our whole hashtag is lift as we climb. How can we create an ecosystem where women meaningfully help each other, so it goes beyond this kind of “you go girl” thing, but like actually promoting one another, investing in one another, buying from one another, all of that. So we actually gamified this thing. We had all these wonderful women on businesses send their product samples and all this sort of stuff, so we did this gamified challenge where people had to find inventive ways to photograph some of the products or promote them or whatever on Instagram

Melinda Wittstock:         So by the end of the retreat, everybody had promoted everybody else’s stuff and everybody was seeing the lift of that, people were seeing ways that they could send business to each other.. And we had a winner, and the winner won next year’s retreat. We stay in luxury five star places and all this kind of thing. So it was a really great prize.

Ruthie Schulder:              Wow, that’s so awesome.

Melinda Wittstock:         But just trying to do creative things like that, that really connect people, whether you’re playing games or dressing up in costume, or whatever it is, right. It’s just got to be something different to get people out of their same as, same as, the nametag and the white wine, oh my God, make it stop.

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah, totally. Yeah. And our community came out of same issue of, we were like there’s a perception that women don’t help each other and we’re kind of just unwilling to accept that anymore as a perception.

Melinda Wittstock:         Apparently the neuroscience on it is that our brains release oxytocin, a feel good chemical when we’re collaborating with each other, women specifically.

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah, I believe that.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. Which is super cool. What’s next for you? What’s the big vision? Where do you take your agency from here? Where do you see yourself in five or 10 years?

Ruthie Schulder:              Yeah, that’s a great question. We are so happy with what we’re building and we are constantly trying to create work that not only is portfolio driven work, because, for sure that’s been true of us forever, but we’re just more and more and more values driven. So some sort of focus on health and wellness, sustainability, inclusion and diversity, or working with clients that are super innovative or best in class. We’re saying no to a lot of things that don’t align with our values.

Ruthie Schulder:              Then just in terms of growing the business, we’re also, in addition to making brands relevant in culture, we’re also working with some emerging cities to help them become a little bit more relevant in culture. We are just always trying to redefine what a client even means in our world. So the cities is a great example. We also, honestly, work with some real estate developers who are spending a lot of money in concentrated areas to grow an area, and they’re coming to us and saying, “Help us. Help us create amazing experiences, help us get the right people to experience those things.” To really put a shine on some of these emerging neighborhoods. So that’s really exciting for us.

Ruthie Schulder:              Then, as another thing that we do as an agency, is we create our own experiential IP. We’re continuing to do that and we’re continuing to roll out platforms that we think the world really, really needs to have access to. A new one that’s not officially out yet is called Without Plastic.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh fantastic. Great.

Ruthie Schulder:              It’s actually a very… It’s a giant digital campaign with some experiential offshoots that are going to be rolling out later, but we’re really using this campaign as a way to educate people, inspire people, and give them actually very tangible touch points of 100 points of action, what are small things that people can really start doing to live a plastic-free life.

Melinda Wittstock:         Fantastic. Well, I have so much to talk to you about. I will follow up after this podcast, because I think it’s so vital.

Ruthie Schulder:              Cool.

Melinda Wittstock:         I personally believe that business is the perfect canvas to actually tackle a lot of these major world societal problems. Probably best exemplified by the U.N.’s 17 global goals. So many of the things that we do with everything that I do, we do all kinds of innovative models, ways to gamify things, right?

Ruthie Schulder:              Right.

Melinda Wittstock:         So people will go out and galvanize and organize around doing something, either good for themselves personally or for the world. So I can see a lot of scope for innovation and growth in that area. I’m excited for you and for the world. I think it’s what’s needed. This is awesome.

Ruthie Schulder:              Thank you. I’m so happy to chat about it all with you.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, absolutely. Well, Ruthie, how can people find you and work with you? Say somebody wants to put together a big experiential thing or whatever, what do they do?

Ruthie Schulder:              So the website of our agency is thisisthepa.com, because our company is called The Participation Agency, and my email is Ruthie, R-U-T-H-I-E, at thisisthepa.com.

Melinda Wittstock:         Fantastic. Well thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us.

Ruthie Schulder:              Thank you. Thank you.