Target and Chase are betting that the future of marketing won’t be purely digital. Instead, physical experiences, from retail stores and bank branches to exclusive events, can become engines for digital content, creator amplification, and consumer connection.

Both brands are applying a similar philosophy to AI: New technology works best when it complements, rather than replaces, the human side of marketing, according to marketing leaders at both brands, who spoke at this week’s Advertising Week New York.

For marketers, that means no longer treating physical and digital, brand and performance, and technology and creativity as separate choices.

Stores and branches are media channels

Target and Chase already have something many brands spend heavily to create: massive physical footprints where consumers regularly interact with them.

“We already have an entire ecosystem that is live and in person, which is our branches,” said Carla Hassan, CMO of JPMorgan Chase, on Monday’s panel. “And so, you know, millions and millions of people are walking in every single day. That is, in and of itself, an experience.”

Those interactions can shape perceptions of Chase more powerfully than traditional advertising.

“It does a lot for our brand more than, frankly, sometimes even our marketing does, because it is sometimes the only experience that somebody has with the Chase brand,” Hassan said.

Target takes a similar approach to its roughly 2,000 stores.

“Our brand is an experience,” said Michelle Mesenburg, senior vice president and chief brand officer at Target. “So everything we create, the way we design our stores, is with intention. The way we design our carts is with intention.”

The physical footprint also gives Target a way to drive discovery. 

“Hopefully you're coming in because you want to spend a little bit of time,” Mesenburg said. “We want to inspire you. We want to help you discover something new.”

The opportunity is to make those physical interactions travel beyond the consumers who experience them firsthand.

“We're finding the power with the two sides of the barbell is creating experiences first that are worth coming to and worth experiencing, so that they become worth sharing,” said Mesenburg.

Chase shifts from attention to connection

For JPMorgan Chase, experiential marketing increasingly isn’t about reaching the largest possible audience in person. It’s “thinking about attention plus connection,” Hassan said.

That has changed how Chase evaluates experiences that may reach only dozens of consumers directly. The company has held exclusive dinners at sports and entertainment venues like the Grand Ole Opry for Sapphire Reserve cardholders.

“We'd say we'd never do that because you're only inviting 80 people,” Hassan said. “We don't think about it that way anymore. We think about it much more as how are we going to connect with the millions of people that care about what we just did, that want into that, right?”

In that model, an exclusive physical experience is only the starting point, and its digital reach can dwarf the in-person audience.

The same thinking informs Chase’s broader partnerships. The goal, Hassan said, is to stop expecting consumers to come to the brand and focus instead on “connecting with them in the moments where they are, not trying to bring them to where we are.”

Target gives creators more control

Extending an experience through social media requires brands to give up some control over how their stories get told.

“In order to live and thrive in this environment, you have to open yourself up,” Mesenburg said. “You have to allow other people in.”

Target learned that lesson through its creator strategy. The retailer previously ran its own creator program but recently pivoted to working with LTK to build an exclusive ambassador program in an environment creators already use.

“Our results have gone through the roof because the creators are used to that environment,” Mesenburg said. “It's where they're used to creating. It's where they're used to running their business, which has been incredible.”

Now Target is opening the door even wider through Club Target, where virtually anyone can become an affiliate.

“Anyone, it could be your neighbor next door with 20 followers, literally, but they are excited and they share their voice, and they're an influencer in their neighborhood and their community,” Mesenburg said.

That strategy builds on consumer behavior already happening on its own: Target gets some 50,000 organic mentions every day, according to Mesenburg.

AI transformation is a culture challenge

Target and Chase are also resisting the temptation to treat AI adoption as simply a race toward efficiency.

“I think the biggest mistake that we are making right now, potentially…is that we're looking at AI as a technology change as opposed to a culture change,” Hassan said.

Instead of plugging AI into individual tasks, Chase is reconsidering entire workflows.

“How do we change the way we do the entire process?” Hassan said.

That includes acknowledging that AI will eliminate some work. "There will be some jobs that go away," she said. But Hassan sees the bigger opportunity elsewhere: using AI to make work better.

“If you change the culture, you'll be able to get better, not just faster,” Hassan said. “We're chasing the fast and efficient. We're not chasing the better.”

Target is similarly encouraging employees to experiment directly with AI.

“We have labs going live every single week, every single month, so that our teams are in there playing with technology, and actually the fear is starting to reduce because they're getting comfortable with what these tools can do for them,” Mesenburg said.

Whether the topic is AI or experiential marketing, both brands have landed on the same lesson: Avoid treating seemingly opposing strategies as either/or choices.

“Don't think of them as two separate things,” Hassan said. “The magical power is actually both the analog and the digital side coming together.”