Catching up on my (normal) reading backlog, I attacked the Experiential Marketing Essays supplement from September in Marketing magazine.
Ten agencies write articles that are printed as full pages opposite a display advert for their services. Some might see it as a double whammy appealing to those who read articles as well as those who read adverts.
I have been critical before about these supplements as business development tools.
But the publisher has tried hard to get additional online readership by making them a micro-site all of their own. It has a video about the agency, contact details and the full essay. Nice touch. But the volume on the videos is very high and doesn’t remember your settings; the buttons on the video player are so faint you can’t see their function and it’s written in freaking flash so you can’t cut/paste contact details. And when you click on the agency site link it opens in the same page… quiet fail for lack of browsing ease.
How should it be done?
And so for biz dev purposes, the rule is
1 – if you are going to use them, write something that is really excellent, gives advice freely and shows how your agency is leading the innovation of new ideas and meeting the challenges of the marketplace today.
2 – Do some direct marketing around the same article, leverage it on your website and in other media (if appropriate) as well for maximum impact.
And so, who has succeeded?
Claire Stokes from the Circle Agency definitely ticks my number 1 box by explaining exactly how her team executed a campaign for BlackBerry using a Facebook fan page. Great, I feel I can understand, use and adapt that for my own purposes now.
John Carver at Cunning spends his time knocking advertising and proving that ‘traditional advertising has been superseded by a strategy that fuses PR with….a range of channels to make a brand famous.” He kicks off with a nice snub to the format of this supplement.
“My immediate inclination is to view each feature [like this one] as a free ad. The trouble is, most people see through this…. you’ll be delighted to hear I won’t be taking this route.”
But he then goes off to describe ‘what we do’ – which he explains well. It’s about getting people engaged and interested as well as making a brand famous. Yes we know that. Advertising turning into dialogue from monologue. But unlike the lovely Claire, he doesn’t say how to do it.
Joel Kaufman at Link Communication shows off a nice twist to traditional sampling activity. He ticks my number 1 box by recommending sampling in non-traditional locations such as office parks where access is cheaper and more freely available. He gets an extra point for being the first MD to actually give his personal email address as the contact on the micro-site.
Both Rob Allen at TRO and Nick Adams at Sense drive home the point about what an integrated campaign really is. Rob has a four point strategic check-list for brands to understand what experiential can deliver. He also states that after a 12 week roadshow, experiential staff may have a better understanding of customers than the brand team. But doesn’t point out how this can be debriefed and shared around other agencies as it sounds like really useful insight information. And Nick focuses on how important it is for “experiential marketers to understand the dynamics of other communications and the role these can play in fulfilling the communicationa nd sales objectives within the experiential brief.” However he lets himself down at the end by claiming the most successful experiential compaigns are those based on either a brand proposition or at “Themed campaignable idea”. A WHAT? Blimey, should have spent the whole article explaining what that means.
Back to the campaign for plain English, please.
Drum roll….
The winner from this crop is outstanding. He focuses on a single format, explains it clearly, draws parallels with the participants and pitches the idea that experiential agencies should lead the messaging.
The man is Shay Boyd of Clay London.
He claims this can avoid budget misappropriation, combine the PR, sponsorship and activation goals of a major brand in a sports tournament situation and draws the comparison between shared experience in sport and discussion, dialogue and opinion which is surely a conversation in which most brands want to take the lead.
The format is sport, the clear insight he provides into how athletes work to prepare themselves and how tiny incremental improvements lead to gold medals is articulate and, from my experience as a sports coach and athlete, accurate.
Shay has proved that he knows how to pitch against other agencies, he provides tips for collaboration in campaign situations and his articulate stand proves to me that he would be a great guardian of my brand message.
You’ll have to read the article for yourself to see whether you agree – but he gets my vote.
Tags: experiential marketing
