Remember when experiential was field marketing and stunts? This complicated sector has evolved through several chapters as a marketing discipline, being conceptually born in the 1990s when a few forward thinkers in field marketing combined the art of events with the science of brand communications. The word experiential quickly evolved to focus on consumer facing activity, closer aligned with field marketing. It became dominated by sampling roadshows, shopping centres and festival activation.
Strategically, it was a channel. You buy your space; you buy your audience. Just like you’d buy media space next to the SuperBowl to get the best TV audience, in experiential you buy your media space at a high footfall location: Westfield, Wilderness. The experiential agency’s work was to define the experience, book the space, sample or trial.
Experiential agencies began to crop up. Exhibition agencies became experiential agencies. It was something ad and digital agencies just didn’t get. It Why do a single event for 1000 people when you can make one Cadburys Gorilla TVC for the same budget? More and more agencies opened, and the deployment of super creative, intelligent event activation moved into b2b and internal comms, with experiential being applied to traditionally dull conferences and exhibitions.
As we moved into the digital era, we saw demand for real world stunts, conceived by PR or ad agencies, tossed to a production company to turn around in a matter of days, and importantly to win awards. These sorts of ideas will have seen a few hundred people engage physically but many more through PR and social. The views are more important than the visitors, but that’s OK, because the idea shows a brand that is doing something tangible and cool.
Now, experiential agency budgets dwarf the average TVC, let alone content. Some of the biggest budgets are assigned to employee events and sponsorship activation: staff and fans. This is how brands are built, through communities. Not that depressing word “consumers”. Rather your fans, your followers, your teams, your squads. Internal or external cultures.
From a media perspective in a world of fake news, in a world of post-truth, Gen z believes less messages from brands. In that context, doing something tangible will do more for brand love than telling them something. The vernacular “actions speak louder than words” remains evergreen. A recent example of simplistic brilliances: The Brake Shop in NYC from Chick-A-Fil-A offered delivery drivers a place to charge and chill. A real experience. Still trading today. A purposeful project, from a fast food joint. Experiential to demonstrate brand purpose, to create high volume fame and content, with low volume physical footfall.
Activation remains the perfect description for this kind of work: the best creative seems to provide demonstrable support for a marginalised community. Another example, Papa John’s Pizza turning a restaurant into a polling booth, to rebalance election fraud in a hotly contested neighbourhood, by make it easier for locals in the particular area to vote. Or the Grand Prix winning Dreamcatcher, allowed a blind person to provide live commentary for a real NBA basketball game using a wealth of combined technologies.
Beyond activation, experience is now everywhere. Ads? Channels? Media? Digital? These are fast becoming legacies, silos that barely exist. Media agencies, digital agencies and consultancies like Accenture and McKinsey are in the end to end experience game, and creating experiences for every type of business vertical from mining to meat.
My relationship with Zara (err, the clothing) is through my phone and my wonderful DPD driver. Apple have worked on the courier handover meticulously….because the delivery moment is as important as unboxing. We’re seeing end to end experiential thinking, on and offline.
In this era of end to end experience, the philosophy and viewpoint of experiential though is more relevant than ever. Yet experiential remains the only function that sits outside of creative agency strategy and creative departments core skill. The bulk of creative talent remains focused on specific assets that correlate to their skill, creating a single asset in isolation of wider campaigns, in most cases.
Creative thinkers are said to be able to tackle any problem, and while that is broadly true, the physical and built world of experiential requires unique practical understanding. We’re restricted by the laws of physics in a way no other discipline is. Experiential talent has a perspective that’s most similar to service and CX designers, but examines humanity away from a screen, arguably more end to end than service design which prioritises screen interaction. We have found that combining CX talent with experiential talent yields two big benefits.
First, experiential gets woven into wider campaigns seamlessly, with detailed consideration of why events exist, to what end, how customers or audiences are acquired, and where they move after any face to face experience, be they staff, customers or consumers.
Secondly, human truths and insights can appear, that don’t happen with a vertical, channel-based process. By looking end to end, on and offline, using multi-disciplinary talent, we unlock gaps, paths and moments that may have been overlooked in traditional thinking, providing opportunities for brands to play a meaningful part, beyond simply communicating. These gaps in the journey allow brands to step in, much like Chick A-Fil-A example.
From a tactical tool to human centric philosophy, experiential has evolved.