Experiential Advertising: Making Moments in Time

A giant basketball player walks on water, a long-dead rapper rises from the grave and viewers/players foil Russian mafia in the first outernet movie. Isobel Roberts takes a wide-eyed wander in the bendy world of experiential advertising, where reality is augmented, campaigns are amplified across multiple platforms, genres and gadgets, but, as with all advertising, the common goal is to engage the emotions

Fragmented audiences, multiple platforms, the ability to skip past ads, more savvy audiences – it’s arguably getting harder and harder to reach consumers through traditional advertising and our appetite for technology in all types of media, from digital TV to social media to smartphones, is footing the blame. But at the same time, those same tools that are making it tougher to track down audiences are also making it easier to engage with them on a deeper level, and one trick up advertisers sleeve that has been gaining traction across the industry is experiential advertising. With increasingly self-selecting audiences and changing consumption habits meaning paid media is essentially worth less, crafting a compelling experience that people want to share has become a selling point for any brand and one that can deliver a lot more bang for an advertiser’s buck.

“Twenty years ago, brands would throw an event or do a stunt and five thousand people would attend,” explains Tom Webster, partner at Mother New York. “If the PR behind the brand was tight, the brand would get the standard but very limited media coverage, delivered by the singular voice of the writer covering it. Nowadays, because of the way people interact with brands, specifically due to digital, it is less of a one-way dialogue. We find ourselves defining advertising in a broader sense and can have more conversation around creative concepts, it’s less an ‘event or stunt’. With experiential, if you can produce something smart and strategically aligned, creating these moments in time can touch people’s thoughts and soul, and completely change their consideration.”

Reality bends and emotions are tapped

As brands look to create more unique ways to connect with audiences and build positive connections to their brands, experiential advertising is rising through the ranks to become one the areas where agencies can really embrace creative, as when it comes to experiential there are no set rules. In fact, experiential campaigns come in all shapes and sizes. From an event created for 100,000 people, such as Tupac’s holographic comeback at the Coachella festival in 2012, to an invite-only occasion like 180LA’s interactive print work for wine company Kim Crawford, where the audience became the campaign, the beauty is in the scope that experiential can bring. Experiential advertising also conjures up the possibility to add in multiple layers to an idea, something that Jung von Matt tapped into for their campaign for horror and crime channel 13th Street. Titled The Witness, the project kicked off with a trailer featuring a fictitious character, Nadia, who had been kidnapped by the Russian mafia. Viewers could apply online to help save her, and then six participants were selected to take part in a two-hour game that crossed between the physical and virtual worlds and took the players on a journey across Berlin, with the adventure beamed out to a wider audience via the web.

“The main point of interest was for sure that we were doing something completely new,” recalls agency producer Julia Cramer, “something that we didn’t even find the right name for. A short film? No. A computer game? No. A theatre piece? Not really. Interactive storytelling? Kind of. An augmented reality based story? Well kind of, but augmented reality was just a little part in the techniques used. It was a mix of so many medias and techniques, and I am sure this made a big part of the fun of it.”

So with experiential campaigns allowing for pretty much any technique under the sun to be used, what is the key to creating one that will make an impact and become a success? In spite of the range and breadth of different examples out there, there is one common denominator that runs through each of the experiential ideas covered in this piece – the ability to create emotion. The more intimate interaction between consumer and brand in an experiential situation brings the potential for deeper engagement and greater payoff for both parties. At its core, however, good advertising has always been about emotion, and in fact the biggest transformation in experiential over the last decade or so is the power that digital media has delivered in the possibility to then spread that emotion beyond just those experiencing the event themselves to the wider world.

“Experiential ideas have always been important,” agrees Ian Reichenthal, co-executive creative director at Wieden+Kennedy New York. “If anything’s changed it’s that now the idea can have a second life online where a much bigger audience than just the people who were there can have the chance to experience it too.”

This opportunity to augment an experiential campaign can come in a variety of guises; press coverage created around an experiential campaign can add in a more-than-welcome earned media dimension, but perhaps even more significant is the potential that those people actually involved in the experience can bring in spreading the gospel of a brand on their own terms to their own peers. This behaviour is something that W+K depended on for the launch of the Jordan Melo 8 sneaker, the Nike shoe of NBA player Carmelo Anthony; the agency staged a three-storey high projection of the basketball player in NYC and after the show was over the project continued to evolve via its online presence. Across town, and Mother New York had earlier taken the same approach to heart in two big experiential campaigns for Target stores. The agency’s Kaleidoscopic Fashion Spectacular in New York City transformed the façade of the Standard Hotel into an epic light show complete with dance troupe, while to showcase the retailer’s collaboration with clothing label Missoni at New York Fashion Week they constructed a 25-foot marionette doll named Marina who blogged and tweeted her way through the event. Both projects were aimed at blurring the lines between culture and brand communication, and helping audiences to relate to the campaigns in a way that spurred them on to share, says creative director Piers North: “Unlike traditional avenues, they [Target] wanted to go beyond words and images and do something for a jaded audience that was truly original and worth their attention. Both of these campaigns were spectacles that have previously happened in the cultural space but never before in fashion. For people used to seeing the same format of communication, both these campaigns brought a story to life in a different way, giving the public a role in it; this immediately gave them, the audience, an investment in the communication, which was the key to amplification.”

Amplification is the magic word here, as it’s clearly not just the experience itself that is the vital component, but also what happens after the dust has settled and the physical act is over. Here is where the power of a potent experiential idea really shines through, as was the case with Duval Guillaume Modem’s Push the Button campaign for TV channel TNT (see box out below). However, creating a ‘viral’ shouldn’t be the mission, says executive creative director on the job, Geoffrey Hantson. “A viral is not something you can create,” he believes. “Viral is a result. So you start of by creating an awesome real-life experience. By doing that you might touch some hundreds. But the fantastic thing is that you can put cameras everywhere, make a good film from the live action and touch extra millions of people.”

Counting the virtual pennies of social currency

For Hantson it also goes beyond just entertaining people with a great idea. Instead, the focus is on building the overall social personality of a brand: “Creating an ‘experience’ is never the aim,” he continues. “Building social currency is. Today if you want to build a brand you can no longer rely on classical media only. Classical media are ideal to build brand equity – trust. But next to that it is as important to build social currency. To engage consumers and ignite, influence or direct their conversations. You could say that social currency is the brand equity in a social world.”

With newer, more dynamic ways of watching, receiving and distributing content via the web becoming increasingly the norm, such technological developments have helped pushed experiential initiatives along in leaps and bounds. But despite the crucial role of technology in nearly all of these experiential campaigns, as with any medium, the message coming loud and clear from the industry is that the idea should always come first, and anything else amounts to a cardinal sin. Where technology has facilitated, though, is in helping creative ideas cross mediums and boundaries with ease and develop into more poignant campaigns.

“Technology has democratised the industry,” state Maxi Itzkoff and Mariano Serkin, executive creative directors at Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi in Buenos Aires, “and in an industry that exists in a state of flux, you have to be driven to continue learning and re-learning everything over and over again, all the time. We look for ambient audio-visual ideas that will catch on. Nowadays nothing should belong to just one medium exclusively. Ideas have to behave the same way the audience does, and these days, people dabble in lots of media at the same time. Our industry should reflect this behaviour in its campaigns.”

The pair instilled this philosophy into a project for client Coca-Cola last year. With Argentina hosting the Copa America, the shop built on the insight that only a few thousand Argentinians would actually get to experience the opportunity of cheering on their national team in the stadium, and so they created the Cheering Truck. A purpose-built lorry featuring a specially designed sound studio, the truck travelled around the country recording cheers and chants from the nation’s football fans. When the truck was finally driven into the stadium it had the vocal power of 1.2 million people to add to the crowd, and the idea itself functioned as an ambient stunt, a PR attraction and a video-based campaign.

The risk of shooting oneself (or a truck) in the foot

On top of its agnosticism when it comes to mediums and channels, another strength of experiential advertising lies in the fact that with tailored experiences it can be a lot easier to hone in on your target audience. Deutsch LA’s work on Twisted Metal for PlayStation showed just this, as participants were given the chance to shoot up a real-life truck with a military-grade gun via their web browser in a campaign that mirrored the context of the vehicular combat game and attracted the right demographic. However, experiential campaigns also come with their fair share of risk, perhaps most significantly in the fact that consumers are probably even more likely to remember and share a bad experience than a good one, and there’s always that anxiety with any live event that it won’t go according to plan. This means you have to think long and hard about the logistics, points out Jung von Matt’s Cramer. “Working on an experiential project is always much more complex than a single television ad,” says the producer. “There are so many different levels to take into consideration: besides the complexity of the production and the technical challenges there is always the question of how to publish the campaign? How to become seen, because the worst thing that could happen is that nobody acknowledges your campaign.”

Incorporating traditional media such as billboards, posters and trailers is not a misnomer then when it comes to experiential, as drawing attention to and encouraging participants to engage with your idea in the first place is one of the biggest hurdles. Tackle that step successfully, and with the right idea you have the opportunity to create a more authentic experience for the consumer. In fact, the best experiential campaigns work when they’re not about branding the experience, but letting the brand become the experience itself. “I think brands are realising that anything could become a medium really,” comments Anselmo Ramos, VP and executive creative director at Ogilvy & Mather Brazil. “And sometimes, you can even create your own medium. Why not? The best ideas are redefining the medium itself. The brands are becoming the medium.” His agency’s experiential idea for Sprite, where refreshing showers designed to look like giant Sprite soda fountains were installed on Brazil’s baking beaches, is one such example of the medium becoming the message, and these type of ideas are essential to connect with a disengaged audience.

“Let me put it this way,” ponders Hantson of Duval Guillaume Modem. “Before, the party was at the brand’s place. Today, the party is at the people’s place. And brands are not invited. So they have to find a way to sneak in. People are not interested in advertising, people are interested in amazing content. And every now and then that amazing content is coming from a brand. That’s one way to sneak in.”

For those working at the forefront of the experiential field, such as Deutsch LA’s EVP and experiential creative director Daniel Chu, exploring the prospects of experiential advertising is fundamental to the future of the industry as a whole: “Experimentation is critical to the evolution of ad campaigns. I read an article where the idea of a ‘70/20/10’ rule was introduced, whereby 70 per cent of budgets should be dedicated to now, 20 per cent on new, and 10 per cent on next. I like that type of formula applied to exploration and experimentation. Overall, agencies are competing more and more with tech start-ups. The success of advertising agencies lies in adopting the same approach to ideation and production. Madison Avenue sells ideas; Silicon Valley sells ideas executed. That’s why experiential is the future.”

Pioneering experiential and scratching the surface

Experiential is helping fuel the agency world’s entrepreneurial spirit, but at the same time, warns Chu, any experiential idea needs to have the audience and its behaviour at its crux, as for every innovative experiential campaign there are several more one-dimensional versions littering the wayside. To be truly valuable going forward, any experiential campaign must feed into the broader strategy of a brand. “It still has to be relevant to the objectives of a campaign,” sums up Mother New York’s Webster. “When applied holistically, [experiential] can be valuable. Strategic perspective has to be broader and all of us have to be open to things we don’t understand yet. Twenty years ago, people weren’t thinking amplification. Now, we consistently have new ways of seeing and distributing stuff. Where we are right now with experiential, I think we are just scratching the surface.”

And judging by what we’ve seen so far, executed correctly, experiential has the promise of becoming a creative goldmine for the industry.