Thought Leader: Data and Insight to transform experiential campaigns

by Andrew Bodwick, head of agency and brand, SpaceandPeople

On-site insight: Clothing retailer pop-up shop sees 77% more visitors in Liverpool compared to Manchester

When I was at the Brand Experience 360 event in April, a speech by Olivia Rayner, Creative Director at Sense Marketing, left a big impression. Rayner highlighted the loneliness epidemic seen in the youth of today.

With loneliness on the rise, especially amongst Gen Z, the importance of experiential marketing is becoming more and more apparent – engaging with consumers directly and creating memorable, IRL-experiences can allow brands to stand out against the busy digital marketing landscape. We are seeing a more diverse range of brands than ever engage in experiential marketing and, as we believe it is such an effective way to reach Gen Z, now is the ideal time to fully understand the impact of these activations by using data and insights to benchmark against.

Data and insights should underpin every marketing campaign, allowing brands to pick relevant venues and effectively reach their desired audience. Nisha Talagala, entrepreneur and technologist, expanded on Clive Humby’s quote “Data is the new oil” with “If data is the new oil, insights are the new money” in an article for Forbes.

It’s easy to see that Talagala is right. Data alone is not enough; it needs to be transformed into actionable insights. Interpreting available data can reveal underlying trends and patterns, allowing agencies to create engaging campaigns. Insights are crucial in proving campaign effectiveness.

This is especially true within the experiential marketing industry – campaigns often encounter challenges when it comes to demonstrating value and justifying spend. While individual agencies have access to data from their campaigns, they have no way to compare their results with similar experiential activations. The lack of an industry benchmarking tool for experiential marketing is a roadblock in allowing agencies and their clients to plan campaigns to their full potential. This can be shown through the data in this article’s title – it is interesting to note that the clothing retailer pop-up shop had 77% more visitors in Liverpool compared to Manchester but delving deeper into why will enable not just the clothing retailer but other brands to incorporate these insights into future campaigns.

This is why SpaceandPeople have collaborated with The Institute of Promotional Marketing to launch CORE, the Campaign Optimiser for Retail & Experiential. This revolutionary platform will transform how brands and agencies plan campaigns, measure ROI and enhance campaign effectiveness.

A notable feature of CORE is the ability to see anonymised results from a selection of brand roadshows, allowing the planner to see the success of the same campaign in different locations and highlighting regions with the most receptive audiences for different types of campaigns. For the clothing retailer in our example, using CORE will allow it to benchmark its performance against other similar activities or product types to gauge whether these results are indicative of the two cities or not and also identify other venues/cities it could visit for future activations.

Access to similar campaign data can also allow brands and agencies to plan sampling and giveaway totals to ensure sufficient stocks. The insights gleaned from CORE can make campaign pitches stand out with justifiable spend and locations choice.

CORE is now available to IPM members via the IPM Member Dashboard, learn more here.