SpaceandPeoplePlus launches for agencies with towering ambition

SpaceandPeoplePlus was launched this morning to brand experience agencies at the top floor of 30 St Mary Axe, a building better known by its nickname, The Gherkin.

The new business is led by experienced Brand Experience and Media agency leaders, Kevin Harbutt and Mike Tocknell, and the stated aim of the new business is to help the growth of SpaceandPeople as a business by creating opportunities for the brand experience industry to grow.

Speaking to Fieldmarketing.com, Mike Tocknell outlined the lofty ambitions of the new business.

SpaceandpeoplePlus aims to fill a perceived void in brand experience, namely the lack of a governing body to present the channel and show how to drive value from it – as Rajar does for Radio.

Mike believes that the brand experience and experiential marketing sector should be getting a greater share of budget in integrated marketing campaigns, and that budgets are currently being skewed in favour of online social media.

SpaceandPeoplePlus will address this by launching with a service that will show how live campaigns can target the a group of consumers known as Conversation Catalysts, a brand influential 7.6 per cent of the UK population. These are the people that media agencies perceive to be the most influential in terms of establishing long term brand value via word of mouth. The service will access existing data used by the marketing sector and by businesses such as TGI and Touchpoint, and make them relevant to brand experience marketing.

The service will also factor in the key types of brand experience, named by its system as Sampling, Showcasing and Immersion.

For Tocknell, the Conversation Catalysts are the key as brands that reach out to them will see long term gains, helping to justify higher cost per contact that brand experience brings compared to other media channels.

Part of SpaceandPeoplePlus’s launch remit is to arm agencies with the right data and venue profiling service – open access, free of charge – to show how Conversation Catalysts can be reached with maximum efficiency. The venue profiling will cover all venues, not just the shopping malls that SpaceandPeople is best known for providing access to.

This online service is aimed at driving campaign effectiveness, but the SpaceandPeoplePlus service also has ambitions to help drive costs down and make campaigns easier by driving deals with industry suppliers such as hire cars, trucks, riggers, stand builders, warehousing and making the most competitively priced of these available to agencies. SpaceandPeoplePlus launches with some supplier deals in place including vehicle rental business Sixt, who Tocknell says will be making their very lowest prices anywhere in the UK available through SpaceandPeoplePlus.

SpaceandPeoplePlus will also have an eye on facilitating training to help event managers meet required standards in areas such as driving heavy goods or health and safety.

Tocknell and the SpaceandPeople team are being joined at the launch by two key advocates, Sean Curtis, head of business marketing and partnerships, Land Securities and Steve Smith, head of thought leadership, Starcom MediaVest.

As a space supplier, the advocacy of Curtis may be welcome but could be expected, but the advocacy of Smith in particular will be of interest to agencies. Media buyer MediaVest is potentially one of the biggest proponents brand experience marketing. “At MediaVest there are currently 100 people on the digital, mobile, social media team, but only one person for experiential marketing”, says Tocknell.