Blog

Experiential conversion to sale

Camilla Felstead, client services director, GMR Marketing, discusses the shift to purchase Countless research studies show that real world brand experiences, offering consumers the opportunity to get their hands on a product and try-before-they-buy, can shift purchase consideration by up to 85%. As boardroom sales targets become more aggressive there is pressure on experiential activity […]

Continue reading...

Second becomes first at the FIFA World Cup

Sebastian Coe discusses the technology that is driving cultural change in event consumption It occurred to me when I was in Brazil for the World Cup that when the 2010 tournament kicked off in South Africa, the iPad was just a couple of months old. Apple have shifted more than 200 million tablets since then […]

Continue reading...

The Portable Idea

Today, your experiential campaign can end up in places you never dreamed it would, but most brands aren’t prepared for that journey says Alex Smith from agency Sense You know the feeling you get when someone tells a story, and ends up trailing off with “well, I guess you just had to be there”? Well, […]

Continue reading...

True influence – SpaceandPeople Report

SpaceandPeople’s Q1 Data and Insight report (FM Spring issue) gave us quite a bit of insight into the current focus on targeted influencing. Carefully targeted brand experiences are increasingly being used to influence early adopters and specific fan bases. In the column various activities were mentioned that have used St Pancras International on different event […]

Continue reading...

How experiential will become a new form of market research

Will Northover, Client Services Manager, Blackjack Promotions argues that customer data collection should be easy when using brand experiences Everyone loves a freebie. It doesn’t matter how old you are, how wealthy you are. Whatever your job title, if there’s a freebie up for grabs then you’re automatically interested. For this reason, I’m baffled why […]

Continue reading...

On Venues: Designer Destinations

London’s latest shopping experience arrived on 24 October when the 350,000 sq ft London Designer Outlet opens in Wembley. This is the first designer outlet within the M25 and a sign of the growing success of this style of shopping experience. There are 50 designer outlets in the UK and 49% of the UK population […]

Continue reading...

Interview with Michael Brown, psLIVE

In this interview, Frank Wainwright put questions to Michael Brown, managing director, PS Live about his outlookfollowing the formal emergence of PS Live earlier this year. A shorter version of this interview appeared in Field Marketing magazine, Summer issue 2013 How has PS Live set out to bring together skills and concepts from PR, OOH, […]

Continue reading...

The great indoors

In the Spring issue of Field Marketing magazine an interesting piece on preparing for an all-weather Summer appeared. It is true that Shopping Centres can be a nice support for outdoor campaigns offering space allied to weather certainty – and proximity to retail. Here is a ‘reprint’ of that thought piece, courtesy of Brandspace. The […]

Continue reading...

Non-food diversity

Annette Lacey, managing director, Service Innovation Group Grocery multiples are set to capitalise on the new opportunities offered by a networked society. The advent of social media, android devices and 3G internet access has rapidly changed consumer behaviour, diversifying the high street into a real and virtual phenomenon. According to figures published by retail analysts […]

Continue reading...

Room to take advantage of brand affinity and sales

Frank Wainwright asseses the data that has shown some shopping centre trend insight in the magazine this issue In our last issue of Field Marketing, the latest data and insight update provided by Spaceandpeople showed Food and Drink (22%) and Automotive (20%) accounts for 42% of all brand experience activity in the locations that they […]

Continue reading...

Accreditation skills

A guest contribution from Steve Radford, CEO, Fieldstar With the launch of the Asda programme the UK now has 2 accreditation programmes for third-party merchandisers working within grocery multiple retailers (the other being operated by Sainsbury’s). But are they fit for purpose? Well I suppose that depends on what you believe their purpose is. From […]

Continue reading...

Researching Samsung – Brandspace

When Brandspace came to me with insight revelations about a recent brand campaign the last brand I expected it to be about was Samsung, currently the fastest growing brand – in terms of recognition – globally. Samsung’s Olympic product activations have been a locked casket to the media so far, so to hear that Brandspace […]

Continue reading...

Supplying added value – SpaceandPeople

As Spring becomes official the number of brand experience campaigns about the place begins to step up. In line with that I expect to see a number of Brand Experience supply busineses show how they are stepping up their game in terms of how they support the industry. Last week’s news about the launch of […]

Continue reading...

Guest Blog: Preparation is All

A guest blog from Leah Bradbury, head of recruitment, Kru Live It has been a busy year of recruitment in 2012 due to the demand from the Games and following this there has been a large, natural ‘drop-off’ since from personnel leaving the field of temporary work as well as a new influx from a […]

Continue reading...

Guest blog: 10 steps to quality staffing

Purity’s talent manager, Emma Burden reveals her preferred route to successful brand ambassador performance 1. Be crystal clear – Have a vision for how you would like your campaign to look, sound & feel. Incorporate your brand values; Brand Ambassadors are a key source of brand communication & engagement so it’s extremely important that your […]

Continue reading...

Guest Blog: Technology Trends for Experiential

Tom McInerney, director of Etherlive, provides an insight into these trends There are several technology trends revolutionising experiential marketing and I am eager, from the perspective of a leading technology company, to get to the root of how marketers can harness this technology to increase their brand engagement. We have noted an overall 60% increase […]

Continue reading...

The Brand Experience Awards Creative Award LIVE Pool 5

The Brand Experience Awards Creative Award LIVE Pool 5 This is online Pool 5 of the 2012 Brand Experience LIVE award, an award which culminates in a LIVE final in front of 4 judges at the IOEX exhibition 8th March. How this competition works Just 4 finalists will emerge to be chosen from 5 ‘pools’ […]

Continue reading...

BE: Creative Award POOL 4

The Brand Experience Awards Creative Award LIVE Pool 4 This is online Pool 4 of the 2012 Brand Experience LIVE award, an award which culminates in a LIVE final in front of 4 judges at the IOEX exhibition 8th March. How this competition works Just 4 finalists will emerge to be chosen from 5 ‘pools’ […]

Continue reading...

BE: Creative Award POOL 3

The Brand Experience Awards Creative Award LIVE Pool 3 This is online Pool 3 of the 2012 Brand Experience LIVE award, an award which culminates in a LIVE final in front of 4 judges at the IOEX exhibition 8th March. How this competition works Just 4 finalists will emerge to be chosen from 5 ‘pools’ […]

Continue reading...

BE: Creative Award POOL 2

The Brand Experience Awards Creative Award LIVE Pool 2 This is online Pool 2 of the 2012 Brand Experience LIVE award, an award which culminates in a LIVE final in front of 4 judges at the IOEX exhibition 8th March. How this competition works Just 4 finalists will emerge to be chosen from 5 ‘pools’ […]

Continue reading...

BE: Creative Award POOL 1

The Brand Experience Awards Creative Award LIVE Pool 1 This is online Pool 1 of the 2012 Brand Experience LIVE award, an award which culminates in a LIVE final in front of 4 judges at the IOEX exhibition 8th March. How this competition works Just 4 finalists will emerge to be chosen from 5 ‘pools’ […]

Continue reading...

Experiential Answers: Part 2 of the series

Brand X magazine reader questions answered by Sally Durcan, MD, Hotcow 1. Is Opportunity To See a meaningful statistic? In my opinion, no. The value for experiential is that you can provide very insightful and robust measurement responses for the client. Opportunity to See is basically the footfall numbers and this relies on foolproof statistics […]

Continue reading...

Three ways lie ahead

A guest column from Martine Eveille, board account director, Lime and Arc UK Looking ahead through this year  is impossible without taking a view on the Olympic Games. Those few weeks under the sporting spotlight are going to be the focus of much activity for multiple brands. But inevitably some will end up wasting their […]

Continue reading...

Festival Awards: Brand Sponsorship Session

The Festival Awards Conference: Pedal to the Metal deabte This is video footage from November’s debate on Sports and Music sponsorship held at HMV Music. The panel, introduced by me are: Karen Earl, chairman, Synergy Andy Westlake, CEO, Fast Track (both representing major sports sponsorship and brand partnerships) Gareth Cooper, festival owner/promoter (including Snowbombing, Beach […]

Continue reading...

Giving Retail an Edge

A guest column from Richard Dutton, new business director, Lime and Arc UK Physical retailers who are coming up against exclusively online competitors can take some solace from our research that shows that shopping on the high street is still preferred to online for most UK shoppers. Specifically the study reveals that over half of […]

Continue reading...

The time and space for brand experience

A guest column from Martine Eveille, borad account director, Arc UK I attended a talk by an inspiring speaker – Howard Saunders, founder of Echochamber  – which led me to think about just how much involvement is needed from a consumer when interacting with a brand experience?  In a world where brand engagement is ever […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE Awards 2011 – Gold and Silver winner’s commentary

Here is my overdue awards commentary – with apologies for its late emergence – after a glitch I had to do  rewite! It is a quick insight into who won gold and silver awards and why. The full analysis will be in our print edition award’s special in November. The Field Marketing Awards Merchandising and […]

Continue reading...

Audience Award 2011: The Contenders

We are really excited to announce the final eight contenders in the 2011 FMBE Audience Award, sponsored by Avantgarde. VOTING: IF YOU ARE LOGGED IN THERE WILL BE A POLL ON THIS PAGE SO THAT YOU CAN VOTE FOR YOUR FAVOURITE CAMPAIGN. ANYONE MAY VOTE THOUGH FOR UP TO 4 FAVOURITE CAMPAIGNS. VOTING IS WEIGHTED […]

Continue reading...

The Shopping Experience

A guest column from Diana Cawley, managing director, Lime revealing insight from Lime’s 6000 shopper survey The multichannel shopping phenomenon has empowered today’s consumers  more than ever before. The shopping journey no longer simply ends, or begins in-store, with 90% of today’s consumers using one or more channel on their path to purchase. Consumers increasingly […]

Continue reading...

Snappy marketing for a false society

At just one event – the Champion’s League Festival of Football in Hyde Park  – I counted 12 ‘opportunities’ to pose for a photo and – typically – to have it uploaded to the Internet. The most popular photos at the event, judging by queue length, were standing with the trophy itself, closely followed by […]

Continue reading...

Postcard From Telford

The day before yesterday, I visited Telford. Of course I had a reason Nobody trips lightly into Telford. There are no passing minstrels writing songs. The place is rigid with function, road, rail, bridge, walkway, glass, tarmac, cycle paths, concrete. Britain’s very own Alexanderplatz, minus the historical relevance. A suitably soulless shopping centre squats left […]

Continue reading...

Feature Blog – 4D Projection Mapping for Bentley

Projection mapping isn’t all about huge displays onto the facades of buildings… Projection mapping can be used in an engaging and memorable setting. Creative production agency Drive made a real impact in the auto industry with 4D projection-mapping making for a ‘radically different’ car launch experience in Bentley showrooms across Britain. Drive took to the […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top 100, number 1

1. CPM, GSK (2008, Client/Agency Relationship Award) ‘Relationship’ was a special award in many ways. It was a one off award that meant that some mega-teams could show off the whole of their history rather than just that of the proceeding year. It was an eye opening long and arduous session for the judges, with […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100, number 2

2. TBWA/Chiat/Day, Gatorade We don’t get that many Cannes Grand Prix winners entered into FM&BE and even  fewer that fail to win our award to sport alongside their Lion, but that was the fate that befell my second best ever FM&BE award entry. It was beaten by the greatest ever branded candid camera stunt in our […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100, number 3

3. Out of the Blue, The Helen Bamber Foundation (2008, Innovative Campaign) Did you hear the one about shipping containers and the event that travelled from city to city? No, not the 2010-11 Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange, but instead a 2007 terrible tale of sweat, sickness and sex. In 2007 connected shipping containers appeared in Trafalgar […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100, number 4

4 REL, Red Bull (2010, Brand/Store Relationship) Red Bull have celebrated their Team of the Year trio of wins and rightly so. They have set a new standard in team training and performance. This gold winner was perhaps more impressive again as it shows how all of that Red Bull team energy translates into a […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100 (10-6)

10. BEcause, Pampers (2005, Roadshow) A win at FMBE was the first award for a campaign that saw its most recent incarnation last year and has a huge track record of award success, peaking in 2006-7 when Sleep Like a Baby took over from this World of Babies tour. The agency and brand team defended […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100 (15-11)

15. Infinite Group, Sony (2008, Retail Training/Mystery Shopping) The older it gets the better this entry looks. The mystery shops were commissioned by Sony for Sony Centres and showed a big upturn in results whilst nicely motivating staff. This entry came to us on video as a hidden camera live mystery shop, filmed especially with […]

Continue reading...

Why ING Direct’s Human Billboards FAIL

Here is a piece of work from Leo Burnett, Italy called Bus. It was created last year. It has a number of experiential marketing experts raving about it. If you haven’t seen the video, watch it before reading why I think it is, well, a bit crap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni8ukBwHRyI Well, now you’ve seen it, perhaps you’ll […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100 (30 -26)

30 LIME, Tesco Wines (2008, Retail Training) Q, How do you make wine samplers more effective? A. Teach them about wine. It seems so simple, but this obvious idea hadn’t been tried before. Until this point, Tecso had done without LIME’s staff and samplers in the wine category, in spite of their strong ongoing relationship  […]

Continue reading...

Red Nose DIY dancing – horrible or great?

Underneath the cliched exterior of B&Q’s massive mob lies a major step in B2E2C co-ordinated marketing I’m saying good. There you go, blog over. OK, perhaps a little more to flesh this out. On 6th March Kingfisher DIY retailer B&Q had group dances, flash mob styleee across 330 of its branches in an employee meets […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100 (36 -31)

35 RT Marketing, Neff (2007, new agency) RT Marketing beat Cosine (see number 36) to the gold in this category, a result that probably surprised everyone in the room as RT’s successes, on a financial par with Cosine’s were much less well known. That in itself was a surprise as RT was a go-getting business, […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100 (40 -36)

40 iD Experiential, Lipton’s Iced Tea (2010, Sampling) Beating the dual challenge from M&S and Morrisons to win gold in sampling was a major coup. Sampling is a heck of a category these days bursting with creative and logistical solutions. Brtivic called this their best ever sampling activity and it was certainly hard to imagine […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100 (45-41)

45 JPMH, Compeed (2009 Targeting) One of the most glittering ‘experiential’ award winners ever, with global success for the agency, but no gold with us. Did my judges get this one wrong by awarding silver to JPMH and Compeed.? Well, yes and no. The debate, was it a live brand experience at all or more […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100 (50-46)

50 Hotcow, Thomson Fly (2008, Use of Low Budget) The agency may be surprised to see this in my Top 50 as they have delivered far more spectacular work – creatively – than this, but I thought that this activity showed how much a PR stunt can achive. This job, delivered in just 5 live […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100 (56-51)

55 Headcount, Loyalty Management UK (2006, Retail Training) LMUK, operators of the Nectar programme approached Headcount to deliver 3 waves of marketing activity in 400 Sainsbury’s stores. This was a clear lesson in how training staff makes a difference to consumer behaviour leading to a 16 per cent increase in swipes. Control stores, where staff […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100 (60-56)

60 Sense, British Airways (2006, Brand Theatre) However did Sense persuade BA into a cutting edge experiential idea – actors on the Heathrow Express talking in loud voices about how lucky they were to take advantage of  checking in online, before breaking cover with the line ‘Have you clicked yet?’ and dishing out Z Cards. […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100 (70-66)

70 Imagination, Sony Europe (2007, Brand Theatre) Imagination’s carefully constructed multi-brand press launch, that took over the centre of Rhodes and a big hotel, was certainly a sign of the times. It has been copied a lot. I’d say Imagination gets copied more than any other event agency, and this was a great example of […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100 (75-71)

75 IMS, The Guardian (2006, Tactical) When the Guardian decided to change paper size it supported the move with a big advertising push, but the move was also cloaked in mystery. It was a crucial time for the newspaper and for newspapers in general as modern lifestyles put a scourge on circulation figures. IMS were […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100 (80-76)

80 Reach, Energizer Wilkinson Sword (2007 Merchandising and Compliance) This was a tale of how the challenger brands to market leaders Duracell and Gillette compete effectively even though ATL advertising spend for the challenger trails a long way behind. Reach showed how a 32 strong team, armed with what was then state of the art […]

Continue reading...

The FMBE awards – my personal top100 (85-81)

85 REL, Sainsbury’s (2006, Merchandising and Compliance) It was a major reveal, the culmination of work that had started in 2004 and which saw REL strongly bonded to the store in a relationship that has lasted and gained ground year on year since. The judges believed it would go forward. REL had been entrusted with […]

Continue reading...