The Experiential Forest vs. The Experiential Trees
Posted by Todd Buckton on Tue, Nov 17, 2009
The world of experiential marketing is not good in Australia this week, and I'm afraid that some agency owners might be looking at the trees instead of the forest. 2 experiential agencies have ceased to be. The first, Maverick, shuttered their doors for good to become a new agency, Wonder. Co-founder Glen Condie described the state of experiential marketing down under by saying the entire sector is "utterly devoid of anything interesting". Next, the experiential agency Ignition EM is turning into a consultancy. Founder Nick Callender says that experiential has been co-opted by promo and PR agencies and has become "nothing more than sampling campaigns. I don’t think a lot of clients have an idea about what experiential marketing is.” Strong words from 2 established talents.
While I'm sure that all forms of marketing in Australia are suffering from the same budgetary constraints that we're seeing here in the US, it seems a bit odd that 2 agencies are saying virtually the same thing: that experiential campaigns are droll ways to get consumers to try your product, and that it's tough to make ends meet doing it. I am certainly oversimplifying, but from where I sit, experiential is vibrant, engaging, memorable and, most importantly, sells product at a far lower cost than traditional media and produces positive ROI quicker. Show me something that's fetching that doesn't move product and something workaday that does; I choose the latter every time. But if it's clever, attractive and sells it's even better.
Also, I live in the B2B, not the B2C world. I'm sure that in B2C, sampling programs are a default experiential solution for CPG companies, but there is some great stuff going on there too from what I see. For example, necessity is the mother of invention and so we have pop-up stores. Cool, temporary stores that drive business and create buzz.
It appears that there may be more to the reasoning behind the coincidental nature of the Australian agency closings. Regardless, I think it's foolish to throw an entire channel under the bus as the justification for poor revenues.
Photo by renaissancechambara