Anyone can throw up a tent in a high-traffic area and harass the general public, but what does it take to pull off an effective experiential event? In a piece that first appeared in Encore, Matt Smith investigates.
A television commercial can easily be muted and ignored, but try ignoring a purring, squirming cat in your arms. That was the experience awaiting passers by in Sydney’s Martin Place in October last year when Mars Petcare built Whiskas Kitten Palace.
The stunt involved constructing a transparent, custom-built house filled with cats provided by charity Pet Rescue. The project took around six months to plan, but the reception from a pet-loving city was more than worth it. “Despite the rain, people were lining up for an hour to see the cats,” says Anthony Dean from Mars Petcare. “We had a live feed of the event on our website and got a tonne of new Facebook likes. The house was busy all day and there was a 13 per cent increase in adoptions.”
Elaborate experiences like the Kitten Palace can be daunting to plan and pull off but are the perfect way to cut through advertising fatigue. At one time something as simple as throwing a tent up at Martin Place and handing out samples would cut the mustard. These days the competition is fierce, the stunts elaborate and flashy, but there’s a fine line between impressive and excessive.
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Australia has a number of locations that naturally make them ideal staging grounds for a high-profile marketing stunt. A report released by the City of Sydney says Martin Place sees more than 65,000 pedestrians on a summer weekday and up to 89,000 during winter. There are similar locations like the Bourke Street Mall in Melbourne or Rundle Mall in Adelaide.
“Martin Place is a busy thoroughfare that offers a ready-made audience for well-considered, engaging events and promotions,” says Michael Abbott, event and filming liaison officer for City of Sydney. “We make sure events are a good fit for it, without affecting pedestrian flow or causing too much noise disruption. The street often gets booked out months in advance. The charge to use the space is $275 per hour, plus a $200 application fee. You also need public liability insurance.”
Across town from Sydney’s Martin Place is another pedestrian-heavy area popular with locals and tourists alike – Bondi beach. When creative partner and founder of The Works Damian Pincus was given the ambitious task of telling the story of whisky giant Jim Beam by converting the iconic Icebergs pool into a giant esky, he knew the agency was taking on a big job.
“Bondi beach is an iconic place in Australian culture, so the location fit perfectly. We thought about using Martin Place – or Marketing Place, as we like to call it – but it was too small in terms of what we were trying to achieve. It helped tell the brand story of ‘making history’ that we wanted,” says Pincus.
“The esky took seven to eight months to plan. There were 32 cans to build, each 15 feet high, and they had to be physically carried down to Icebergs pool.
“While Icebergs regularly hosts events, this was on a bigger scale. We secured the site by making a donation to the Bondi Icebergs Club. We had the pool for a single day.”
It makes sense to capture an elaborate stunt like the giant esky on film and The Works took this one step further shooting the latest Beam commercial using the esky as a set. “If you’re spending a big amount of a client’s money a stunt you like to maximise what you get,” says Pincus. “The reaction from the public and the press was outstanding, and the experience worked for two simple reasons – it was a great idea, and it was achievable.”
But a single location isn’t the only option for an experiential set up. Tim Tam’s ‘share the love’ campaign, devised by Mango, took the popular biscuit nationwide. The ‘love more than one’ tour saw a Tim Tam-branded bus drive 5,378kms over 17 days across Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales, distributing 73,000 packets of Tim Tams on the way. “To launch the new Tim Tam treat pack range we really wanted to embrace the ‘share the love’ campaign,” says Brooke Pilton, head of experiential at Mango Sydney. “The bus was a great way to engage the public directly – around 50,000 people came to see it.
“We had a skeleton staff on the bus – a videographer, a tour manager, a photographer, around eight people in total. A support vehicle followed and interactive games and activities were carefully planned so we could quickly pull it out of the bus and set up.
“We were briefed for this in September 2012 and rolled it out just before Valentine’s Day, so it was tight. Logistically it was a challenge but we had a great team and planned for the inevitable. You have to when you’re on the road.”
A different kind of experience was shared by Victoria’s Transport Accident Commission late last year, in an effort to increase awareness of the road toll and driver safety over the 2012 Christmas period. A 60-metre long table was set up at Southbank in Melbourne with an empty chair and place to represent each of the people who had died in road accidents in the state that year. A similar table was set up in Ballarat to show the regional road toll.
“We were careful to make the tables as respectful yet accurate as possible,” says Michael Knox, executive creative director of Grey. “The place settings were all second hand. They were representative of age groups, there were high chairs and walkers.
“If there was a new death we’d set an extra place, which happened even as we were setting up. We began with 257 places. We finished the campaign at 262. Sometimes it’s hard to visualise such a large number, yet that’s what we did without exaggerating it.
“What we really wanted to do was to start a conversation. We filmed for the three days, and people would come and look at the table, light candles and share their stories.
“We weren’t setting out to make a commercial, we just wanted to put a tangible representation on the road toll.”
While experiential events are often costly and time consuming, they can bring feedback and success that makes the undertaking worthwhile.
Taking a different approach to creating an experiential campaign, activation director of Chieftan Communications Neil Parkin says they “took a bit of a hit” to pull off Kit Kat Chunky’s ‘hero’ campaign which involved a nationwide call out to find an everyday hero that would be trained as a stuntman.
“We decided to put a campaign together where we asked the public to send in stunts,” says Parkin. “We chose a winner from 250 submissions and trained him to be a stuntman. Every step of the way was documented with video diaries and it melded well across different platforms.”
The campaign was recognised in the experiential category at the 2012 Australian Marketing Institute awards and Parkin says some ideas are worth the bragging rights despite budgetary stress.
“We loved the idea so much that we wanted to see it through,” he says. “It opened the client’s eyes to what experiential advertising could be. If we didn’t do it we could have been missing out on something that would take us to the next level.”
This story first appeared in the weekly edition of Encore available for iPad and Android tablets. Visit encore.com.au for a preview of the app or click below to download.
