IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES
Catherine Botibol, Owner Pd3, Executive producer, Grimm Tales
For brands, real-life experiences and touchpoints with their audience have become much more relevant. It is something you can't download, something tangible, almost a backlash against the virtual world we now experience so much of life through. Immersive experiences are real.
Everyone has been using the term 'storytelling' in ad land for the past two years because most brands need to be switched on all the time. That is how customers interact now, so the best way to approach that is for brands to decide what their story is and then deliver that message - or story - across all their platforms.
We are certainly sensing a shift towards immersive experiences. Our agency, , specialises in culture marketing for brands, but immersive remains a tough sell. Clients often tell us that they want to create an immersive experience, but aren't entirely sure what it entails.
Exploring the theme of immersive experiences for brands helped us come across Grimm Tales. And once we'd discovered it, we thought it was such a great concept that we had to explore it for ourselves. The tales are universally known, but they are so simple and old, and were originally told to audiences as folk tales. Creatively, therefore, it was perfect bringing them back to life in a storytelling sense.
No one has created an immersive yet accessible theatre production that a mainstream audience can enjoy - you don't need an arts degree to understand this one. We spent our entire marketing budget on the set for Grimm Tales, which is currently playing at London's Bargehouse.
Ultimately, we have made our audience marketers because 20 per cent of the crowd will come and be absorbed by the performance and tweet what they see, which means word of mouth becomes the best way to market ourselves. For brands to create transformative experiences, the audience will become their marketers, their advocates, which is what every brand wants.
Clients have come to experience the production and it has been our best new business driver to date, because it is proof of what we can create and deliver. One of our proudest moments last year was an event for Save the Children at the start of December. Some of its team had seen Grimm Tales at Shoreditch, so for one night we created it at Guild Hall for the charity's most important annual fundraiser. We had to par back the set to make it appropriate for the audience - it is such a different venue to the Bargehouse, and the woodchip forest feel we have here might not have worked for the celebrity guests in their gowns. However, it was an honour to be involved and more than £1m was pledged at its biggest-ever fundraiser.
Immersive is a trend that is simply going to grow in 2015, so brands need to adapt and choose the language of the immersive experience that works best for them - and their story.
Tomorrow, Dawn Cardy, experiential director of Mission, will discuss the trend towards cross-brand collaborations.
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2014
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