Experiential marketing is by no means a new phenomenon. But this summer, with nearly every public gathering place stuffed with immersive brand experiences - from music festivals to shopping centres to mainline railway stations - it seems to have truly cemented its place in the media plan.
Anyone watching Trafalgar Square will have seen it grassed over by Visit London, converted into a sports arena for Norwich Union and otherwise co-opted by one high-concept branded event after another.
Meanwhile, Innocent Drinks rolled out one of the grandest experiential set pieces to date, with its flagship village fete in Regent's Park. Despite offering an environment completely conditioned by the Innocent brand, it had no trouble persuading people to pay £5 for the privilege.
Hungry for real engagement, frustrated by fragmentation, brands want to put the message to us face to face, just to make sure we are getting it. More importantly, they are getting better at doing it.
The central tenet of experiential marketing is to let consumers inside the brand, in the least metaphorical sense. A TV ad makes you think about a product; the experiential version might put you in a comfy chair, give you a massage and entertain the kids while you eat the product - as demonstrated by the Natural Confectionery Company's ongoing roadshow, created by Sledge. Hugh Robertson, managing director of rival specialist agency RPM, explains: "We talk about being able to prove the truth behind the brand claim.
"Traditional media doesn't necessarily do that. It might make you aware of it, but in terms of being able to define it and prove it, we would argue that we are the only ones who can."
Mike Mathieson, chief executive at experiential veteran agency Cake, has a similar way of defining the experiential stock-in-trade. "My definition is basically about bringing brands to life through a total brand experience - one that fully immerses consumers in the brand proposition," he says.
"For each brand, it is a question of what they can do to make people smile and engage. It might be Visit London turfing over Trafalgar Square, or it might be Carling going to a music festival and offering to swap warm beer for cold Carling."
Anecdotally, most blue-chip brands are experimenting with experiential marketing in some form. For someof them, it is a central pillar of the communications strategy; legendary examples of brands such as Nike, Red Bull, Bacardi, Carling, Innocent and Ben & Jerry's have been a key factor in the medium's growth, combined with a fundamental shift in the mass-marketing model.
And it's not just specialist agencies talking up the sector. Russell Place, chief strategy officer at Universal McCann, observes: "Across a wide range of clients, there are some fairly phenomenal experiential programmes and some very strong brand properties, with a momentum of their own. The reality is that experiential marketing is becoming more important because the communications model we are involved in is moving from exposure to involvement."
Frustratingly, for all this growth, no one has yet put a convincing value on the market. "We have looked at trying to establish what the spend is," says RPM's Robertson. "People have talked about £400m - all we know at the moment is, it's going up," he says.
While many talk about the importance of creating engaging content as ad-avoidance becomes endemic, the best of experiential marketing - sometimes known as brand entertainment marketing - appears to be achieving it.
"Media fragmentation is driving it, but there is also a consumer demand around it," adds Robertson. "People are looking for greater truth behind brand claims and a way of establishing that is through a more direct and emotional communication."
As with any comparatively new marketing tool, experiential is hampered by the lack of a standard measurement. In this respect, the medium suffers a little from its own diversity. How to compare, for example, the branding value of PlayStation/OMD Fuse's current takeover of London and Manchester retail spaces to create temporary SingStar studios, with Evian/Cake's work in saving the Brockwell Park Lido in south London and teaching children and over-50s to swim?
The more serious accusation that events inherently lack strategic focus is an ironic one, according to Tim Leighton, communications director at WPP's FitchLive, the new incarnation of the recently merged PCI Fitch and Clever Media. He believes the roots of experiential media lie in the business-to-business sector, where for many years all kinds of manufacturers have brought sales forces, franchisees and staff together for crash courses in their brands at dedicated conferences and trade events, where woolly, unquantifiable goals would never be tolerated.
"A lot of what we do in the business-to-business world has to achieve some quite ambitious strategic goals," says Leighton. "And with a lot of the kind of events pioneered in that space, people are now looking to transfer above the line to interact with consumers."
FitchLive has worked for 15 years on Microsoft's famous Tech Ed events, where 7,000 developers and IT professionals pay for a week of seminars, workshops and presentations. Other clients include General Motors, for whom events are a key part of the sales process.
"When General Motors runs product launches for its dealers, you are talking about 6,000 or 7,000 people who have the power to ensure the success or failure of each new product as it comes out," says Leighton.
Proponents of consumer-focused experiential media dispute that events are less measurable than traditional media, pointing out that successful campaigns are just as systematic and goal-driven, sharing strategic objectives with traditional media.
Cake's Mathieson says: "More and more, when we see briefs, we see that element: 'What will the cost-per-sample be, what will the ROI be?'. We have tried to develop different measurement tools, using a combination of exit polling and on-site qualitative and quantitative research."
Sometimes, the yardstick might be rate of sale: the Ben & Jerry's Sundae music festival on Clapham Common, created by Cake, sold out this year in three and a half hours. On other occasions, the measure might be the amount of media coverage, a certain spike in brand awareness or a particular return on investment target, such as the number of test drives booked in, or even, yes, the number of samples given out.
"Sometimes, clients just go with that gut feel," says Mathieson. "'We exchanged half a million cans of warm beer at the Carling Weekend, so we touched that many people.'"
Jez Paxman, strategic director at Sledge, says experiential specialists have been elevated to full partner status on numerous major strategic accounts - evidence of a sea change in perceptions of the discipline.
"What used to happen, and thankfully happens less and less, is you would get a brief from a client who would say, 'we are launching the advertising campaign, the proposition is x, we would like you to come up with some experiential to work with it'," he says.
Sledge is in the process of helping to launch the self-explanatory Natural Confectionery Company, purely on the strength of an experiential media push. A mobile installation is touring family orientated festivals and shopping centres with a jungle adventure area for kids, incorporating slides and ball pools, along with diversions for mothers.
At an executional level, the sophistication of the operation is telling.
"First of all, we worked with the advertising agency (Fallon) and the PR company to come up with a strategic platform that worked for all of us," says Paxman. "That was focus-grouped with qualitative research agency Spinach, who spoke to a lot of mums and enabled us to fine-tune our concept."
Consulting firm Hall & Partners is evaluating the overall campaign as it happens, Paxman adds, reporting back on people-flow, how the branding appears to be working and the success of different experiential elements, before carrying out a quantitative assessment using an online survey of people who took part.
"Something like that holds its own with other media - it is not being done in an ad hoc way," says Paxman.
"There has been so much stuff in the press over the years saying it is not sophisticated and it is not measurable, and that is wrong."
Clearly, experiential media is taking itself seriously and the wider industry is following suit.
The movement of increasing numbers of mainstream advertising and media professionals into specialist experiential agencies, not to mention the in-house creative solutions departments that are springing up within the larger agencies, such as OMD Fuse and ZenithOptimedia's Newcast, make a similar case.
The emphasis across the sector, as everywhere else, is on integration. Experiential marketing, for all its stand-alone strengths, will be used by most clients as part of the wider communications mix, while particular events and initiatives are routinely amplified using other media.
Experiential specialists, who "have had the crumbs off the floor for quite some time", in the words of RPM's Robertson, plan to make themselves useful now they are at the top table. "Our planners are communications planners, as opposed to experiential planners," he says.
"We are always talking about traditional media being limited; well, let's not limit ourselves to just being experiential."
WALKERS "LUNCH HAPPY" CAMPAIGN
Good experiential marketing allows a brand to address a public need, and Walkers, with its "Lunch Happy" campaign lamenting the disappearance of the British lunchtime, attempted to do exactly that.
The brand initiated a nationwide "Moment of Happiness", using national press and radio partnerships against an experiential backdrop, which saw huge ranks of Walkers-branded deckchairs stationed in iconic sites across the UK.
"There was a creative, core idea about all these events, with deckchairs all over the country, and radio and press all worked around that," says Phil Holliday, head of OMD Fuse, which was behind the campaign.
"That is a good example of where the brand experience took centre stage. A brand experience shouldn't be seen in isolation and, at the same time, it shouldn't be about recreating the brand."
The promotion had value as both a sampling tool and a driver of sales. In all, 66,000 bags of crisps were sampled, while Boots experienced its highest ever day of Walkers sales and, by Fuse's calculations, 1.7 million consumers experienced the "Lunch Happy" campaign.
"As an agency, that is very much seen as a good example of how media and the non-traditional all work together," says Holliday. "Lots of these experiences can be quite passive - like, 'hey, sit back, we will give you some great content'. I think that is quite lazy, when a brand experience can do so much more: it can educate, it can create social spaces."
HOW EXPERIENTIAL CAN ENGAGE CONSUMERS ONLINE
Online audiences have become accustomed to advertising as part of their web browsing experience. As such, brands are looking for ways to truly engage consumers with their product - and online experiential marketing can do just that.
The basic premise is to use the power of social networks, user-generated content and Web 2.0 to allow consumers to actively participate in a promotional campaign. This is because a greater sense of engagement creates a much deeper relationship with the brand.
When Yahoo! worked with Lynx, consumers could create and upload their own video for the chance to meet the Lynx Minxes in Miami. This month, Sony teamed up with Yahoo! for Destination Handycam, a campaign combining professional and user-generated content to document Europe's favourite summer travel destinations. Yahoo! users are being asked to upload videos of their own travel tips and inspirational summer moments to their country's microsite for a chance to win European weekend holidays.
Blake Chandlee, director of media sales for Yahoo! UK & Ireland, said:
"Our recent work with Lynx and Sony are fantastic examples of how online marketing can work successfully with social media. By providing interesting and unique content - not just simple branding - we are enabling brands to engage and interact with a key audience in very meaningful ways. The key is to complement the experience, versus interrupting it."
Another example was the three-day virtual festival hosted in Second Life in June by The Guardian and Intel, with sets from the Pet Shop Boys, Hot Chip and New Young Pony Club, among others, spread across 144 "virtual acres". The event was an example both of how experiential can be leveraged for PR value and also of how an online happening can attract as much interest as an offline one.
Michael White at Itch, the event company that programmed "the festival", says: "We had 13,800 unique visitors to that site, which made it the biggest activity within Second Life to date. It was a virtual event, but it got just as much PR as the real thing."