Being briefed early in the campaign planning life cycle and working as a cross agency team can have massive benefits for all involved.
You might say that this would seem quite obvious, however (and unfortunately – although this is slowly improving) experiential agencies have traditionally been seen as the distant relatives of the big advertising and media agencies. This can result in the experiential brief being delivered almost as an afterthought – not impossible to work with but it certainly makes life interesting when the brief is literally to “bring the ATL to life”.
Being briefed at such an early stage also enables all the agencies to work together as a “team”, allowing the experiential campaign to evolve more naturally from the ATL, creating a seamless identity between all media. Consumers then find it a more natural step to physically and mentally link together the experience they have undergone, to the competition they read about in the Metro that morning, or the ad they saw on TV that week.
Not only can this significantly impact results – (results from the recent Nescafé Masterbrand experiential campaign show significantly stronger results amongst consumers exposed to the rest of the campaign) but from a practical point of view, I know from talking to clients how much they personally get out of working as a cross agency team (it quite simply saves a lot of time in meetings).
I’ve been lucky enough to work as part of a cross agency team on quite a few campaigns now and I only wish that all brands had the capacity to manage their campaigns in this way.
What are the drawbacks I hear you say? Pitching for budgets can certainly lead to some quite creative discussions!
Thanks,
Tessa James
Senior Account Director
iD Experiential
0207 428 1465
tessaj@idinfo.com