Article: How To Turn Traditional Advertising Into Experiential Activity

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There is a common misperception that in order to fully embrace modern advertising activity like experiential marketing you must first reject traditional advertising techniques.  This, of course, is rubbish – why on earth would a new form of advertising totally reject all that has gone before it? The answer is that it simply wouldn’t. New concepts tend to take their inspiration from current thinking and past experience so the idea that traditional methods and mediums have been left by the wayside just doesn’t fly.

In fact, with just a few simple changes, traditional advertising practices can be brought into the realms of experiential marketing with little or no fuss.  Indeed, we’d go further and say that experiential marketing is in no way a replacement for the traditional (as seems to be a common misunderstanding) and is, in fact, there to compliment it and increase effectiveness across the board.

So, what are these simple changes that can turn a traditional campaign into an experiential one?  Well, we’ll take the three traditional bastions of advertising in turn starting with…print media.

Print media has long been seen as a standalone advertising tool; campaigns can run, in their entirety, on print alone.  In fact, print advertising (along with TV) is still the number one form of marketing globally.

However, it has no need to be standalone.  When seen as the first step in a two step process its applications as a facilitator for experiential marketing are evident.  When used to provide a wide-ranging announcement (such as heralding an event) or provoke some kind of physical consumer action (a competition that requires a real-world action at a certain place, time and date for instance) its merits are clear.

Simply put, it acts as a driving force in your experiential activities.  It is also useful in slightly more complicated roles where it actually forms part of the experiential activity itself rather than just a pointer to it.

An example of this kind of activity would have national print press running adverts that take the form of cryptic clues in a major nationwide competition to win a Ferrari; the clues would, when collected from the selection of papers they appeared in, give away the secret location of the prize Ferrari.

This kind of competition can take place over a period of days or weeks with each successive cryptic clue revealing a little more of the location. The winner of any such competition would, of course, be the person who got to the correct location first.

In this way it is possible to see how traditional print media when not being used to drive audience or attendance figures (in itself a legitimate and important part of experiential activity) can actually make up the activity itself. Indeed, it is possible to see how, in a hypothetical case like this, only the use of print media can accomplish a country-wide experiential campaign.

Next on our list of traditional media bastions is that of product placement.  Product placement is traditionally associated with TV and film – and yet, in the right hands, it can be so much more.  All it takes is a little inventive thinking. In fact, a great number of experiential and guerrilla marketing efforts rely on the proven effectiveness of product placement.  Whether it’s heavily branding an enormous paddling pool and placing it in a busy park whilst handing out ice-creams as part of a brand awareness project or carrying out standalone installations featuring your chosen product in unusual places designed to intrigue and cause comment the applications remain the same.

It’s a simple case of moving away from the screen and into reality – breaking the fourth wall in a different way.

Finally we’ll take the third pillar of traditional advertising; that of television itself.  This is most normally looked at as a medium to convey something to an audience at home…and in general there’s not a great deal that’s experiential about that.

However, when used another way it becomes an enormously helpful tool in any experiential campaign.  TV cameras bring people flocking wherever they’re located…so why not use that to your advantage?  The simple setting up and use of a TV camera at an experiential event can dramatically increase the number of potential customer in your immediate locale.  But more than this these TV cameras can provide more customer profile and product testing information than any number of notes and Dictaphone recordings can.

Instead of using television to sell your product to consumers (in the traditional fashion) use it to provide a focal point for your experiential event and then use the filmed results as the basis for your product assessment in the aftermath.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just how to begin using traditional media in experiential campaigns…ask us what else we know, go on.

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