Experiential marketing is changing and there are now more opportunities to be creative than ever. In today’s fiercely competitive marketplace driven by extreme consumerism, brands are forever struggling to make a recall in the minds of consumers. Luckily, new technologies are making our world more connected and opening up opportunities for brands to reach out to consumers with engaging experiential brand activations.
Take UK based charity Woman’s Aid for example. To coincide with International Women’s Day on March 8th this year, the charity placed interactive billboards around the country, featuring a woman with black eyes, swollen features and cuts and bruises. It’s a powerful image on its own, but the ad took things further by changing based on people’s responses to it.
Through a jaw-dropping use of facial recognition technology, the image changed based on how passers-by reacted to it. If people ignored it, nothing happened. But if they stopped and looked at it, the woman’s face began to heal. The more people that looked at her face, the faster the bruises faded.
The striking image of the woman was accompanied by messages such as ‘if you can see domestic violence, we can stop it,’ and ‘don’t turn a blind eye.’
The message behind the compelling experiential campaign was that addressing the silence and ignorance that accompanies domestic violence is an important step to ending it.
The ad made people stop and take notice. And to make it more impactful, people’s reactions were caught on camera and projected via a live feed at the bottom of the screen.
Facial Recognition Technology (FRT)
To a computer, your face is just a set of points and measurements, but to advertisers, the data is invaluable – offering a highly personalised way to connect with customers.
Facial Recognition Technology has come on so far that it can now measure the attention-level, age, and even the gender of passersby.
To that end, it is rapidly developing into a highly effective experiential campaign feature.
Beer brand Astra Bierre took advantage of FRT for their latest experiential marketing campaign; using it to identify consumers by their gender – and then delivering targeted messages specifically to women. If the ad identified a man, or those who it deemed underage, it instructed them to ‘keep on walking’.
The billboard delivered personalised content for viewers, fabricated from 70 unique videos featuring German actor and director Uke Bosse, who called out to women walking by to stop and try the beer.
The campaign combined experiential marketing with cutting edge technology to great effect, generating 326 million coverage views.
Hotcow is a non-traditional creative agency that specialises in experiential marketing that goes viral. Our campaigns generate buzz through crowd participation, PR and content sharing. Contact us on 0207 5030442 or email us on info@hotcow.co.uk.
