London Pleasure Gardens transforms docklands wasteland into arts and culture oasis

An ambitious project to convert a 20-acre stretch of east London wasteland into a 35,000 capacity arts and culture destination will be completed on 30 June.

The London Pleasure Gardens, located at Pontoon Dock, will feature a 27,000 capacity open-air space for live concerts, a 2,800 capacity sound proofed indoor space with late license, a floating cocktail lounge with a 24-hour licence, large-scale sculpture gardens and a dome building with an events capacity for 1,000.

Events already confirmed for the site include, UK electronic music festival Bloc, featuring Snoop Dogg and Orbital on 6 and 7 July, plus the Africa stage for BT’s River of Music, taking place over the weekend before the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony.

Part of the London 2012 Festival, the BT River of Music will feature performances by musicians representing all the Olympic and Paralympic nations.

Musicians from the world’s major continents will be represented across six stages: Battersea Park (Asia stage); Trafalgar Square (Europe stage); Somerset House (Europe stage); Tower of London (Americas stage); Greenwich Old Royal Naval College (Oceania stage) and London Pleasure Gardens (Africa stage).

During the Olympic Games, the London Pleasure Gardens will provide a waterfront location for live art, film screenings, promenade performances and community projects.

On 30 July, a pyrotechnic show will animate the concrete architecture that surrounds the site.

The show will be inspired by a traumatic event that happened on the site in 1917, when a TNT factory exploded, tragically killing 73 people and filling the sky with burning grain. The performance will fuse music, pyrotechnics, projection and theatre.

Between the 17th and 19th Centuries in Britain, Pleasure Gardens were communal spaces where people from all walks of life, converged to listen to music, admire paintings, stroll, drink and immerse themselves in the culture that made their city great.

The most famous Pleasure Gardens were in Vauxhall. Mozart played there aged nine and Charles Dickens wrote about them. Between 1851 and 1884, the Royal Docks had its very own Pleasure Gardens, named The Royal Victoria Gardens.

The modern day scheme is supported by Newham Council, the Mayor of London and the London Development Agency to kick-start regeneration initiatives planned for the Royal Docks in the London borough of Newham.

As winners of a Mayoral competition to find ‘Meanwhile’ uses for prominent brownfield sites in the Olympic borough, the team behind the Pleasure Gardens will stage events, concerts and cultural collaborations on the site until 2014.

The London Pleasure Gardens team includes Debs Armstrong, who is the Creative Director and Co-producer of the Shangri-La area at Glastonbury Festival, and was also the co-Founder and Producer of The Lost Vagueness area which preceded it, as well as the designer of bespoke events and live music tours by bands such as Groove Armada, and Ed Harcourt.

Also involved are Robin Collings who organised Stoke Newington Festival and Bassline Circus at Glastonbury, and Garfield Hackett who produced Mutate Britain, and Cordy House.

London 2012 Festival will be largest cultural celebration in our lifetime

The full programme for the London 2012 Festival was launched today (26 April). It contains some 12,000 events and performances from over 25,000 artists from all 205 participating Olympic nations.

Kicking off across the UK on 21 June and running until 9 September, there will be 137 world firsts and 85 UK premiers, featuring well-known names from the arts, music, comedy, dance and culture. 

Billed as the ‘Once in a Lifetime’ Festival and taking place at 900 venues, the London 2012 Festival  begins with four opening day events. 

Lake Windermere in the Lake District will stage a free outdoor event featuring French pyrotechnic wizards Les Commandos Percu to celebrate the Olympic Flame’s arrival to the region, whilst in the heart of Derry/Londonderry’s new cultural quarter, a Peace One Day Global Truce Countdown Concert will take place. 

Also, on 21 June, the children of Raploch in Stirling will perform in The Big Concert, conducted by world renowned conductor Gustavo Dudamel, and Edward Gardner and Simon Halsey will raise their batons together for the UK premier of Weltethos at the Symphony Hall, Birmingham. 

London highlights during the Festival will include the floating children’s opera The Owl and the Pussycat written by Monty Python star Terry Jones and Oscar winning composer Anne Dudley, which will travel through London’s canal network, plus pop-up Shakespeare performances around the city, with a cast led by actor and director Mark Rylance. 

A barge manned by a group of well-known British comedians will set sail from London and attempt to reach Edinburgh’s celebrated Fringe venue, The Pleasance, staging pop-up comedy gigs along the way. Whilst, The BT River of Music will showcase performances from five continents across six stages located in iconic locations around the capital. The six stages will represent the continents - Asia in Battersea Park, Africa in Jubilee Gardens, Europe in Trafalgar Square and Somerset House, the Americas at the Tower of London, and Oceania in the Greenwich Old Royal Naval College. 

Some 160,000 free tickets are available for confirmed acts including the Noisettes and the Scissor Sisters. 

Major London events which form part of the Festival include BBC Radio 1’s Hackney Weekend (23-24 June), the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, the World Shakespeare Festival and Urban Classic - a mash-up between the BBC Symphony Orchestra and urban acts including Ms Dynamite planned for Waltham Forest Town Hall on 5 July. 

Other much anticipated activity from across the country includes the world premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht, which features a string quartet streamed live from helicopters flying over Birmingham, plus an ‘Unlimited’ programme of events involving deaf and disabled artists. 

Ruth MacKenzie, Director of the Cultural Olympiad and London 2012 Festival said: “It will be the largest cultural celebration in our lifetime. With new work from the best musicians, comics, artists, film makers and more, there will be arts events taking place in unusual places all over the UK that will showcase the best in international culture when the eyes of the world are on us this summer.”

Principal funders of the London 2012 Festival are Arts Council England, Legacy Trust UK and the Olympic Lottery Distributor. BP and BT are Premier Partners. 

London announces plans for 2013 cycling festival

This week saw the announcement of the first mass participation event, to be held in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park after it reopens to the public following the London 2012 Games.
The two-day cycling festival is an ambitious undertaking to kick-start an events legacy for the park and encourage more cycling in London.

On a Saturday in August 2013, a family-fun-free-ride will take around 70,000 participants passed many of the UK capital's famous landmarks.

The following day, an elite race and amateur cycle challenge will comprise a 100-mile route, which is intended to start in the Olympic Park and finish in central London. Some 35,000 riders are expected to take part.

The Olympic Park Legacy Company will also organise a full weekend of wheel-based activities on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park to support the festival of cycling. They will aim to bring local communities together through events, competitions, workshops, music, food and film.

Below is a short video of the press conference to announce this Olympic legacy initiative and to call for an events delivery partner to come forward. If you can't see the video, please click here to access it on YouTube.

London wins bid to host 2017 Athletics World Championships

London has been chosen as the host city for the 2017 World Athletics Championships.

The International Association of Athletics Federations selected London ahead of Doha at a bid presentation in Monaco by 16 votes to 10, earlier today (Friday 11 November).

It will be the first time that the World Athletics Championships are to be held in the UK and marks the first major tournament confirmed for the Olympic Stadium post London 2012.

Speaking from Monaco, The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said: "Despite an excellent challenge from Doha, the London team put together a cracking bid which has paid off. With the 2017 championships now in the diary, next summer’s London Games is just the start of a long and active life for our magnificent stadium."

Over the last decade, London has transformed itself to become recognised globally as a leading city for major sporting events. Other successful bids for major sporting events post 2012 include the 2013 UEFA Champions League Final, the 2013 ITU World Championship Series Triathlon Grand Final and the 2015 Canoe Slalom World Championships.

Based on the success of London 2012’s International Inspiration Project, London 2017 has revealed the international legacy programme that will now be launched following the city's successful bid to host the 2017 World Athletics Championships. 

LEAP 2017 has been designed to engage two million children in athletics across 17 developing countries over four years.

A huge congratulations to everyone involved with the successful London 2017 bid.

Integrating Social Media into Conferencing & Events

Last week, I gave an after-lunch talk to marketing and events professionals, hosted by the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre. The feedback was positive so I thought I'd post some of the key insights and tips on a couple of events industry blog sites. The posts have since been tweeted and re-tweeted so many times, I must have struck a positive chord with event planners. So, I've decided to post my talk highlights one more time, here... I hope you find it useful.

My talk went something like this…

I firmly believe that online marketing and communication channels such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and FlickR are enabling event planners, venues and suppliers to develop longer-term interaction with event attendees.

These online tools are allowing us to grow the conference or event beyond the physical and to keep people talking about their experiences and our event content long after the last delegate has left the building.

Social Media is nothing short of a communications revolution. It’s a means to amplify our messaging, build community, gather feedback in real time, ask questions of our audiences, research our markets and gain business referrals from our new online friends and followers.

One-way marketing messages, whereby a newsletter or piece of email marketing is sent out from an email address that says DO NOT REPLY are becoming obsolete. The communications revolution is all about Conversations, User Generated Content and Interacting with the online community.

We can no longer control what is said online by people attending our events so we need to understand how to engage with the conversations that are already happening, build loyalty amongst followers and provide good Social Media Value.

So I’m just going to give you a few tips on how to start thinking about integrating Social Media into your marketing or event strategies.

If you’re not using Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, the best way to understand their benefits is simply to start using them socially. Once you get to grips with the simple mechanics of growing online conversation, such as Hashtags, Fan Pages, Tiny URLs, TwitPics etc, you can then start to see how it can be applied to your every-day business or event planning needs.

When integrating Social Media into Event strategies, consider how it can be used to engage with delegates or attendees at an earlier stage. A lot of exhibitions now use Twitter as a free marketing tool to communicate the latest confirmed speaker, or encourage registration sign-ups. But what about creating user groups on LinkedIn or Facebook and crowd sourcing what topics delegates wish to hear about or allowing them to vote on panelists, or even something as simple as the theme of the gala dinner. By engaging your audience at an earlier stage, you will secure their buy-in and reduce the number of no-shows or drop-outs.

Every event has a website but, by creating multiple event pages across different online streams you’ll be casting your net wider and enhancing your search engine optimization at the same time. This is especially true if you then link your blog, Facebook Fan Page, YouTube Channel and LinkedIn discussion group back to your website.

In the run up to the event, launch Twitter competitions awarding free registration or tickets. A simple way to do this is just to ask people on Twitter to Re-Tweet a chosen message. A winner can be then drawn from the pile of Re-tweets that appear in your @Replies Folder. This is a good way to track the reach of your marketing messages across Twitter and to see who is willing to engage with the event. Maybe you can reward the most loyal advocates in some other way at a later date.

During the event, launch a HashTag on Twitter and encourage people to use it so that attendees and remote watchers can follow what’s happening. Putting a HashTag before a word simply creates a link to a new page. This page then shows the full conversation stream of everyone who has used that chosen HashTag – enabling a simple way to follow a particular conversation subject.

If you then stage an unofficial Tweet up (networking event for people engaged with Twitter), it’s a good way to spread the word of your chosen HashTag and get likely content creators motivated and excited.

Broadcasting the conversations that people are hash-tagging, by running a live stream on a big screen on the main stage at your event, is perhaps a risk too far. Human nature dictates that somebody at some point will publish something offensive. But, why not use smaller screens in seminar rooms to help facilitate real-time Q&A sessions whilst the speaker is presenting?

You’ll find that some audience members will be able to answer the questions before the speaker does. If this is deemed too distracting for the speaker then technology offered by companies such as Crystal Interactive allow audience members to text in questions during the presentation, which are stored and can then be shown on screen and answered during an allotted Q&A slot.

Your aim with Social Media should be, to spread as widely as possible, content generated, either for the event by those directly involved, or by participants, advocates and remote watchers.

There’s so many web-based applications available to allow you to stream video, share speaker presentations, merge all Hash-tagged Tweets into PDF documents, create graphs and charts to measure the Return on the Objective of HashTags, launch user generated photo galleries, broadcast audio and so much more.

If you’re not doing any of these things, just think how much more engaging your events could be – if only you’d invested the time in discovering what free Social Media can do for you.

Brits lose their French appeal

Has the main after-party at the Brits become another victim of recessionary times or has designer Bruce French simply run out of ideas?

Last night the Brit Awards celebrated its 30th anniversary at Earls Court with a star-studded ceremony, elaborate set and stage designs and the obligatory rock ‘n’ roll moment, which saw organisers having to plead with the pit full of baying teens to hand back Liam Gallagher’s microphone during commercial break.

But once the cameras stopped rolling and sing-a-long with Robbie was finally over, it was time to head next door for what should have been another year of Tim Burton-esque party theming.

Down the years, Bruce French has produced some spectacular backdrops, which would regularly make it onto the covers of my former magazine RSVP.

In 2005, the Brits celebrated its 25th anniversary with a Silver Jubilee Cockney Street-party, complete with East-end pub, whilst on Valentines Day 2007, revellers partied on Love Street complete with its own Elvis Chapel.

I first heard about his work from those that remember the fully blossomed pink and white trees he once installed at the Brits. So in 2004, when looking for a cover story to launch RSVP, I headed to his two-tier Heaven and Hell themed extravaganza.

Being the 30th anniversary, this year should have been special so I was shocked to discover that Lady Ga Ga was better dressed than the 2010 after-party.

Earls Court’s Brompton Hall looked like...well..it looked liked the Brompton Hall with dodgems, an out-of-place over-sized crazy golf course and a Rockeoke stage inviting wrist-band holders to screech out their favourite song whilst a band tried desperately to keep them in time.

It was achingly bad and budgetary issues aside, I know a hundred different events agencies that could have done a better job. Maybe it’s time that the Brits organisers put this annual party contract out to tender. Let theatre designer Bruce French be remembered for his legendary Brits work and next year, give this after-party contract to the UK’s creative events industry.

A decade to be done with?

As we enter into the final month of the Noughties, most events businesses will be glad to see the back of the opening decade of the 21st Century.

For many, it began with the irrational fear that the Millennium Bug would wipe computer systems off the face of the world. It will end with the very real threat that event budgets, purchasing power and creative execution will never be the same again.

In event terms, the Noughties will be remembered as a decade when humans were given the power to stop talking all together. Instead, we could tweet, poke, MSN or Skype. How event management companies adapt and integrate this communication revolution into their face-to-face strategies will determine their success in years to come.

In world affairs, the Noughties introduced us to terms like global warming, tsunami, Jihad and Jedward. At first we were too scared to travel, then we were too green to travel and now we are too cash-strapped to travel.

'Staycation', 'carbon footprint', 'procurement' and 'phoenixing' are all words that event and incentive planners would rather consign to the archives. Instead, these words are now cemented into language by Wikipedia editors and for a while, resulted in pretty decent Scrabbulous scores.

In Milan last week, I chaired a conference round-table discussion between event agencies from France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Portugal. In front of a European audience of around 200 suppliers, venues, agencies and planners, we discussed if the events industry would ever be the same again.

The outcome across Europe, as you may expect, was not wholly positive but, there were some things to look forward to once this decade of death and destruction is done with.

Hardship brings forth collaboration and entrepreneurship so creativity will win out in the end. Client relationships are more important than budgetary spend and so, business will grow more personal as networks grow ever more promiscuous. The economy will recover (the majority forecasting green shoots towards the end of 2010) and reckless bankers will be prevented from ever bringing us to the verge of bankruptcy again. And, despite all the options to the contrary, people across Europe still prefer to do business face-to-face. Besides which, here in the UK we have the Olympic Games to look forward to!

Talking social media at Summer Eventia

Brighton played host to the Eventia Summer Conference this week so I headed to the south coast for three days of stimulating sessions on events industry trends, fun networking and a community programme that saw delegates painting a local school’s playground. (see more of my photos included in C&IT's 48 hours at Summer Eventia slideshow)

I was also there in my capacity as an events industry speaker. At 9.30am on the conference’s second day, I joined Simon Burton, MD of Exposure Communications and Rob Shimmin, MD of Shimmin.biz, to talk-up the benefits of social media to businesses.

The session drew a lot of interest from an industry that is still quite slow to embrace the opportunities presented by an ever-changing media landscape so I’ve decided to use this blog to repeat and expand on some of the key points.

Firstly, the events and hospitality industry needs to stop thinking of Twitter as a social tool for online conversation and start viewing it as a marketing and business channel that can be used for: amplification, community building, feedback, research, awareness and to build brand advocacy amongst business and consumer audiences.

Statistics that show how Twitter has transcended basic social networking include:

• The total minutes spent on Twitter rose by a staggering 3712% from April 08 to April 09. (Neilson)


• 88% of marketers say they are using some form of social media to market their business with Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook, in that order, forming the top 4 social media tools used (mediaplanner.com)


• The average age of a twitter user is 35-49 (Neilson)


• Twitter has more than 32 million users, an increase from about 2 million a year ago


• Some Internet measurement services show that figure increasing 50% to 100% month over month. (Wall Street Journal)


• Twitter is now growing at a mind-boggling 2,565 percent


• Twitter reached more than 13 million people in the US during April 2009 and that’s just on its website (i.e. - not counting 3rd party applications and mobile) (Mashable)


• The top two brands mentioned on Twitter as of May 2009 were Starbucks and Google

In a media rich and time poor environment, more and more people are selecting channels to allow for filtering of vast quantities of disseminated information. People want a lot of information instantly but need to find ways to focus on what’s useful or interesting or relevant.

This means that if an audience has a genuine interest in your proposition and has chosen Twitter as the key channel by which to filter their information, they are more likely to engage with your messages and click through on provided links than they are to engage with, say a newsletter that appears in their email inbox daily, or a piece of direct marketing that’s landed on their doorstep.

My example of the potential reach of Twitter made during the conference session:

I recently did a marketing consultancy exercise for an events industry client which involved live Tweeting from an event they were staging. They wanted to know the worth and potential reach of Twitter so that they could decide how to use it as an effective communications tool.

During the course of the event (one hour), I sent 10 Tweets with relevant key words and Hash tags:

The Tweets were Retweeted 17 times across the world

The furthest away was Retweeted in New Zealand

Of those 17 Twitter accounts that repeated one or more of my messages, the potential reach was 18.109 people

We exist in a world where content is accessible and free. The days of being able to control or manage that content are long-gone. Seeking the removal of online messages will now legitimize and simply bring further attention to any negative sentiment.

Brand communication strategies have to focus on engagement. And the engagement needs to be long-term, from senior players in the business (rather than PRs) and abide by basic ‘Netiquette’ principles.

By banning social media from your business, not only are you making a statement about your brand’s unwillingness to engage, but you’re also cutting off a key research tool that allows you to see what others are saying about your business in real time.

Do you know your brand’s perception according to the Twitterverse?

Footnote:
Remember, just as so much content is free, so too are the applications that allow you to broadcast or access this information.

I’ve recently discovered AudioBoo - a free iPhone application that allows you to record five minute segments of speech before immediately publishing online.

Here is five minutes of Rohit Talwar, CEO of Fast Future, predicting the future trends for the events industry at the Eventia conference:

The British Music Experience at London's O2

For anyone that hasn't yet made it down to the British Music Experience, here's a case study I wrote for Visit London after the O2 staged an evening to showcase the Bubble's latest interactive exhibition along with its Finale events space.

What was the event?
On Wednesday 13 May, more than 150 corporate planners flocked to London's newest events space and interactive exhibition, the British Music Experience (BME) within The O2 entertainment complex.

How is the BME set up?
Hundreds of artists feature in the exhibition from The Beatles to Iron Maiden, from Cilla Black to Elastica, and from David Bowie to Motorhead with in-depth looks at musical genres from Skiffle to Reggae, from Rock n' Roll to Blues, and from Punk to Grime.

The BME uses RFID technology throughout, meaning that traditional tickets are replaced by a Smart ticket which allows visitors to activate the interactive elements of the exhibition and also to register further interest in specific features.

The exhibition is split into nine zones around a central core that explores, amongst other areas, the history of playback, transmission and dance music.

The core's Dance the Decades feature allows guests to learn one of 12 dances from the past 70 years including The Twist, Disco, The Loca-Motion, Voguing and even Rave. A virtual dance instructor shows off the moves and a swipe of the Smart ticket on the Smart ticket sensor point outside the booth, allows guests to record their own choreography and become a virtual dancer in their own video.

Around the core's perimeter, the zones are split into music decades beginning with 1945-62 and going right through to 1993 to present day and a glimpse of the future. The Gibson Interactive Studio, also situated on the core's perimeter, offers visitors an opportunity to play on various guitars from the Gibson family, Singerland drums and Baldwin digital pianos, plus a mixing desk and vocal booth. Visitors are given step-by-step video tutorials on beginner, intermediate and pro-tutorial settings.

How would the BME work for event planners?
O2 Head of Sales Caroline McNamara explains: "When event planners hire the 347m² Finale Space, their guests get to tour the phenomenal exhibition before ending up in the events area. Within this Finale Space, we can host 288 people on round tables, 350 people for a conference or 400 for a standing event. The audio-visual technology available allows corporates to create a special visual experience across the walls of the space, and we also offer a BME corporate or individual exhibition membership scheme."

What happened during the showcase evening?
Guests gathered for a drinks reception in the Finale Space, which is available to hire seven days a week and can be transformed into a variety of set-ups in just one hour.

Food was provided by Compass Group and guests were treated to an introductory speech by Curator Paul Lilley before heading off to explore the exhibition.

Lilley said: "Britain has been at the creative forefront of the worldwide music industry for well over half a century now so it's always struck me as strange that there has never been a British music museum. Popular music is often thought of as something disposable, great entertainment or escapism. It is all these things but it's also something more, a part of who we are and our history. This is why it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the British Music Experience, here at the world’s most popular music venue.

"Museums collect, preserve and interpret. We have collected and preserved iconic memorabilia but, where we differ to other museums is in the interpretation. The BME is an experience and its Smart ticket system allows guests to get involved with many of the exhibits and take a part of the experience away with you when you leave. You can download your guitar playing or singing. As you go around you can learn dance moves or explore music time lines. You can interrogate the Thatcher years or look at how music playback and broadcast have changed over the decades. It is a combination of the most cutting-edge memorabilia with this high-end, state-of-the-art interactivity. What a perfect backdrop for an event."

What did the corporates think of the BME?
Reaction from those client event planners who attended the BME open evening was overwhelmingly positive. Jennifer Campbell, Senior Consultant at Style de Vie Unique said: "It's an excellent venue and I loved the fact that corporate hire of the Finale Space included access to the exhibits. It is a fantastic space for live events but also stylish and effective for private hire - just the type of venue we'd be interested in using from a bespoke perspective."
Linda Wadkin, PA to the Chief Executive of Courthaulds said: "It's amazing, I don't want to go home. It's really interactive, I love the smart tickets and I can't wait to recommend it to my bosses as an events space."

For details on hiring the O2 Bubble featuring the British Music Experience for events click here

Tweetup at SEA Life London Aquarium

I co-hosted the first Events Industry Tweetup earlier this week at the new SEA Life London Aquarium. It was a great evening with an unexpectedly high turn-out of more than 100 event professionals.

On arrival, guests marveled at the sharks, swimming beneath them as they ventured across the Shark Walk. They could then communicate with scuba divers in the tank, watch the Green turtles from the new glass Ocean Tunnel and network with fellow Twitterers including deceptionist Sav, and look-a-likes Marylin Monroe, Madonna and David Beckham.

Myself and fellow host Peter Kerwood also used the event to announce the launch of our online Twitter directory. By registering your Twitter name on www.eventweeps.com, it'll make it easier for others to find and follow you.

Thanks to everyone that made the Tweetup such a fun night. It was fantastic to meet so many of the personalities behind the twitter profiles and interesting to hear the stories of how Twitter has benefited business and network connections.
Follow me on Twitter for other crazy schemes and tweet updates. For more photos from the evening, click here.

Events 2012 & Beyond: Full conference report

The first official conference to focus on the opportunities for the events industry around the 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games took place at Earls Court's conference centre on the opening day of International Confex.

Events 2012 and Beyond was organised by Visit London and VisitBritain in conjunction with the Events 2012 Development Group, and produced by UBM Conferences.

Chaired by BBC Breakfast host Bill Turnbull, the day promised insight from key Olympic stakeholders and first-hand advice on the opportunities that 2012 will present to the UK events industry.

The enormity of the task ahead was outlined by Greater London Authority Director of Marketing Dan Ritterband. Drawing on his experiences of being in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, he confessed that the Chinese missed a great opportunity to enhance the overall visitor experience and feel of the city. He then urged the UK events and hospitality industries to ensure all opportunities to maximise the visitor experience were seized upon.

"At this point in time London is ahead of the curve compared with past Olympic host cities. The logistics of holding the equivalent of 38 World Championships across 17 days are huge but for us, this is the opportunity to position London for the next 50 years. It's important that we improve our level of service, our professionalism and show our ability to put on big events," he explained. "We need visitors to have a fantastic experience whilst they're here. London should be a place they're going to want to come back to. We know that visitors love to come to London, and we need to raise our game on the business and events side of things as well. We need to get the message right and bring the whole city with us in the lead up to 2012."

Ritterband was the first to take to the stage after opening remarks from David Sharpe, Events 2012 Development Group Chair and Managing Director of the London Eye. Ritterband was also the first of several other speakers to urge the industry to sign up to the city's Fair Pricing and Practice Charter to ensure that unfair venue hire and supplier cost hikes do not feature in London's Olympic legacy.
"Any profiteering during the Games will be to the detriment of the city for the next 50 years because if people feel they've got stung in what they already perceive as a relatively expensive city, they're not going to want to come back," Ritterband said.

The first indication of the opportunities that will arise in the lead up to 2012 was outlined by Visit London Commercial Director David Hornby and VisitBritain's Head of Business Visits and Events Joss Croft.

Providing a sense a scale, Hornby stressed that the Games would be more digital than ever before and content would be broadcast across multiple platforms. This was later reiterated by Davies Tanner PR Managing Director Robert Wright in a session on how the media will change over the next four years.

Hornby then broke the Games down into numbers – 205 nations, 147 Paralympic teams, 10,250 athletes, 100 sponsors, 26 international federations, 560 domestic sporting bodies and 26 test events that will take place in the summer of 2011 and spring 2012.

Croft gave the statistics a wider context. "The Games are the world's longest commercial with the biggest global television audience of 4.7 billion viewers," he said. "The UK volunteer programme will start in 2010, the 2012 torch relay will take place solely in Britain, and we expect 34 official live sites around the country providing big screen Olympic viewing parties. We will welcome the world, engage the customer, extend our reach with new partnerships, win new business and leave a lasting legacy."

The plans for live sites were later outlined by Mike Gibbons of the London 2012 Organising Committee (LOCOG). Supporting Ritterband's earlier comments about Beijing, Gibbons told delegates that there had only been 17 screens around the Chinese city. "There will be 21 permanent big screens around the UK by April 2009 and more than 30 by 2012. It will be a ten-year legacy providing an interactive opportunity for brands and requiring content all year round," he said.

A real coup for the conference was securing two Olympic top sponsors to join two major Olympic agents in describing to delegates what their requirements and expectations of London 2012 will be.

Daryl Jelinek, General Manager, London 2012 Olympics for Coca-Cola and Barrie Howard, Vice-President Global Sponsorship, Olympic Office for Visa International shared the stage with SportsMark and Sportsworld Group UK.

Coca-cola recently extended its eight-year Olympic Top Sponsorship until 2020 and is already planning its London hospitality and events programme for around 8,800 guests.
Jelinek said, "We will use the Games to inspire change and our strategy will be based on sustainable activity. Venues and suppliers need to be 'gold medal' planning and putting standards in place that will align with sponsor's requirements on pricing, flexibility, quality and sustainable solutions."

Visa's Howard told delegates that the moment the torch relay begins in Britain, the Olympics will ignite and a raft of event activity will ensue. SportsMark Director Olympic Operations Walter Dobrowolski, who manages client programmes for Olympic Top sponsors concurred. He stressed that corporate guests will visit London for short day-long itineraries, whilst Sportsworld Group UK Director Len Olender urged delegates to be focused on relationship building for the next 18 months as his ticketing and tour operator wouldn't be ready to start purchasing until 2011.

Some Olympic contracts are ready to be awarded however. Mike Mulvey, Chief Executive of the London Business Network, which manages the CompeteFor.com website urged the events industry to use the portal as an official route to market. To date, 59,000 businesses have registered with CompeteFor.com and 18,000 of them are based in London.

One way suppliers can stand out when competing for Olympic work is to ensure full compliance with the sustainability guidelines published by LOCOG.

Head of Sustainability at LOCOG, David Stubbs told delegates that the 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games would be the most sustainable games to date and all venues, suppliers and event solution providers will have to demonstrate a high level of sustainable practices to win official contracts. "Sustainable and ethical sourcing of goods and services for 2012 will change event industry procurement forever by setting new standards," Stubbs said.

Mark England, Director of Olympic Operations for the British Olympics Association set out Team GB's medal aspirations to win 60 in 2012. Drawing on his experiences of Beijing he told delegates that all 205 nations and their Olympics Associations (NOC) will need to acclimatise before the Games. This will result in an influx of activity prior to 2012 with the NOCs gravitating towards their embassy locations in central London.

The rest of the day was made up of question and answer sessions in which the main concerns for delivering a successful Games were discussed. These are transport, pricing and security. On the issue of transport, Visit London's Hornby added, "There is some real ambition within Government bodies to use and maximise the river’s potential for transportation in the run up to 2012."

Towards the end, delegates were given a glimpse of future plans to bring other major sporting events to the UK. England 2018 Commercial and Marketing Director David Magliano presented England's World Cup bid and told the conference how we are better prepared and have learned lessons following the failed bid in 2001 to host the 2006 competition.

With Visit London's Hornby promising that the Events 2012 and Beyond conference would now be an annual, possibly bi-annual event staged during the next three and a half years, it is certain that the UK events industry will also be better prepared for what’s in store when the greatest show on earth comes to town.

Europe's event offer & trouble in Turin

Last week I was invited to Turin to judge the European Best Event Awards. Organised by Italian publishing company ADC, this set of awards brings together agencies from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, England and Eastern Europe to compete for a string of event accolades.

There are very noticeable cultural differences in the way each country organises its events. Outside the UK, creative content and the spectacle of performance out-weighs the need for return on investment. The results are often spectacular and over-the-top but the European events arena is a hot-bed of creative ideas. UK agencies should take these awards seriously, for inspiration if nothing more.

I of course, can’t divulge who the winners are as yet but, come November this blog will be the only place to find out which European agencies should be tracked and which one country in particular UK agencies should be aware of for its rapidly growing and innovative events scene.

In the meantime, a quick story that occurred during the two-day judging. An Italian experiential agency sent fake Rolex watches to every member of the jury panel judging the Italian-only categories. Many of the judges sent the watches back not realising that instead of a bribe, it was in fact a promotional campaign. Some however accepted the fake watches, realising the nature of the activity (I can only assume).

On the first evening of the two-day judging session, two agency representatives turned up to the Hotel Principi di Piemonte and staged a demonstration outside. They announced via megaphone that the awards were fixed and that judges had taken bribes. Members of the ADC organising team franticly tried to defend the integrity of the awards and make the protestors stop. Fortunately, they eventually saw the funny-side when they realised what was really happening.

It reminded me of the campaign to promote the second series of Dexter on FX by Portuguese agency Torke. A team of street actors caused international outrage (especially from the UK tabloids) when they played dead on the sidewalks of Lisbon covered in blood with knives protruding from their backs. Irresponsible or a creative idea to die for?

Howards Way Walk

Last Friday, I joined key players from the events industry at the Riverbank Park Plaza Hotel to raise money to fund pancreatic cancer research. The evening's charity auction, gala dinner and entertainment was inspired by Howard Kerr, an events stalwart who is suffering from pancreatic cancer at the age of 47.

On 18 April, Howard Kerr and 12 colleagues from Gallowglass, Land Rover, RPM and Eventia completed an 87-mile walk across The Ridgeway, from Hertfordshire to Wiltshire in three days. The footage of the Howards Way Walk, filmed by Events Review was shown to the room on Friday. It brought into focus not only the scale of the endurance, which is traditionally walked in five days rather than three but also the compassion, enthusiasm and strength of will from an industry that always seems to pull together when it matters most.

Congratulations to everyone who participated in the walk. I felt humble just being a part of the gala dinner. As it stands, the walk raised £35,126 and the dinner raised £40,899 which gives a total so far of £76,025. According to Matt Storey from Gallowglass (the lead company driving the initiative), there's a friendly London versus Henley fundraising cricket match at the end of the month which is likely to add to the total. If you'd like to help support a poorly recognised cancer in desperate need of research funds, please visit Howards Just Giving page.

Centre Point: The next chapter

Sources at citizen journalism start-up Newspepper.com tell me a new chapter in the beleaguered history of Centre Point tower on New Oxford Street is about to unfold. Up on the 31st, 32nd and 33rd floors, a private members' club called Paramount has been four years in the planning and is close to completion.
Centre Point has long been embroiled in controversy. It was completed in 1964, offering 180,000 sqft of office space at a construction cost of £5.5 million. For years,property tycoon Harry Hyams kept it intentionally unoccupied as values soared against its potential rent yield. The building's estimated market value in 1973 was £20 million. Moreover, by keeping it empty it was not liable for rates.

According to records, Hyams' tactics resulted in Centre Point becoming the single most profitable landmark ever constructed in the UK - an act which so outraged students from the Architectural Association that at one point they planned to storm the building and hold the security guards hostage to publicise his actions.

Pierre Condou (the man responsible for the Century club) is behind the Paramount development and now plans to throw open its doors to event planners and the Soho media fraternity.

It'll take 28 seconds for guests to reach the 31st floor greeting area by lift. Here, visitors will find a members' bar with dedicated events space and dance floor. To ascend to the 32nd floor, visitors will climb an internal staircase with views out over the British Museum, stretching all the way towards Canary Wharf. The East Side restaurant occupies this floor and will offer European cuisine with an emphasis on provenance. The Western Bar on the same floor boasts an eclectic wine list but it won't be the bouquet of the vino that'll be stimulating the senses. Just one floor further up, a 360 degree, floor to ceiling glazed walkway will allow visitors to circumnavigate the Paramount Cocktail and Champagne Bar whilst marveling at the breath-taking views as they change from day to night.

Centre Point has withstood years of criticism and disuse to earn the accolade of a Grade Two listing. The Royal Fine Art Commission once praised the building as having an 'elegance worthy of a Wren steeple'. Now, finally it appears a new occupier will realise its elegance whilst providing guests with a new perspective on London.
Click here for Centre Point conspiracy theories

Jack Morton's New Year cheer

As 2007 drew to a close, several hundred thousand people witnessed the New Year's Eve fireworks over the River Thames. Millions more tuned in to the live coverage on BBC1. The celebration, which introduced the year of the Beijing Olympic Games and of the handover to London as the next host city was produced by Jack Morton Worldwide. Yesterday, the agency famed for its high profile Opening and Closing Ceremonies at major sporting events gave the live events industry something else to celebrate as it published the results of its global survey conducted amongst 277 brand marketers. The report reveals widespread plans to increase usage of and spending on experiential marketing in 2008. Here is a summary of the findings:

75% of marketers surveyed in the UK, Europe, the US, China and Australia affirm they will increase spending on experiential marketing in 2008.

Of those planning an increase, half plan to spend 5-10% more than in previous years, 12% will increase spend by 11-25% and almost one in ten pledge to increase spend by over 25%.

70% of brand marketers state that experiential marketing is extremely or very important to their organizations, and 71% report that experiential marketing will become increasingly important in the year to come.

Experiential marketing’s unique ability to reach, engage and make relevant connections with audiences has contributed to its growth. Highlighting this point, 93% of respondents agree that experiential marketing generates advocacy and word of mouth recommendations—the ultimate “user generated content” in an era of increased consumer control and hunger for authenticity. 92% agree that experiential marketing builds both brand awareness and brand relationships. 77% also state that it generates sales and leads.

The survey also reinforces the need for brands to “do” more and “talk” less. 98% of respondents agree that “brand experiences that deliver on brand promises are central to building commitment and loyalty”. 99% concur that “what a brand does is as important as what a brand says”.
To receive a copy of the report click here

Look back at 2007 Russia's elite come to London

On the eve of the 2007 London Marathon, when runners from all over the UK were having an early night, another group of people visiting the capital were drinking Moët & Chandon and Hennessy and dancing the night away to Muscovite bands, Sophie Ellis Bextor and Mika. Russia’s business tycoons and fashionistas were in town for four days to support their resident supermodel Natalia Vodianova’s children’s charity - the Naked Heart Foundation, to attend an exhibition and conference on Understanding Luxury and, following the party, to wake up and attend the Russian Economic Forum.

The four events, including the Moscow Motion party on Saturday 21 April, were organised by UK and Russia-based Eventica and produced consecutively by Event Concept in a timeframe that would have left even the most hardened Muscovite aghast.
At 6am on Thursday 19 April, Event Concept producer Jane Dillon and her team arrived at Old Billingsgate to begin the set-up for the Global Luxury Forum. An opulently dressed conference room for 500 delegates plus an exhibition comprising 27 stands and a lunch area was created against the venue’s blank canvas ready for the opening at 8.30am the following day. Eventica spokesman Sergei Kolushev says: “We wanted to add a new dimension to our conference. We needed a production company that could not only deliver a high-profile forum but one that could also help delegates really experience what it is that makes luxury brands so desirable.”
Following five sessions on subjects such as ‘the democratisation of luxury’ and ‘talking the luxury language’, plus speeches by, among others, Vodianonva, Vogue Russia’s editor-in-chief and owners of worldwide luxury brands, Billingsgate then had to be transformed overnight into the Russian Economic Forum’s launch party, Moscow Motion. Around 1,500 guests, largely made up of Russia’s most wealthy elite, rubbed shoulders with British fashion designers, chief executives and celebrities until 4am in an environment that was split between a decadent drinks reception and a Russian nightclub.
Dillon says: “The creative saw a reception with a Marie Antoinette feel but with a modern reference that used oversized candelabras and flower-holders to balance out the venue’s sheer size and form centerpieces against antique furniture, a circular bar and huge chandeliers.
“Together with caterer Alison Price, we looked at strong graphical ways for standalone food stations which resulted in huge Fabergé eggs containing savory straws, oversized porcelain swans holding crisps and pyramids pierced with filled profiteroles. When the main room was revealed, guests were greeted with a Colourweb LED wall spelling out Moscow Motion and a nightclub with stage, moving lights and huge mirror balls.”

The next day, delegates moved on to the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster for the 10th annual three-day Russian Economic Forum. The forum, which ran from 22-24 April, attracted almost 2,000 delegates. As they stood in silence for Boris Yeltsin, the first President of the Russian Federation, who had died on the Monday before, Dillon was not only helping to produce the forum but was also in the throes of transforming Billingsgate for a third time in as many days in preparation for the Russian Rhapsody charity fundraising gala dinner on Monday 23 April.

Military precision
Event Concept managing director Mark Beaver says: “We do a lot of work in Billingsgate and know the venue exceptionally well, so the logistical challenges of access and vehicles not being able to stop on the road outside can easily be overcome, providing each supplier knows their time slot and the build-up and break-down is managed with military precision.
“The roads were closed on the Sunday for the marathon so we’d planned to reuse much of the staging from the Global Luxury Forum and use the venue’s basement and mezzanine level for storage. But the venue’s floor space needed to be re-carpeted with each event, and the sheer scale of trying to get the bands in and set up is complicated.”
The Russian Rhapsody charity black-tie gala dinner attracted 800 wealthy Russians and used the same shell as the Moscow Motion party. Dillon worked with London’s luxury toy designer, Dragons, to create oversized models of rocking horses, teddy bears, balloons and other children’s toys, which dressed the room and encapsulated the theme of the auction. In the end, it raised almost £500,000 for the Naked Heart Foundation.

Haute couture
A pair of rocking horses designed by Valentino and Jean-Paul Gaultier, an antique musical box customized by Giorgio Armani, a Japanese Bearbrick doll dressed in Chanel by Karl Lagerfeld and a children’s puppet theatre styled by John Galliano were among the haute couture toys that were sold to the highest bidders as they enjoyed a dinner by French chef Joel Robuchon and continued the consumption of Moët & Chandon champagne and Hennessy cognac.
“The reception felt like an adults’ playground but in keeping with the luxurious feel and putting guests in the mood for the unique auction that followed,” says Dillon.
Naked Heart Foundation executive director international, Valerie-Anne Creps, says: “It was the most stunning decoration of all the Eventica-organised events I have seen so far.”
At 9am the following day, Tuesday 24 April, Event Concept finally handed the keys back to Billingsgate after returning the venue to its blank-canvas state. The Russians sampled the final sessions of the Economic Forum and embraced a wide variety of topics, some focusing on specific sectors such as oil and gas, construction or telecommunications, others featuring discussions that reflected on the path Russia has taken in the 10 years since the forum began, and expectations for how the presidential elections scheduled for 2008 will impact on the investment climate.
Once it was all over, the Russians slipped away, as unnoticed by the majority of Londoners as they had been since their arrival. For Event Concept, however, the presence of the world’s new elite – where the average age of a millionaire is 32 – left a lasting impression, and it’s certain that the same impression of awe will have been shared by visitors who witnessed the creative transformations and event production during those gruelling four days.

Bringing brands to life The Tiger Beer Singapore Chilli Crab Festival

In 2006, almost 490,000 Britons travelled to a country whose two most celebrated exports are its beer and its food.
Tiger Beer has been brewed in Singapore since 1932 and its roots are so firmly planted in Asian culture that it is currently brewed in seven countries across Asia. Chilli Crab is widely recognized as the unofficial national dish of Singapore. Together, they formed the ingredients for a unique festival in the heart of London’s East End in 2007, designed to increase awareness of the destination and expose the beer brand to its target audience of ‘early adopters’.
The Tiger Beer Singapore Chilli Crab Festival ran across the weekend of 1-2 September. Managed by RPM on behalf of the Singapore Tourism Board and Tiger Beer’s UK marketing department, the celebration occupied three venues in Brick Lane: the Boiler House, Vibe Bar and 93 Feet East.

Busy thoroughfare
The festival was piloted in 2006 at just the Vibe Bar and attracted 7,000 people across the weekend. A year ago the food ingredients were mixed with paste because organisers were unsure how popular the concept would be, but resources still ran out by the second afternoon. This time around, agency RPM was drafted in to manage the process and expand the concept, resulting in all culinary dishes being prepared fresh on site.
RPM specialist events director Alex Webb says: “Queues of people were something we were not going to avoid in such a busy thoroughfare so we decided that if people were prepared to wait in line then they would be guaranteed that the food would be fresh and not cooked with paste.
“The chefs began preparing at 11pm the night before and then came on site at 3am each morning. On the first day alone we sold out of Chilli Crab dead on our 6pm close and served in the region of 9,000 people. Our brief was to double the amount of visitors from last year and it looks like we’ve far exceeded that.”
By expanding the festival into Brick Lane’s neighbouring 93 Feet East bar and the Boiler Room space within Old Truman Breweries’ Boiler House, RPM could introduce more experiential elements. While the two bars focused on selling food and Tiger Beer, the Boiler Room acted as a window on to Singapore art, culture and entertainment.
Market stalls in the Boiler Room sold Singaporean products and Tiger Beer merchandise, around which visitors could experience traditional calligraphy demonstrations, henna tattoos and Singaporean art. On a main stage, lion dancing, martial arts, acrobatic tumbling and dragon dancing took place three times a day.
In the venue’s outdoor space, RPM created a traditional Singaporean garden which featured celebrated chef Terry Tan conducting cooking demonstrations, also three times daily.
Singapore Tourism Board’s area director for northern and western Europe, Divya Panickar, says: “The three venues in close proximity were perfect for creating an authentic environment that could reach young trendy consumers. For those who haven’t had the opportunity to travel to Singapore, we are providing a touch of what they can expect and maybe they will then consider it as a future holiday destination. This is not about selling holidays, however. It is about branding and education. It’s the longer-term benefits of this activity that will see increased travel to the region.”
Tiger Beer is a brand that regularly embraces experiential activity such as kickboxing in disused car parks or celebrations of Asian grindhouse cinema, but UK marketing manager Steven Greaves is none the less grateful for an agency capable of managing the swelling crowds and sometimes hour-long queues for food.
He says: “Tiger Beer is looking to consolidate its activity so we’re doing fewer small events and instead of focusing on a couple of larger events that attract greater numbers of ‘early mass market’ consumers. When I saw the food queues I was intimidated, but RPM has experience of this type of crowd management and it is important for us to have an agency of this type on board.”

Origami displays
RPM’s Webb redirected table magicians and origami displays from the bar tables to the growing food queues and ensured promotional girls in tiger dresses were interacting with the crowds and handing out competition cards to win a holiday. “The main thing for us was that everyone was being communicated to,” she says. “When told that they had a 40-minute wait, they were then happy to remain in line.”
Panickar echoes the sentiment and adds: “Looking at the response we’ve had this year, there is no way we cannot make this an annual festival. We will just need to find a bigger space.”

Profiling business leaders

One of my journalistic strengths is interviewing key personalities from the world's of business and entertainment. Here's a recent profile published by Event magazine of Graham Kemp - the newly appointed chairman of RPM.

The recently appointed chairman of the RPM Group is the proud owner of nine acres of Surrey. Married to a qualified garden designer, Graham Kemp, his wife and five children have spent the last three years developing an old farmhouse into a family estate. The project seemed an ambitious one until he confesses that he has in fact rebuilt every home he has ever lived in, including the residency he occupied in Chicago for just three years during his nine-year tenure as global CEO of The Marketing Store Worldwide.
“It’s a bit of a disease,” he admits. “I’m not interested in being a property developer, I just enjoy refurbishing properties and the fun we have throughout the process.”
Kemp is the first chairman RPM Group has ever appointed since the agency, which specializes in experiential, field marketing, staffing and branding city centers, was founded in 1993.
He brings to the role, more than 20 years experience in the marketing communications industry. And since his appointment in August he has already launched an ‘Open Road’ initiative comprising 15 measurable objectives shared out across department heads for the next three years.
Contrary to the ‘Changing Rooms’ nature of his home interiors interest however, Kemp has not joined RPM to rebuild the company from the ground up. In his words: “I am here to mentor their next levels of management and coach better performance whilst providing fresh thinking, invention and inspiration.”
Initially the chairman’s position is a non-executive role, which puts pay to the observation that Kemp has most likely been brought in to prepare the group for a sale. “Currently I don’t own equity in RPM so it would be of no benefit to me,” he states. “The RPM directors are too ambitious to build the business to consider a sale. My experience tells me that you should always have it as a thought at the back of your mind when implementing strategy but preparing RPM for possible suitors is not part of my agenda.”
RPM managing director Hugh Robertson met his new chairman whilst on the board of the Marketing Communication Consultants Association, which Kemp has chaired since 2005. Kemp says he was impressed by Robertson’s professionalism and the RPM culture of genuinely caring about its people whilst actively encouraging them to express themselves. Robertson must have been impressed with Kemp’s track record for company growth.
In 1986, Kemp launched marketing promotions agency The Marketing Store and established its position within the retail sector. Within a month of starting the business, it won a promotion across 1,000 Argyll Group Presto stores (forerunner to Safeway) that equated to 80% of The Marketing Store’s first year projected turnover. Due to the nature of the supermarket retail industry at the time, Kemp’s contacts were often acquired, merged and dispersed across different retail companies. They would then turn back to him to run their in-store promotions and re-brand outlets that had been bought and needed transforming into names such as Gateway (forerunner to Somerfield). “The landscape was constantly changing and we always seemed to be on the right side of the fence whenever a merger occurred,” recalls Kemp. “The result was that we quadrupled the business in the first three years and went from three employees to a £4.5m business employing 30.”
At its peak, The Marketing Store had offices in Birmingham, Scotland and Leeds and employed 180 staff making it one of the top three promotional marketing firms in the UK. When a sale came, it was in March 1998 to MB Sales, a division of US company, the Havi Group. Kemp says: “The two companies were pulled together and called The Marketing Store Worldwide. I signed up for three years and ended up serving nine as global CEO, opening eight offices in countries such as Brazil, Australia, Canada and France and trebling the size of the operation.”
Kemp admits that staying longer in roles than he first intended is another of his personality traits and one that currently sees him serving on three boards within a music marketing rights company, a content provision publisher and an Irish marketing firm. His three-year plan for RPM therefore looks set to be only the beginning. And with an intent to become a fully-fledged share holding, equity-holding director, it may be that the long-term future for the RPM Group will also be of his hand.

Kemp on…
RPM’s portfolio of work. For me, the Sky Festival in Manchester stands out as a magnificent piece of work due to its sheer scale and logistics. The One Love campaign for Umbro is another incredible idea that shows the power of connecting to a global passion such as football.

Acquisitions as part of the RPM strategy. I think acquisitions should be looked at so I wouldn’t rule out that possibility. We are not on an acquisition trial but if they strategically help to build the business in the most effective way then they will be considered.

The marketing landscape. Where television advertising is loosing share, experiential and digital are gaining and they will grow closer together. The shift is away from efficiency (television, print, mass communication) and towards effectiveness. The most effective ways of marketing are no longer bound up in efficient methodologies. I don’t predict the demise of television advertising, I just see it being used in different ways and combined with more effective means.

The Great Experiential Debate

On 14 November, I chaired a lively debate held at The Hospital private member’s club in Covent Garden. Heads of experiential agencies and brand marketers came together to hear three marketing specialists give their take on how experiential is perceived by the wider marketing mix.

Mike Mathieson, chief executive of Cake, which began life focused on the PR side of marketing, Tove Okunniwa, managing partner of MEC Access, formerly MEC Sponsorship and Anna Watkins, director of branded content firm Hubbub presented to a room full of delegates, all armed with IML interactive handsets and ready to text opinions and questions provoked by what they were about to hear. After the three presentations, the questions and comments were organised during a short break in proceedings. When delegates had returned to their seats the texts formed the basis for the discussion. Here are some of the highlights from each speaker followed by soundbites from the debate.

Cake, chief executive Mike Mathieson
“I view this industry in terms of its seat at the table of an early 20th Century dinner party. The client sits at the head of the table and on each side are his advertising agency and his media agency. Then down the table sits the other marketing services agencies including experiential. After dinner, the client turns to the media and advertising agency and says: “Shall we go for port and cigars in the other room and leave the girls to chat?” My mission has always been to manoeuvre myself up that table. Through the demise of advertising agency control, those dinner seats are all now up for grabs. The old model of the live events industry saw silos around the discipline, each with their defined role to play. With the onset of experiential, disciplines such as field marketing and roadshow marketing can propel themselves into this new world. The danger is that the term experiential becomes meaningless. So I’ve decided to set the rules of what is experiential. First, it has to be creative and not just follow the advertising campaign. It then has to be attractive and create real brand conversation. Third, it should be immersive as consumers are becoming harder to reach so immersing them in the brand and its values is key. It should also be content rich and finally be accompanied by both amplification and measurement. Not everyone may go but everyone should know about a good piece of activity. When we nail down the justification of experiential marketing, only then will we move up the table.”

MEC Access, managing partner, Tove Okunniwa
“Our sponsorship offer is split between consultancy and strategy. Where it overlaps with experiential is in the implementation and leverage. There is a need for a deeper engagement with client campaigns and it’s the good innovative ideas that are driving the content. Sponsorship is no longer about properties charging for logo stamping. Now it’s all about activation and making the investment work harder by leveraging greater value from that sponsorship. Activation is being taken to a new level as the technology improves and marketers are tapping into the passion of the audience but the sponsorship arena has the same problems as the experiential sector – we need to crack the measurement and evaluation. We are part of a media agency and yet we can’t stack up sponsorship ROI with media ROI. Maybe both experiential and sponsorship could work together on this.”

Hubbub, managing director Anna Watkins
The future of branded conversations is to create enough noise and at Hubbub we mix live with other forms of branded content. Interruptive marketing is about delivering unwanted messages that often get ignored by media savvy consumers. Branded content is about drawing the consumer in and giving them an offer that they actively chose to engage with. This may be in the form of an event but it’s also digital content, mobile content and brand content. The average consumer is now bombarded by more than 4,000 messages a day. We have a bored, bamboozled consumer who is getting busier and needs to be engaged with more exciting offers. It is an exciting time for us all but the marketing roles are no longer defined so who will gain the ear of the client?
My four territories where whoever raises their game will prosper are: Insight – anyone can come up with a plan but not everyone can do the strategic long-term marketing objectives. The integrated planning has been wrestled away from the ad agency and now needs to come from us. Ideas – creativity and innovation will win through. The ideas need to reflect the integrated nature of the landscape. Integration – If you only specialise in one area, it needs to have amplification. Only then can you justify the investment and explode the idea across other channels. Accountability – We need to collaborate together to find a series of accepted measurement models. There are analysts such as Hall and Partners that have produced a branded content evaluation model and we need to use models such as this to justify brand investment.

Discussion Soundbites
Julian Mack, Sony Ericsson: “Experiential is a horrible word. Most people can’t even pronounce it. I challenge the industry to come up with a new piece of terminology.”

Hugh Robertson, RPM: “The term experiential has become a bit of a dumping ground and lacks clarity. I think clients are savvy enough to understand what each of us do without the need for one term.”

Simon Lethbridge, Jack Morton Worldwide: “It is necessary to have a big word to describe what we do, especially when competing against advertising terminology. Experiential is a big word.”

Tim Bourne, Exposure: “The client should be looking at creating networks of agencies that specialise in brand engagement across all forms. As agencies we are converging so how will we collaborate to all our advantage?”

Anna Watkins, Hubbub: “Recent work for P&G was won pitching against the media agency, the PR agency and the advertising agency. Briefs are being handed out to a wider remit of agencies and we are competing against each other.”

Ian Irving, Sledge: “It is criminal that a brand’s activation investment is not the same as the initial sponsorship outlay.”

David Hornby, Visit London: “When it comes to measurement you have to have the feel good factor and the accountability together.”

Anna Watkins, Hubbub: “If you want to be at the top table you have to evaluate and stop being seen as the fluffy side of marketing.”

Ian Irving, Sledge: “How can you make an experience better year on year unless you discover the consumer’s thoughts and are able to prove the value of our marketing force?”

Julian Mack, Sony Ericsson: “If you don’t measure you will miss consumer insights and current consumer thinking.”

David Boreham, D3: “For agencies looking to offer a fully internal solution, do you think they are turning a full circle and becoming what they once rejected, a full-service agency? Collaboration with specialists is the way forward.”

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