Field Marketing & Brand Experience Awards 2009 | 11.08.09

Wax Live, the experiential division of Wax Communications, has been nominated for an award at the FM&BE 2009 Awards for the Remington ‘Shine Therapy’ campaign.

The awards ceremony is on in London on 8th October.

The Remington Shine Therapy Tour was created to promote the new Remington New Shine Therapy Straightener which features innovative vitamin infused technology and Remington New Shine Therapy Dryer with vitamin boost technology.

Remington, with a heritage in electrical beauty, has a total haircare market value of £152m and is achieving a 4% year-on-year sales growth.

The brand sits at number 2 with a 16% share of the market behind Babyliss (2009 figures).

Research conducted proved women wanted fantastically shiny hair – but with no compromise to their style and look and without the everyday drudgery.

Remington developed a revolutionary range of styling tools ‘Shine Therapy’ that care for hair while styling. No other haircare brand has this unique offering.

The Wax Live campaign was to encourage trial of the new Shine Therapy products (to prove claims Remington make to intrigued consumers); Raise awareness of the two new Shine Therapy products (by educating and highlighting to consumers the innovative technology) and to ccontribute to category growth (sales and share in haircare).

We created an experiential campaign that toured the top tier shopping centres (including Westfield London on the launch day of the new centre) with a team of stylists giving demonstrations of the new products.

We worked with all the centres to ensure that our design would work within the 2m restrictions and adhere to all public and centre regulations.

The Remington Shine Therapy Roadshow was designed to be a fresh approach for an electrical beauty campaign.

We created an eye-catching Shine Therapy Carriage to convey aspirations of beauty and shine whilst also aiming to reflect the Shine Therapy products brand positioning against its competitors.

This fairytale carriage was designed with creative reflecting the new packaging, whilst retaining the modern day fairytale overtones we felt emanated the brand, appealing to our consumers and created competitive standout, whilst remaining within guidelines.

Shine Angel’s, our promotional staff, at the activity engaged intrigued consumers and invited them to partake in a complimentary Shine Therapy consultation.

They could do it then and there or the promotional team took a booking for their mini make-over later in the day.

The Shine Angel introduced the consumer to a Shine Therapy consultant and they received their 3-5 mini-make-over, with either the dryer or straightener.

Consultants showed them the ease of use and the fantastic results whilst educating them about the technology behind the products. Consumers not wishing to participate were handed a coupon and advised of product benefits and distributors.

Following the consultations consumers were offered the opportunity to enter the Shine Therapy ‘Great Britain Shines’ photo competition to find the Remington Shine Therapy ‘Shine Angel’.

The competition was hosted on Glamour.com. The event manager took a photo of consumers after their consultation and it was uploaded to the Glamour.com website.

Polaroids were also showcased on an actual ‘Great Britain Shines Wall’ at all the shopping centres.

Consumers then encouraged friends and family to vote for them to win a hair and colour make-over with Stephen Goldsworthy, plus Shine Therapy Kit.

Glamour.com readers also got the chance to vote for their favourite Sine Angel as well.

The team also handed out flyers promoting cross category selling and displaying price promotions at two key retailers – Boots and Argos.

Complete marketing spend was just under £2m including a TV ad, press ads and on-line activity

We eencouraged trial with c5,000 ‘Five minute’ makeovers given over 5 weeks over eleven live day. We raised awareness with c17,000 people visiting the stand and being educated about the new product with a further c900,000 females seeing the campaign. We contributed to category growth, sales and share in haircare with Remington is now the No. 1 Dryer with the Shine Therapy Dryer. It is the No. 1 selling product in haircare with phenomenal sales growth.

Wax Live has just completed a national sampling campaign forRustler’s which partnered with the new Matt Horne/James Corden film ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers‘.

The campaign came to town and visited Wax Live’s offices.

Pictured is Brydon Gerus (Creative) and Jo Heron (Senior Account Executive) both of whom worked on creating the campaign, along with our promotional staff that implemented the campaign.

Lucy Pearce, our Experiential Director, is  quoted in today’s Evening Standard:

Despite the gloom, most firms are still planning a festive party – meaning now is a good time to look for a job in hospitality.However, according to some industry experts the Christmas party mill is still churning.

Lucy Pearce advocates that although the global economy’s downturn has left companies struggling to justify the expense of an annual Christmas bash, the credit-crunch fallout is certainly not stopping companies showing some sort of festive cheer.

“We are now seeing companies being more sensitive and appropriate in the current climate, so the parties booked are less lavish,” says Pearce.

“There is a lack of uptake in swanky bespoke events, with companies now downscaling and being cleverer in their spending and more frugal with their annual celebrations”.

“Obviously it is not appropriate to see champagne on tap when there have been staff redundancies, but rather than cancel these festive knees-up to cut costs, companies need make the nmost of what monies they do .

Christmas bashes are still in demand as they boost morale, reward employees and importantly bond staff – something that employers should consider in this period of economic uncertainty.”

According to Pearce, Christmas is still the time when employees across the hospitality industry can still brace themselves for a whirl of private parties, corporate functions and office lunches.

“We have no difficulty getting the hospitality staff we need at this busy time of year,” she says.

“We currently have 2,000 multi-skilled hospitality representatives on our books and obviously around Christmas-time we are very, very busy.

We recruit by word-of-mouth and online through our website, but any well-groomed, presentable and enthusiastic people are free to pop into our head office on Tottenham Court Road for a face-to-face interview.”

Marketing Week | By Jo-Anne Flack | 11.09.08

Budgets are being squeezed and procurement departments are demanding evidence of ROI, but live marketing agencies are rising to the challenge to make the impact clients desire.

Is it possible to cut marketing costs without affecting the quality of the output?

If not, then the quality of the work being produced now must be bad because costs are being forced down like never before.

It is usually fairly obvious when an agency has been asked to produce work on a shoestring; however the evidence seems to show that good campaigns, in whatever medium, can be produced with budgets that are being squeezed.

Finding the best deals and comparing the market can be difficult with live marketing because in many ways it is a relatively new discipline, encompassing more than field marketing and events and including the latest hot ticket – experiential marketing.

How can marketers ensure they get value for money in a discipline that is quite new to many of them and can involve several different elements?

Live event providers

Mark Wallace, managing director of WRG, an integrated live events agency, says the industry remains highly competitive and is roughly divided into two areas: hardware providers – those companies that provide lighting, sound, staging, etc – and bigger, more integrated companies that consider themselves guardians of the brand they are working with.

“In the past five years, the hardware companies, or box shifters, have found it harder getting margins from just renting out gear.

As a result, some of them have developed creative teams and are providing a one-stop shop for clients.

That may be the right approach for some clients: if you have a clear idea of what you want to do for an event, using a small supplier is fine.

But the difference between a good event and a bad event is based around the communications, not the staging. We consider ourselves communication conceivers,” says Wallace.

Wallace says some clients have been lured down the cheaper, smaller road but maintains they have returned pretty quickly.

More significantly, the live events industry is being affected by increasingly powerful client procurement departments that have already made an impact on more traditional agencies.

He adds: “In the past month we have had nine request for information (RFIs), which is unheard of.”

These RFIs are electronically delivered documents that demand information on everything from financial status to green credentials.

It means that smaller suppliers which cannot meet the benchmark set by the bigger clients won’t even get a look in.

Wallace adds:

“Organisations that are serious about communications are filtering out companies by using these RFIs.”

Start of bidding wars

In response to critics who say RFIs also filter out nimbler, more creative agencies, Wallace says: ”

RFIs are not necessarily about size. They are also about process and knowledge. Later you still have to go through the normal pitch process.”

He does admit, however, that some clients are starting to introduce a bidding process whereby a creative brief is distributed and agencies are invited to bid for the work – the lowest bid presumably winning the work. Wallace says WRG refuses to get involved in bids.

“All clients want premium, but there is a balance between cost, premium and delivery,” he says.

The live events sector is also under great pressure to perform because, as Alison Berkani, head of production experiential at live events agency Exposure, notes:

“Experiential marketing is often taking money out of a pot that was earmarked for advertising which would be reaching millions of people.

Internally, the client has to go back to their people and make sure any experiential work provides a similar return on investment (ROI).

As agencies, we have to provide that ROI any way we can get it, for example through data capture.”

Berkani also believes that larger, more integrated agencies offer clients much better value for money, even if it does mean they are spending more.

“The live event landscape has changed a lot and you must have a three-dimensional perspective including design, planning and strategy.

We look at every brief in the same way an ad agency would, including brand values.

Even if the brief is for a one-off event, we see it as a long-campaign.”

Berkani refers to the work Exposure has done for cigarette paper brand Rizla for the past five years, which began as a one-off event that aimed to make the best of the restrictions around tobacco-related advertising.

“Clients are not only asking that we be more cost-effective.

They are much smarter now – many clients have come from the agency side.

It is no longer just about cost, but also reliability and the ability to deliver on time.

Deadlines are much shorter now than they used to be,” says Berkani.

But it can still be difficult for clients, especially those new to live events, to know how best to get the most for their money. Andrew Davey, business development director at The Liquid Way, says:

“For the past couple of years there has been a buzz around experiential marketing, which has had a number of effects.

Many new entrants can talk the talk but can’t necessarily deliver.

Also, what really constitutes experiential has become diluted as each agency presents ‘experiential’ as they want to deliver it rather than looking at what the client needs and working back from that.

Experiential marketing is an increasingly flabby term with agencies describing themselves as experiential ranging from PR or field marketing to pure experiential.

“Experiential marketing is an emerging and increasingly important part of the marketing mix and as a result there are increasing expectations on the medium as people expect to get as much bang from their buck as they would out of any other medium.

Detecting bias

“Clients need to understand what an agency offers and why. An agency rooted in field marketing will always tend to offer a brand ambassador-based solution.

The key to sourcing an agency is not based on its size but more on its ability to deal with the issue of reach – how do you ensure that the people who are engaged have a sufficiently profound experience that they act on it and also talk to their friends about it?”

It does seem that if clients want to get the most from a tight budget, the solution is far from obvious.

The more integrated, and often the larger, the agency, the better.

Advertising agencies, under pressure from clients, paved the way in the Nineties by proving that size didn’t necessarily mean extortionate mark-ups and Berkani notes that transparency is one of the elements that marketers are already demanding from their live event suppliers.

Going in house

Lucy Pearce, experiential director at Wax Live, says:

“It is often more cost-effective to go for an agency with an in-house production and staffing resource as the client is not having to pay mark-up on mark-up from outsourced suppliers and facilities.

“More importantly, clients retain much more control when working with an agency that has an in-house production facility where both the production workers and the account handlers build up a deep knowledge of a client’s needs.

Ultimately it means quality, control and cost efficiencies, which are anything but cheap.

“Many agencies that are jumping on the experiential bandwagon think it’s just a case of getting on the web, sourcing a few suppliers and it’s all done and dusted.

But experiential specialists who were there at the start have a deep understanding of the discipline and know there’s a lot more to the discipline than that.”

Experiential marketing earned its stripes from edgy, young brands wanting to be seen as ‘different and unique’.

But over the last decade or so experiential has become mainstream, and is leading from the front in many campaigns.

Increased spend

Some 75% of marketers recently surveyed by Jack Morton Worldwide in the UK, Europe, the US, China and Australia  say they will increase spending on experiential marketing in 2008.

And as more brands demand it, of course, the more it is supplied – agencies are fast jumping on this ‘brand- wagon’ and developing an experiential offer to add to their list of services, with which to challenge the specialists.

But are they really equipped to do so? By definition, offering experiential as an ‘add on’ is to show true ignorance of its very nature. To tack it on as an after-thought, either to an agency’s offering or to a campaign, is to miss the point.

Experiential marketing earned its stripes from edgy, young brands wanting to be seen as ‘different and unique’.

Mainstream

But experiential has become mainstream, and is leading from the front in many campaigns.

Its power to drive other awareness channels, for instance, needs to be planned in right from the beginning as an integral part of a campaign or it could be lost.

Carlsberg Experiential Marketing Campaign

Carlsberg demonstrated how well experiential can kick start other channels with its ‘money drop’ campaign last year.

The socially responsible guerrilla  ‘we don’t do litter’ campaign saw £5000 worth of £20 and £10 notes, each bearing stickers with the  campaign message, dropped randomly on to London pedestrians who literally clamoured to get involved.

It spawned a dynamite PR campaign that exploded across the world setting traditional and non-traditional media alight with talk of it. For £5000, it had ‘probably the best ROI in the world!’ – who says experiential is hard to measure?

Dorito’s Experiential Marketing Campaign

Doritos’ recent ‘You make it, we play it’ competition, which invited consumers to generate their own digital adverts for the chance to win £20,000, has enjoyed similar success.

Which goes to show: in experiential, budget size is not important – it’s how well you use it that matters.

If the creative and strategy is right, smaller brands can make as big a splash on a budget using experiential methods as those event sponsoring giants such as Virgin, Tennants and O2.

It’s almost made for helping niche brands grow awareness.

Superdrug’s Experiential Marketing Campaign

A campaign Wax Live did for Superdrug sun cream last year used four gorgeous ‘firemen’ to rub said cream on sun-soaked festival goers at T4 on The Beach, T in the Park and the 02 Wireless events.

The campaign allowed Superdrug to literally touch end users in a way that above the line advertising can only dream of.

It delivered added value, fun, and allowed the topless ‘brand ambassadors’ to interact with consumers on a one-to-one basis to talk about the product.

For many, those festivals will always smell of Superdrug sun cream and remind them of half naked ‘firemen’ – a powerful ‘feel-good’ association!

So clearly, experiential now consists of a lot more than just handing out samples from a pretty stand. When done well it can engage consumers and enhance brand equity in a way that no other medium can match.

But doing it well is no walk in the park.

Creating these live campaigns that work in the field presents a logistical minefield and depends on deep knowledge, hard-earned experience and well-trained staff to make them work in practice.

Staff must learn how to ‘live the brand’, locations must be just right, health and safety risks have to be covered … for when experiential goes wrong, it can create a nasty  mess and ultimately do more damage than good to a brand.

Snapple

Snapple learned this the hard way. Their 25ft tall frozen treat melted and flooded Union Square, New York on the first day of summer, and left them fielding a barrage of complaints.

Remember, when you run an experiential campaign you are ultimately inviting customers to talk about the brand; the real job is making sure you create a positive buzz.

Which is why experiential must surely be the preserve of specialists. It’s worth noting experiential agencies tend to stick to their specialism; it requires real understanding, focus and the resource to deliver it.

Only those who know it inside and out, and who can make it work effectively in the field as an integral part of a campaign, can truly deliver a brand enhancing experience.

Anything less than a whole-hearted, integrated approach and experiential risks becoming a meaningless aside, token add-on, or worse, a potentially brand damaging event that people will talk about for a long time.

See our work at www.experientailessays.com

Wax Live, experiential experts and part of Wax Communications, has won a pitch to promote Cars, the Disney/Pixar blockbuster film and franchise, throughout July, as it completes the Euro leg of a trans-world tour.

The initiative is part of a drive to maintain interest and excitement around the film ahead of the launch of
Cars 2 next year.

Disney has also recently launched The World of Cars a new magazine aimed at 4 – 7 year old boys which features comic strips, games, puzzles and activities.

Wax Live was invited to pitch by Disney and impressed on the day with its creative ideas and ability to deliver.

Lucy Pearce, Experiential Director at Wax Live, says:

“This is a real coup. Disney is a world class brand and one that is synonymous with providing great family experiences and we are delighted and excited to be part of that. Our aim for this project will be to create a buzz round the Cars franchise and deliver memorable experiences that will excite, attract and engage our target audience with plenty of interactive mechanics and ideas.”

Wax Live will deliver the Cars experiences for families at the Motor Show and five retail events around the country in July when the ‘stars’ of the film, including,  lovable Mack the truck, tour England, giving fans the chance to meet them.

Wax Live, experiential specialists and part of Wax Communications, has created an in-store tropical ‘Cadbury Dessert Island’ experience around Cadbury’s Twin Pots, Chocolate Mousse and Trifle for client Müller.

The island, complete with beach hut and tropical back-drop, will be appearing outside top end grocers Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons across the country from mid August through September.

Staff wearing branded Hawaiian shirts will hand out samples, and a guerrilla campaign will run alongside the in-store one, on high streets, outside train stations and other high footfall areas.

Lucy Pearce, Wax Live experiential director, says:

“The Dessert Island is a real show-stopper and will provide shoppers with a taste of island living to create a fun focus for the selection of Cadbury’s chilled desserts and front of store buzz.”

A spokesperson for Müller commented:

“The ‘dessert’ island is a fun idea that grabbed us right from the start as it fits well with the light-hearted, playful essence of the brand.

It’s bound to get people talking wherever it appears and consumers can experience and interact with the Cadbury chilled desserts brand.”

Remington has hired Wax Live to its agency roster with a brief to create an experiential campaign for hair-straightening product Shine Therapy.

Initial activity will run in shopping centres nationwide from 18 September to 29 October.

Consumers will be given the opportunity to have their hair styled and receive money-off coupons for the product in Argos and Boots.

The centrepiece of the campaign will be a “Cinderella-style” carriage.

Participating shopping centres will include Kent’s Bluewater and the Birmingham Bullring.

Remington has also briefed Wax to work on a partnership campaign, entitled Great Britain Shines, with fashion and beauty website glamour.com.

The portal will post photos of those people taking part in the experiential campaign.

The brand is planning to launch a transactional site as part of a strategy to reinforce its digital presence.

The website is expected to go live at the end of the year. Remington has hired agency Fuse Digital to work on the portal.

Wax’s appointment follows Remington’s recent decision to hand its £5 million pan-European advertising business to Albion.

In 2007, the brand split with its global agency Grey Worldwide.