In my 21 years as the owner of an experiential agency, I don’t think a client brief has ever come past my desk that hasn’t in one way or another listed ‘brand awareness’ as the key objective.
And I get it, visibility is important. When every market is so cluttered, brands need to be seen to be chosen. That’s marketing 101. But the attention economy is burnt out. Consumers’ attention is being ripped in multiple directions – not just to other brands but to the rapids of the news cycle while juggling daily life.
So what good is awareness when your customer has a million things coming at them every day? For me, the question is: why do brands chase being seen, when being remembered is what really matters?
There has been a push towards experiences because we know the impact they can have. But impact is not a given. Plenty of activations may garner awareness but drive little real change. The ones that do leave people with an impression – not just a like or a share. An experience that stops you in your tracks stays with you. Because it taps into your memory. And if a brand can encode a feeling into customers’ memories after an interaction, that is a powerful economy to be trading in. Far greater than attention alone.
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We may have moved past the dreaded ‘we want to go viral’ requests of a decade ago, but there is still an incessant push for ‘shareability’. And again, it’s important. We want as many people as possible to see what we create. But the issue comes when shareability is the starting point, when memorability should be the goal.
Sometimes, when we push consumers to share something, it pushes them away. They are savvy to it, and we forget to consider who they are sharing it with and how it is received.
I’m reminded of a pitch we lost a few years ago. One of those ones you never forget because it would have been game changing for our agency to win, and I thought we were in with a good shot. But we lost out to a big global agency. When the activation went live, I took our team down to see it so we could learn how we could have done better.
It looked incredibly impressive. A big build with a big budget. The agency had done an amazing job pulling it off. But as we looked around, there were only a few people there (not as many as was spruiked online), and they couldn’t properly engage with the main attraction because of occupational health and safety reasons. Part of the experience also had to be paid for, which felt a bit soulless. Online, we saw the influencers posting and the hype reel told a very different story. But in person, there was no emotional connection, no participation, no story to take away.
I reflected afterwards that the winning agency delivered exactly what the client had asked for in their brief. Awareness. But there was nothing lasting about it. That million-dollar budget disappeared as soon as the activation and content did.
In contrast, I think of one of my favourite activations was promoting motorcycle safety in the UK – The Spare Parts Shop. A simple pop-up that appeared to be selling bike parts, but the products were titanium implants used to repair broken bones after a crash. The shop assistants were crash survivors engaging with punters for the ‘aha’ moment when they realised what the products actually were.
The agency delivered a truly memorable experience that translated across multiple online channels. They got awareness in spades, but they got it through creating something memorable.
Our industry rewards the wrong things. It has an obsession with impressions, reach and social metrics. I don’t know how many impressions The Spare Parts Shop got, but I do know how it made me feel.
Awareness has its place, but it is not the best use of a brand experience. A memorable experience works harder. It becomes worthy of attention. It’s not that impressions aren’t valuable, but measuring time spent and responses with qualitative data means we can better understand sentiment and how people feel.
The questions asked can cover whether the idea lives in the mind beyond the moment (memorable)? Does it connect to something deeper, like a value, behaviour or purpose (meaningful)? Can we track impact beyond impressions (measurable)?
The questions asked can cover whether the idea lives in the mind beyond the moment (memorable)? Does it connect to something deeper, like a value, behaviour or purpose (meaningful)? Can we track impact beyond impressions (measurable)?
I hope to see briefs from clients with more of these questions, to challenge their objectives beyond exposure. That tells me they understand the value experiences can deliver when they are memory encoded. And when clients start demanding that from their agencies, we will see more experiences that last.
Experiences that matter.
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