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A new era of tech driven ROI from experiential activations
Live marketing has been notoriously difficult to prove ROI for but for so many brands has been invaluable in creating brand advocates and fans!
BUT with the advent of AI, there’s affordable and invaluable things that your tech partner can now do to help provide insights.
Here’s some insights from our very own Neil Dickinson into what you should be implementing in 2025 that we’ve seen work brilliantly this year.
People counting: A tech which has been around for ages but has come of age with AI to be able to provide reliable insights and proper space monitoring.
From simply monitoring numbers entering a space and providing a live dashboard, to heat mapping the most popular areas of an experience and reporting dwell time and enjoyment levels, this is a must for brands looking to truly get an accurate picture beyond staffing reports from your experience.
Signing up social followers: The trusty photo booth has been around as a tried and tested brand moment for years. BUT there’s a new kid in town. Everyone has a phone in their hand giving them immediate access to great photos with no strings attached to their data.
User generated content performs best on socials, so with this in mind, as well as the ambition to improve the visitor experience – enter FanCam, a system we have developed that gamifies screens already in place.
It enables people to upload photos and videos through a QR code and beam it straight onto the big screens at sporting, music or corporate events and to share on their social media platforms, widening the reach of the experiences.
Best of all it can incentivise data sharing and social follows for an added experience and it’s all completely traceable. Which screen did they scan to engage? How many people were in the picture? Where did they share the picture which was used? How many people used the app? Get all the info on an easy-to-access dashboard.
Linking purchase directly to the experience: If sales are the ultimate goal of your experiential activity then step right up. We recently created a ‘Magic Mirror’ to be used in a marketing promotion at Heathrow Airport for Polo Ralph Lauren to celebrate the brand’s 17-year collaboration with Wimbledon Championships.
The users could quickly try on different styles with an iconic backdrop, send themselves and other images of them in the glasses and then immediately purchase the glasses in question at the stand next door. The client saw a 300% uplift in sales while the promotion was in place, as well as brilliant results in the upload of images to user profiles as a great customer experience and we were able to provide data for every interaction along the way.
Integrating a product and digital experience: We have to say it but Lift and Learn experience with triggers to an experience..it still works.
This is why interactive tables that utilise a puck instead of your hands directly on the display are also so much more successful.
People LOVE to touch a button or a dial. So if you can make the product part of the digital experience then do it. When your audience picks up the shoe, the phone or the can, it can trigger interactive experiences with lights, audio visual, smells or anything that stimulates the senses and provides an unexpected moment of delight.
Of course, the real ROI many brands want to see from their activation is lead generation. Has the customer booked a test drive from the Ford electric vehicle experience they just had? With all our installations we can monitor exactly how far along the journey the customer goes.