INSPIRING BRAND ACTIVATIONS

They all have a few things in common. And promotion companies in Gauteng need to get these fundamentals right. We’ve briefly covered the difference between brand activations and experiential marketing before but that’s not what we’ll focus on here. Instead, we want to take a look at what kinds of event inspiration we can draw from around the world, as well as within our portfolio, so you can get excited about what 2019 has in store for your brand.

We pride ourselves in 10 years of experience when it comes to brand activations and event services – so if you’re feeling like you’re ready to chat about an event or brainstorm some ideas, we’d love to hear from you.

MAKING THE MOST OF BRAND ACTIVATIONS

We’ve been reading up about some incredible campaigns recently and while there are so many to mention that we found across article like this article, this listicle and this overview, below are a few we were particularly impressed by:

Docker’s “Docker Dash”: They created the “first 5000 person live multiplayer video game” where all conference attendees were players. This event helped them to bring to life their product offering (they’re a software platform aimed at developers, which allows them to make and run apps through containerisation). You can read the full case study here to find out how their experiential marketing event gave their attendees the opportunity to network through gamification.

Refinery29’s “29 Rooms”: This digital media and entertainment company really lives up to their offering through an annual event where they create imaginative and immersive spaces. By partnering up with different brands and allowing for curation, they create these “interactive fun houses of style, culture, & technology”. Their most recent theme was “Turn It Into Art.”, where each room relied on participation to create various works of art. Here’s a video recap of 29 Rooms.

HBO’s “Westworld”: The 2018 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, saw one of the biggest and most immersive activations where fans could literally enter the town of Sweetwater, interact with residents (actors), solve clues and get an eerily-real sense of the HBO show’s environment. Recreating an entire environment of this scale was a serious feat, and you can check out this video with more detail about the activation. There were also a lot more notable events at SXSW this year, which have been wonderfully rounded up here.

Nike’s “Unlimited Stadium”: Though from 2017, this activation by Nike was the world’s first LED running track where participants could literally race against themselves. Taking over an entire block in Manila, the track was designed in the shape of a shoe, where people could time themselves and then set out to race against their own avatar. Here’s a look at how it all went down.

BEST PRACTICE FOR BRAND ACTIVATIONS AND EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING

We also agreed with the best practices that were outlined in this article about experiential marketing. In fact, all promotion companies in Gauteng and the rest of South Africa could benefit from keeping these 7 principles in mind:

1. Tie your brand into the experiential activity
2. Set marketing goals and measure your success
3. Know what action you want users to take
4. Emphasise the scarcity
5. Look for other companies to partner with
6. Make social media shares easy
7. Make the experience memorable

Interested in planning a brand activation and need an events company in Johannesburg to get you started? The team at Jawbone is here to help.