Perfetti Van Melle-owned Chupa Chups heads to Thorpe Park with N2O for a third year in a row, following last year’s success with Chupa Chups x Stranger Things challenge

Multi-award-winning creative brand experience agency N2O is bringing Chupa Chups’ new above-the-line campaign, ‘The Struggle Is Over’, to life this Halloween with an immersive brand experience at Thorpe Park Fright Nights, turning the familiar frustration of opening a lollipop into a series of playful new struggles.

The activity supports Chupa Chups’ launch of its new easier-to-open wrappers, which are rolling out across Europe. The wider campaign plays on the fact that opening a Chupa Chups has become something of an internet-famous struggle, culminating in the brand creating its hardest-to-open lollipop yet for content creators.

The Chupa Chups Struggle Exchange invites Fright Nights visitors to swap the struggle of opening their lollipop for a series of deliberately frustrating (and much more fun) challenges. Working in teams and against the clock, guests enter an immersive Halloween facility to try and conquer three familiar everyday annoyances: hunting through a mountain of laundry for a missing Chupa Chups sock, finding the elusive ends of stubborn rolls of tape, and unravelling a chaotic bundle of knotted headphone wires before the time runs out.

It follows N2O’s Chupa Chups x Stranger Things experience at Thorpe Park Fright Nights last Halloween, which recreated the Byers’ house and turned sampling into an immersive attraction. The activation was named Thorpe Park’s best-ever brand-led experience, achieved a 9.3/10 visitor rating and has since won Gold in the Entertainment & Sport category at the 2026 IPM Awards.

Scott Kilvington, Senior Client Development Director at N2O, said: “There’s something brilliantly simple about this campaign. People have been talking about the struggle of opening Chupa Chups for years, and the brand has listened and done something about it. Last year showed us how powerful Chupa Chups can be when the brand becomes part of the Fright Nights experience rather than simply appearing alongside it. This year we’re building on that, with an idea that comes directly from the product innovation.”

Kim McMahon, Brand Manager for Chupa Chups at Perfetti Van Melle, says: “Our activation is all about turning those everyday moments of frustration into opportunities for fun, inviting guests to take on a series of playful challenges for the chance to unlock sweet rewards. It’s the perfect way to bring Chupa Chups’ playful spirit to life and we can’t wait to help visitors put their everyday struggles behind them and embrace a little more fun this Halloween.”

The Chupa Chups Struggle Exchange will run at Thorpe Park during Fright Nights across the Halloween season.

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Dubbed by many as the “Glastonbury for business”, Ideas Fest has rapidly become one of the UK’s most exciting gatherings for founders, entrepreneurs and ambitious brands. Bringing together inspiring speakers, challenger businesses and a thriving community of enterprising people looking to learn, connect and grow, it has firmly established itself as a standout moment in the business calendar.

At an event built around bold ideas, meaningful conversations and entrepreneurial ambition, the brands that leave the biggest impression are often those that contribute something genuinely valuable to the experience.

This year, Starling did exactly that with the Starling Social Club.

Rather than creating a traditional branded presence, Starling set out to build something more useful, a space designed around connection, conversation and community. Positioned within the festival’s Ideas by Her zone, the Starling Social Club became a welcoming hub for founders, entrepreneurs and business leaders to gather, exchange ideas and build meaningful relationships. Across two days, the space hosted a Starter Party with DJ Vinyl Jen, a packed programme of talks, workshops, pitch practice sessions and networking opportunities, balanced with quieter moments for attendees to pause, recharge and connect.

As part of a partnership with Ideas Fest, Starling and Ideas Fest launched a scholarship programme that provided 250 fully-funded tickets to ambitious female founders across various sectors, backgrounds, and business stages.

Thriving female entrepreneurs are vital to the UK economy, and with around a third of Starling’s business account holders being women – more than double the UK average – Starling provided this initiative to champion female-led businesses, break down barriers, provide a growth platform, and reinforce its position as the go-to banking partner for enterprising people.

The initiative was over-subscribed, and generated overwhelmingly positive online sentiment. Beyond event attendance, it has created an instant community where female founders have connected, supported and uplifted each other and will live on.

The approach reflects a wider evolution taking place across experiential marketing.

Today’s audiences are increasingly seeking experiences that offer genuine value, whether that’s learning something new, making a useful connection or gaining access to expertise. The most effective live experiences are moving beyond brand exposure and towards enablement, creating environments that help people achieve something meaningful while naturally building affinity with the brand behind them.

For Starling, a female-founded business with a strong connection to the UK’s entrepreneurial community, creating a home for founder conversations felt both authentic and purposeful. The programme was carefully curated to balance inspiration with practical value, offering everything from strategic business discussions and founder stories to pitch coaching and peer-to-peer networking.

The physical environment played an equally important role in bringing that ambition to life.

Working with experiential agency HYPHEN, the 20m x 20m activation was designed to feel less like a branded stand and more like a destination. A central stage sat alongside networking areas, founder-focused content spaces and informal social zones, encouraging attendees to move freely between sessions, conversations and experiences throughout the festival. Features including founder pitch opportunities, networking spaces and social touchpoints provided multiple reasons for visitors to return across the two-day event.

Crucially, the activation recognised a simple truth about founder communities – some of the most valuable moments happen outside the scheduled agenda.

While content remains a draw, audiences increasingly value opportunities to connect with peers, share experiences and build relationships in a more informal setting. By creating a space that supported both structured programming and spontaneous interaction, Starling enabled attendees to engage in a way that felt natural, relevant and rewarding.

As brands continue to evaluate their role within festivals and live experiences, the success of the Starling Social Club offers an important lesson. The most memorable activations aren’t necessarily the loudest; they’re the ones that put audience needs at the centre of the experience and create something people genuinely want to be part of.

When brands focus on facilitating connection rather than chasing attention, they stop being sponsors and start becoming part of the community.

Quote from Andrew Casey, Director of SME Marketing, Starling
“In an increasingly digital age, the value of face-to-face connection, shared experiences, and spontaneous conversation cannot be overstated.”

“We were absolutely delighted with the space created in partnership with HYPHEN. The large tent structure brought our vision for the Starling Social Club to life brilliantly – providing a welcoming, high-energy hub where founders could pitch, recharge, and build lasting, meaningful connections.”

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IPM members N2O bring Beauty of Joseon’s heritage-led k-beauty credentials to life with immersive Westfield Stratford pop-up.

Easter Bank Holiday activation positioned one of the UK’s first Korean skincare brands as the standout choice in a saturated market.

Multi-award-winning creative brand experience agency N2O has partnered with Beauty of Joseon and delivered an experiential pop-up at Westfield Stratford City over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend (3^rd, 4^th and 6^th April), designed to cement the brand’s position as the number one K-Beauty choice for UK shoppers.

As the UK beauty market becomes increasingly saturated with Korean skincare brands, Beauty of Joseon – one of the first Korean brands to launch in the UK – doubled down on its heritage, efficacy and education credentials with a high-impact retail experience that blended culture, discovery and play.

The pop-up brought the brand’s story and full product range to life through themed zones. A bold gamification mechanic, inspired by a traditional Korean game of Yutnori, offered visitors the chance to win skincare prizes, and a separate product exploration area invited shoppers to explore and learn about the brand’s formulations through hands-on product experiences and expert-led education with Brand Ambassadors.

“The K-Beauty space has grown rapidly in the UK, and with that comes increased competition,” Clare James, Chief Commercial Officer at N2O. “Our role was to help Beauty of Joseon stand out not just visually, but strategically. We did this by celebrating its heritage as one of the first Korean skincare brands to enter the UK market, creating an experience that feels authentic, educational and culturally rooted to position the brand as the experts in an increasingly crowded category.”

Dongho Han, Team Manager at Beauty of Joseon, added: “This pop-up allowed us to showcase the depth of our range, our heritage and our commitment to effective, thoughtful skincare, all while creating a memorable and engaging experience over a key retail moment.”

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IPM Members Zappit are proud to announce new platform rezolvecx.com establishing Compensation as a Service as a new customer care category.

For years, complaint resolution has been manual, slow and expensive. Compensation as a Service changes that, enabling brands to resolve consumer product complaints instantly through secure, managed digital payments delivered in seconds.

The platform enables brands to issue digital goodwill payments within defined financial guardrails, turning reactive complaint spend into a controlled and measurable engagement channel.

Already deployed across the UK and Europe with brands including Unilever, Colgate, Fever-Tree and BOL Foods, Rezolve operates at both SME and enterprise level.

“Moving to digital vouchers has completely simplified our current process. It’s quicker, easier, and fits how we work today especially with more of us working remotely. The team have been great – collaborative, responsive, and always open to feedback and quick to find solutions when we’ve needed them. It just feels like a much more modern, simple way of working now.”
Sarah Samtani – Consumer Care Manager, Organix

“Working with the team at Rezolve is great. The level of service and attention we receive is excellent – the team is so responsive, professional, and clear in their communications. The platform itself is so incredibly intuitive, which makes it easy for new agents to get up to speed quickly. It streamlines our consumer care process and helps us respond to queries faster and more effectively than ever. Rezolve has become an integral part of how we strive to deliver great service.”
Nika Bureick – Consumer Experience Capabilities Expert Germany, ABInBev

How does it work?

While brands invest heavily in incentives and loyalty programmes, complaint-related compensation has remained manual and inefficient.

Rezolve enables organisations to:

• Issue compensation via instant at-till redemption, cashback or direct payout
• Distributed digitally in seconds – zero P&P costs
• Reduced cost per resolution and driving significant time savings
• Capture structured consumer insight
• Drive retention and increase lifetime value

In effect, Compensation as a Service formalises complaint spend as a measurable,
performance-driven channel. “Compensation has historically been treated as an administrative task,” said Mark Fraser, Founder of Rezolve. “Yet it represents significant spend. Compensation as a Service brings speed, structure and accountability to that spend, turning complaint handling into a strategic revenue lever.”

Rezolve positions Compensation as a Service as a core component of modern consumer
engagement infrastructure.

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IPM Members Momentum Worldwide partner with Primark in dynamic new social experiment to challenge perceptions of the fashion brand.

London, 1st April 2026. Global experience agencyMomentum has partnered with Primark on an immersive social experiment that challenged perceptions of high-street fashion by creating a fictional premium fashion label to showcase the retailer’s new Spring womenswear range.

The immersive experience saw fashion enthusiasts invited to an elegant London townhouse on 19th –20th March for the debut collection of ‘Kim Parr’ – a fake brand created by Primark (the name itself an anagram of the retailer). Guests were stunned to discover that the premium-looking pieces they had been admiring were actually from the high-street chain, with items starting from just £12.

Jamie Davies, UK Executive Creative Director at Momentum, said: “This was an immersive theatre experience designed to strip away preconceptions and let the product speak for itself. By creating a fully believable premium fashion environment, we gave guests the space to engage genuinely with the quality and style of Primark’s Spring collection. The reveal moment was powerful: that shift from assumption to surprise perfectly captured the ‘Shockingly Chic’ campaign message.”

The activation forms part of Primark’s new Spring campaign ‘Shockingly Chic’, celebrating the ‘double-take’ moment of discovering elevated style at affordable prices.

Jermaine Lapwood, Director of Innovation at Primark, said: “Kim Parr was created to challenge perceptions in a playful way, tapping into that double-take moment when something looks high-end but is actually shockingly affordable. By removing the Primark name and allowing people to experience our collection in an unexpected destination, they could see our great style and quality first-hand, without preconceptions.”

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Drambuie had fallen into the trap of being branded ‘old fashioned’. The brand needed to modernise themselves and connect with a slightly younger audience. Their objective? Get 55-year-old sociable hosts to choose Drambuie as their drink of choice for the 5th course, the coffee serve.

Together Agency completely overhauled the brand’s visual collateral and digital presence to inspire a new demographic. Sales and social engagement soared.

Showing up wasn’t enough, they needed to inspire the demographic. So they created a new look and feel to the brand, starting with the tagline: ‘The taste of togetherness’. Setting up a one-day shoot to create a range of visual collateral to use across social medias, an on-pack collar, digital advertisements and the website.

Transforming their Instagram and Facebook pages to create a more collected and consistent approach. With a deeper emphasis on togetherness, they focused on beautiful-looking food pairings, cocktail recipes and the dinner party setting with family and friends enjoying drinks and laughter.

The results were an increase in sales and engagement across socials. See here for more details. Cheers to that!

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Experiential marketing experts N2O helped bring Christmas cheer to Tesco shoppers. At a time when the country was under the severest conditions of lockdown this campaign delivered on two fronts, providing some heart warming entertainment for shoppers as they queued to get into store whilst providing employment opportunity for the cultural industry, which was perhaps the hardest hit sector after frontline workers.

This innovative campaign was based on providing a live Panto experience in short, 3 minute sketches ending with a song (repeated every 20 minutes) and at other times the cast would interact casually with customers. In addition, every 3 hours there was a 30 minute carol and song service.

[vimeo url=”https://vimeo.com/541575711″ width=”500″ height=”300″]

The cast of 775 were professionally sourced, rehearsed and costume fitted. The scripts were specifically written for three old Panto favourites; Aladdin, Cinderella, and Peter Pan. These entertainers performed at 125 stores over two days and brought much needed cheer to well over 1m customers queuing to get into store because of restricted access. This campaign was a winner on so many levels.

Judges’ quote

“N2O’s campaign for Tesco was full of festive spirit. Creating panto magic to put a smile on shoppers’ faces without demanding anything in return, creates goodwill with customers well beyond the pandemic. To also provide work to nearly 800 actors when theatres were closed, showed how a campaign can benefit everyone involved – Oh yes, it did!”

N2O; Nigel Clifton, Head of Creative

Tesco; Will Baker, Head of In-Store Customer Communications

The post Covid Featured Case Study-Setting the stage for some extra festive fun appeared first on IPM Bitesize.

At the very peak of the Covid pandemic, the DfE needed to find a solution to providing school meals for a growing number of household beneficiaries. The quickest and most flexible solution was to provide eligible families with vouchers that could be downloaded or requested by post and redeemed in nominated retailers.

Speed to market was absolutely key to the success of this much needed benefit support. The DfE turned to Edenred, an existing voucher scheme organisation who through their “Select” platform had a model that could be adapted for the campaign, with its own tool kit and business rules specific to the benefit programme. Within the dedicated portal there was advice and guidelines to ensure the public, schools and retailers could engage with the scheme with minimal fuss.

[youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqg0oj1Yzac” width=”500″ height=”300″]

This scheme was delivered in an incredibly short lead time enabling the DfE to mobilise this very high profile programme in record time. The scheme came in for a lot of press and public scrutiny, but the results were quite spectacular, over 128m meals were delivered by the end of summer through £483m government spend and 94% of user satisfaction with the scheme and its processes.

Judges’ quote

“The scale of the activity was amazing, and it must have been a pretty monumental undertaking. To maintain above 90% satisfaction in the process is seriously impressive, particularly for a scheme surrounded by negative publicity.”

Credit: Colin Hodgson, Edenred

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We continue with our showcase of incredible campaigns carried out by members of our community through the Covid pandemic period. These cases were selected by our panel of judges as having used creativity or incredible management skills to support the Covid cause or to overcome the problems created by it.

Our feature this week includes Promotigo; using their data and marketing skills to assist the leisure sector to manage the restricted opening up regulations.

Guest Visit by Promotigo; Helen Millichamp Managing Director

Scan, track and welcome back

[youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqkt5jvLyYQ” width=”500″ height=”300″]

In June 2020 as the Covid pandemic looked to be easing, pubs and restaurants had the opportunity to reopen but only under very specific controls. Businesses already in considerable turmoil faced the challenge of having to register every guest who came back to their venue, making sure they adhered to all the government guidelines, and with the specific outlets having responsibility to ensure it complied with fairly complexed data rules and privacy policies.

Promotigo, a promotional platform used for campaign and data management, evolved their platform to create an end‐to‐end journey for venues and visitors to meet government requirements. Outlets could register themselves and create their own unique QR code identity so guests could safely and efficiently register themselves via their phones. The QR code was easy to use and could be displayed throughout the venue where appropriate. As the system was virtually self managed it allowed staff to focus on reopening their doors without the risk of hefty fines or complex procedures. It was so successful it was later adopted by the government with the launch of their tracking app in October 2020.

Judges’ quote

“This was a simple and easy solution to an increasingly relevant challenge across pubs and restaurants in the UK, and the fact that the government later followed this same method with their tracking app is testament to the efficiency of the product.”

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We continue with our showcase of incredible campaigns carried out by members of our IPM community through the Covid pandemic period. These cases were selected by our panel of judges as having used creativity or incredible management skills to support the Covid cause or to overcome the problems created by it.

Here we feature Work Perk, who demonstrate the power of sampling within a case related focus.

Moments of happiness in the toughest of times

Maddi Graham, General Manager, The Work Perk

Campaign Video Watch

Employee rewards and sampling specialists The Work Perk, know more than most the benefit and effectiveness of product sampling. In this case study they demonstrate real creativity in bringing their operational expertise to the aid of critical workers within the NHS and other frontline organisations.

Faced with difficulties in maintaining normal sampling distribution techniques The Work Perk inspirationally directed all its sampling campaigns towards supporting critical workers. With a staggering total of almost 4 million samples from the likes of Kenco, Cadbury, Cif, Heinz and more, which were specifically targeted to appropriate sectors, The Work Perk showed how existing resources could bring moments of happiness to critical workers both in the UK across the globe, at a time when they needed it most.

Judges’ quote

“The Work Perk were flexible and nimble in adapting their core services to effectively leverage their

pandemic‐driven campaign through a multiplicity of channels, underpinned by a digital hub and

upscale it through the power of big brand support around a worthy cause.”

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