By Sara Bru-Garcia on Behalf of The Together Agency

Whether it’s getting people to buy a product or persuading them to use a service, we’re in the business of changing consumer behaviour. That’s why the team at The Together Agency now includes behavioural psychologists and linguists, working with the University of Nottingham. It’s science meets creativity. But how does it actually work?

Behavioural science is getting a lot of buzz lately. From government “nudge” units to industries ranging from banking to healthcare, an increasing number of people are leveraging behavioural science as a cost-effective way to change human behaviour.

But what even is behavioural science? At its core, behavioural science is an umbrella term that refers to a number of scientific disciplines that study human behaviour at an individual or group level. One of these disciplines is behaviour change, which packs up almost 100 years of robust evidence from cognitive psychology, behavioural psychology, learning theory or social psychology, to change the way people behave.

Creative marketing and communications aim to get people to change their behaviour in some way: make a purchase, visit a website, sign up for a service etc. Understanding how people make decisions and why they do what they do provides additional reasoning that goes beyond intuition. It means creatively, marketing does more than look great – it’s more likely to effectively change consumer behaviour.

Behaviour change uses robust evidence-based models (like COM-B) that can help you organise and target the creative process. It starts with making sure you’re focusing your creative energy in the right place, which is identifying and understanding the behaviour you’re really trying to change. Behaviour change can also spark creativity by understanding, for example, how the context (physical or social) influences people’s behaviour, and then leveraging this understanding to maximise the effectiveness of the creative work. While spontaneity will always be creatively important, behavioural science models like COM-B make us think again – in a manner that enriches the proposition and delivers better results.

Want to learn more about COM-B? You can read our blog post about it here.

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The 2019 Effie Europe winners were announced in La Madeleine in Brussels on 15th October. McCann Worldgroup won the Agency of the Year Award, as well as the Grand Effie for their outstanding campaign ‘Like Brands’ 2011-2018.

The winners were selected by an international jury of senior agency and client representatives co-chaired by Bastien Schupp, Vice President, Global Brand Strategy and Marketing Communication at Groupe Renault and Harjot Singh, Chief Strategy Officer, Europe & UK at McCann Worldgroup.

Bastien Schupp, Vice President, Global Brand Strategy and Marketing Communication at Groupe Renault, said: “While most of us push to get the most creative campaigns out there, the only thing that really counts is their effectiveness. I am honoured to chair the jury of this prestigious award and look forward to reviewing powerful cases with my fellow marketers!”

Harjot Singh, Chief Strategy Officer, Europe & UK at McCann Worldgroup, added: “Effectiveness is the only measure of the value of our work. As the landscape of our industry changes and broadens the discourse on effectiveness must keep pace. It must be dynamic. The Effies are the most definitive, credible and recognized standard of the most compelling effectiveness stories for our industry. The new changes to the Effie program and the new categories that have been introduced as a result are all very exciting and timely. They have been made possible by the relentless hard work and deliberation from all members of the steering committee and I am very excited to see it all come to life in 2019.”

McCann Worldgroup scooped the Agency of the Year award, as well as the prestigious Grand Effie for their outstanding ‘Like Brands’ 2011-2018 campaign for Aldi UK. An instant hit and a long-running success, Aldi UK aired over 100 Like Brands ads, and exported the idea to USA, Australia and Ireland. Yet, the real success of Like Brands laid in reversing Aldi’s fortunes, winning it a special place in the hearts of UK shoppers by transforming consumer attitudes to private label.

Click here to see the full list of winners.

The Effie Europe – Steering Committee has met for the second time around the Effie Awards Gala celebrations to help steer the overall programme, providing guidance across all programme areas, such as the call for entry, learning initiatives, awards gala, categories and more. The organiser has the pleasure to announce the new committee members: Achim Rietze, Strategy Lead ZOO EMEA at Google; Vasileios Kourakis, Global Director Marketing ROI Consumer Products Division at L’Oréal and Szymon Gutkowski, Managing Director at DDB Warszawa.

The Effie Awards Europe are organised by the European Association of Communications Agencies (EACA) in partnership with Facebook, Procter & Gamble, The European Publishers’ Council, WARC, Adforum.com, European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance (EDAA) & Viva Xpress Logistics.

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Lee McCarrick, Business Development Manager at Eventeem, shares how using virtual reality in experiential marketing campaigns create higher consumer engagement.

Virtual reality is not only a fun and immersive tool for both gaming and virtual experiences, but it also stands to be a significant tool for marketers to harness. Virtual reality or VR technology has already been used in some pretty impressive marketing campaigns and will no doubt continue to be an effective and impressive tool in the marketeer’s arsenal.

Marketing campaigns that include virtual reality are considered interesting and progressive by the majority of consumers and often cause a higher engagement with potential customers. 80% of consumers feel positively towards a branded VR experience and marketing campaign.

VR headsets are becoming increasingly affordable and accessible to the public and are likely to continue to become common in homes. In fact, it has been estimated that by 2020 there will be 82 million VR headsets sold worldwide. This increasing availability coupled with some popular targeted campaigns shows how VR is here stay and will have a strong impact on the marketing world.

Here at Eventeem, we have seen the power that VR technology can have on an experiential marketing campaign first hand and have created this detailed infographic to help demonstrate why virtual reality matters to experiential marketing.

If you would like to find out how Eventeem can help you, get in touch with Lee McCarrick at Lee@eventeem.co.uk

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Experience12, the pop culture marketing agency, continues its year of growth as George Bateman is promoted to Business Director.

George is the first person to hold this position at Experience12 after almost four years at the agency, where he has been heavily involved in its growth and the development and implementation of the agency’s positioning.

As Business Director, he will be taking a step back from day-to-day team management following a solid year of hires to the client services team which has left it stronger than ever. George will also maintain oversight of creative, pitches and campaigns, while also continuing to service larger client accounts.

Alongside client responsibilities, his role will focus on overseeing the next big stage of growth for the company. This is largely centred on business development in new sectors, and organic client growth, working with brave clients to produce great creative work and developing the agency’s brand, offering and services.

George Bateman, Business Director at Experience12, says: “I’ve been fortunate enough to see Experience12 go from strength to strength – from a single desk in a shared office, through to our very own HQ on Greek Street. It’s been a challenge and a privilege to be a part of a young, aspirational agency, with a lot of lessons learnt along the way. I’m proud of how far the company has come, the brand, our clients, the work we’ve delivered and, most importantly, the team! It’s now time to look toward the next stage of agency growth – building brand awareness, developing existing client relationships and establishing ourselves in new sectors.”

Chris Whittle, Founder and Managing Director at Experience12, adds: “The impact that George has had on Experience12 since he’s worked with us is significant – from business development to evolving our agency positioning. He’s been a massive part of raising the bar for client-delivery and the team that we’ve become, and I am really looking forward to him stepping up into his role as Business Director and our next stage of growth.”

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Recently, Tottenham Court Road turned from being a one-way street into a two-way road. Not long after, the accidents started to happen. Pedestrians who had been long used to a one-way system were forgetting to look both ways. And they were getting caught out.

Since the shift, numerous accidents have taken place – some resulting in life-changing injuries. Which is why Stack, the customer acquisition and engagement agency owned by MSQ Partners and based at 90 Tottenham Court Road, decided to do something about it.

Stack has created a new campaign called ‘Look Both Ways’, which launched though outdoor, social and experiential channels.

The campaign is a true community initiative. The work features people who work in businesses all along the famous street – from the pub landlords to shop staff, coffee shop baristas to personal trainers. All feature in eye-catching images showing the ambassadors simultaneously looking both ways across the street.

Business Development Service The Fitzrovia Partnership is backing the campaign.

Iain Hunter, Executive Creative Director at Stack, said: “We felt that the initial warning signage created by the Council was too low level and wouldn’t stand out on a street as vibrant and colourful as Tottenham Court Road. So when accidents started to happen, we took matters into our own hands. The Tottenham Court Road community has welcomed our campaign with open arms, agreeing to run the ads in their place of business and even feature in them too.”

Stack’s fellow MSQ Partners-agency The Gate has provided media support, securing prominent sites along Tottenham Court Road, including the 48-sheet digital displays by Goodge Street station – the scene of one of the most severe accidents so far.

Ben Stephens, Chief Executive at Stack, said: “It only takes a moment of forgetfulness to change a life forever. Tottenham Court Road has run in one direction for many years and people slip into bad habits. This is about a community coming together to protect their own.”

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A new ground-breaking scientific study, commissioned by Beano, has sought an answer to the age old question of what makes farting funny and reveals the world’s funniest fart sound.

The new in-depth study titled “The Flatulence Report” also finally unveils the mathematical formula to the wind most likely to have listeners laughing.

With the help of Beano boffins, sound specialists Bose Professional and scientist Dr Helen Pilcher, the team studied recordings of 176 different farting noises. The full fart spectrum ranged in sound from low to high pitch, short to long, dry to wet and from loud to squeaking.

Focus groups across the UK then scored each against a number of metrics, including a funniness scale of 1 to 10. The top ten funniest farts were then tested and voted on by a broad sample group of Brits of all ages.

By statistically analysing the sounds and scores, Dr Pilcher and her team identified key factors and devised a mathematical formula to describe the world’s funniest fart sound:

F = (I x L)^S x k

         (A x g)

I = Intensity of the fart (dB)

L = Length of fart (sec)

S = Social embarrassment (rated on a scale of 1 to 3)

k = Number of kids present

A = Age of the listener (years)

g = Gender factor: If female, multiply by 1.05

Mike Stirling, Editorial Director of Beano Studios, said: “Beano has always been the authority on LOLZ worldwide, so we hired some genuine boffins to prove it, by helping us release the funniest fart of all time – you know, for science.”

A special soundwave fart installation can be seen at Beano’s offices at 185 Fleet Street, London, where visitors can listen to the world’s funniest fart at a touch of the button through Bose speakers.

The public can also visit Beano’s audio partner Bose and request to hear the fart on their professional sound system at their flagship store in London’s Regent Street.

The marketing campaign was devised and created by creative agency Taylor Herring, with the production and film managed by St Marks Studios.

To listen to the world’s funniest fart and all of the farts from the “Flatulence Report” visit www.beano.com/farts

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McDonald’s and Leo Burnett London have launched a campaign called ‘Schnuggs’ celebrating the release of new spicy chicken McNuggets, the latest addition to its menu, available for seven weeks.

The campaign comprises a mixture of food focused content and short films showing models wearing custom made Spicy Chicken McNuggets apparel in aid of the collaboration – Spicy X Chicken McNuggets = Schnuggs. Drawing upon the love of chicken McNuggets, the campaign is targeted at 16-24year olds and aims to tap into the cult-like brands this age group is infatuated by.

With brands like Supreme having consumers queuing outside stores from the early hours of the morning for the latest product drop, the campaign draws upon this culture to create a spoof clothing brand modelling the spicy chicken McNuggets.

The social campaign will run across Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Further supported on Snapchat with a spicy chicken McNugget face lens that allows users to turn their face into a fire breathing spicy chicken McNugget and a Snapchat marker tech, which will allow users to bring the OOH posters to life through Snapchat

A series of GIFs and stickers have also been created that will live across digital channels allowing consumers to engage and interact with one another using the social currency.

Liz Whitbread, Brand Manager at McDonald’s, said: “The Spicy Chicken McNuggets campaign is a very exciting product launch for us. An existing innovation to one of our most loved products and with Schnuggs, we’ve got a campaign to match.”

Graham Lakeland, Creative Director at Leo Burnett London, said: “We drew inspiration from these cult-like brands that have this young audience going crazy for their latest product.  Therefore, creating a spoof ‘hype beast’ clothing brand to model our new Spicy McNuggets felt like a great fit. This, coupled with a mixture of food-focused posts helps us create a buzz to become one of the most talked about foods this year.”

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Craig Williams, Director at The Work Perk, explains how brand-to-hand activations within the office environment result in consumers reacting much more positively towards products.  

In a digital landscape that is becoming increasingly dominated by paid promotions, invasive advertising and celebrity influencers, there is evidence to suggest that consumers are growing cynical and weary of such marketing strategies. In an article published by Bazaarvoice in 2018, they found that “62% of consumers now feel that influencer content takes advantage of impressionable audiences by being too materialistic (55%) and misrepresenting real life (54%)”. Instead, people are responding favourably to experiencing things first hand and developing more meaningful and personal relationships with the brands that they choose to invest their time and money in. Given these evolving consumer preferences, product sampling is being re-enforced as an effective promotional marketing technique with its back to basics charm.

In a recent IPM article featuring The Work Perk’s company directors, they stated that “over 88% of consumers said that product trial was their preferred method of advertising, of which 82% of people that trial a product they enjoy are likely to actually go on and purchase it”. Our ‘try before you buy’ office sampling mechanic allows potential buyers to trial goods in a marketing-free environment conducive to product testing. By segmenting our network of office workers to a defined target audience determined by the brand/agency, we’re able to help brands impact their ideal consumers.

These brand-to-hand activations within the office environment result in consumers reacting much more positively towards products. As the samples are being distributed by their own employer, it helps to create an implicit feeling of trust due to the distinct absence of a hard sell. They are more willing to fill out questionnaires, give up their free time to provide feedback, and initiate organic, unbiased conversations online.

Loren Baker from the Foundation Digital discusses the effects of “leveraging our customers as brand ambassadors by asking them to share info on a product to their own networks. This helps bypass ‘influencer marketing’ to an extent and lets us empower our customers to do the talking.” It’s this greater sense of involvement and connection to the brand’s journey and growth that consumers respond so well to. They want to feel more in control of their choices and purchasing power.

The rise of experiential marketing is further evidence of how consumer behaviour has shifted. The Drum surmise that “experiential marketing is proving popular among brands eager to retain a real-world connection with their consumers”. Meeting brand representatives, interacting with products and engaging with them in a relaxed, personable setting leaves a lasting and positive impression. At a time of consumer disillusionment, it’s these real-life, emotional and authentic connections that are driving engagement and long-term advocacy.

Learn how The Work Perk can precisely target, engage and impact your ideal consumers through office sampling by clicking here.

All images featured in this article are from our 2019 US desk drop sampling campaign with Mondelez to launch their brand new Triscuit Wheatberry Clusters.

If you would like to find out more on how The Work Perk can help you, please get in touch with Craig Williams at craig@theworkperk.com

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As marketers, we are facing increasing scarcity when we try and grab the attention of our customers. We are competing with thousands of other marketers and businesses for that finite resource. This shortage of attention might seem like a problem, however, scarcity is a core principle of economics.

Scarcity is how the prices of goods and services are set, which in turn guides our economy. A scarcity of resources isn’t something to necessarily be afraid of. It just challenges us to fight harder and smarter for our audience’s attention.

The Scarcity of Attention

As the amount of information that is accessible to us continues to increase, so grows the amount of calls on our attention. It has been suggested that the average consumer is exposed to up to 10,000 brand messages a day, and that number is only likely to increase.

Unfortunately, that scarcity of attention not only comes from the continuously increasing demands on our attention but also a declining supply in attention spans themselves. The average attention span of your customers has dropped to just 8 seconds, which is lower than the 9-second attention span of a goldfish.

In our modern, information overloaded world, there is so much content trying to grab our attention that it’s easy to become distracted. Faced by this constant bombardment of adverts and messages, consumers are likely to switch between screens up to 21 times an hour.

Marketing to these conditions might seem impossible, but that’s not the case. After all, someone will have an infinite attention span, as long as you are entertaining them.

The Wrong Approach to the Attention Scarcity

Unfortunately, marketers are approaching this scarcity of attention in the wrong way. They are trying to grab the attention of their audience by screaming louder, or more frequently and are actually making the situation worse.

Email marketing is a good example; the average marketing email campaign has a click-through rate of 1.5%, so 10,000 marketing emails are sent out to your audience and on average 150 clicks through. Of course, we want more than 150 interactions from our campaigns, so we compensate by sending more emails with the hope of engaging with more potential customers.

This is where the problem begins. The more emails we send, the more calls on our audience’s attention. This leads to a shorter attention span, which in turn leads to a lower conversion rate and the cycle starts again.

Competing messages and advertisements will continue to grow, and sending more emails or adverts isn’t helping the situation. So how do you market your business, service or products to your ever increasingly distracted customer base?

How to Market to the Attention Scarcity

Despite the old saying ‘quantity is a quality of its own’, when it comes to marketing to the attention scarcity it’s all about getting the most out of each contact with your audience, rather than getting lots of contacts. Indeed, quality has a quality all of its own.

Imagine if, similar to the above example, you still sent out 10,000 marketing emails but had a click-through rate of 15% instead. You would have had to send 100,000 emails to reach that many of conversions in the above example, and it’s more than likely that the increased volume of emails would have had a negative impact on your click-through rate.

The key is to find new ways to compete by producing high-impact communications that grab your audience’s attention and interest. This doesn’t mean you should be using marketing gimmicks like “re:…” or “FWD:…” in the subject lines, or ALL CAPS emails. You are reaching for that quality and attention-grabbing communications that will increase your click-through rates.

The ideal attention-grabbing marketing email or communication pattern:

However, due to the shortage of attention in our audiences and the all-time high demand on our attention, many marketers are struggling to achieve the first part of this pattern, which is what brings down our conversion rates.

How to grab your audience’s attention

The answer lies in making your marketing communications personally relevant to your audience. Gone are the days of marketing to personas. Just because something grabs and hold one person’s attention, doesn’t mean it would do the same for another person. The key to grabbing your audience’s attention and holding it is personalised marketing communications that treat them as individuals.

Change your Marketing Focus

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is focusing your marketing campaign on what you or your business wants to achieve. Of course, it’s important to have targets and goals that you want to reach, however, thinking of your marketing campaign in terms of what you, and your company, wants at the expense of what your audience and customers want is bad practice.

By making the effort to understand who your customers are, you are far better equipped to create attention-grabbing marketing communications that also add value to your audience.

Personalised Emails

Personalised marketing originated with the ability to add individual names in emails. I’m sure you can recall what a novelty it was to use “Hi <firstname>”.

Personalised marketing was incredibly successful due to people’s need to feel personal connections and recognition. Personalised emails are still far more successful than generic marketing communications. The positive feeling from personalised emails also seems to positively effect on-page conversions.

However, there is more to personalisation than just merging someone’s name into an email or even tailoring your marketing communications to their job title, location or other demographics. This tactic generally fails to offer any real value once the user has clicked through, which reduces the overall impact of the communication.

Remember to serve your customer before yourself and avoid this kind of shallow engagement. Instead, you should be moving towards individualisation, or hyper-personalisation, in your marketing communications and consistently offering relevant and engaging content.

Hyper-personalisation

Hyper-personalisation, or individualisation, in marketing communications is where the content is truly customised with each individual member of your audience in mind. This method brings your audience into the story that you are trying to tell.

The entire experience with your brand should feel like you are truly getting to know your potential customers and are building a one-to-one relationship with them. This is how you retain your audience’s attention and increase conversions and sales.

Face to Face Marketing

One way to work with your audience in a personalised way is to actually engage with them as individuals through a face to face marketing campaign.

Face to face marketing is when you promote your business, service or product to another person or to a group of people in person, rather than through digital or traditional marketing. The effectiveness of face to face marketing comes from the ability to connect with your customers on a personal level.

There is a wide variety of ways to approach face-to-face marketing, such as local trade shows, conventions or sampling campaigns. With so many options available to you, it’s easy to see why face-to-face marketing should be part of your business’s marketing plan.

Why is face to face marketing important?

Face to face marketing is still important because it has shown to be very resilient in this digital age. The ability to connect to your customers on a personal and emotional level will always be an essential part of marketing and is something that is hard to achieve within the digital marketing space.

Experiential Marketing

Experiential marketing builds on the connection that face to face marketing creates by forming experiences between your brand and consumers through product sampling, immersive experiences, stunts and events.

If it suits the type of product that you offer, a sampling campaign can be a great way to get a customer’s attention and engage with them. If, for example, you are selling breakfast bars then organising some promotional staff to offer samples outside your local train station during the morning commute, is a great way to let people try your product and recognise your brand identity.

If your promotional team are engaging and knowledgeable about the product, then your potential customers will form a positive opinion of your brand and product, which might impact them the next time they see your product on the shelves.

Marketing to Entertain your Audience

Entertainment, emotion and engagement all go together, and the same can be the case for your marketing campaigns. Effective marketing will stand out and grab your audience’s attention if it elicits the right emotions for your target market.

After all, the Comedian Jerry Seinfeld once said “This whole idea of an attention span is, I think, a misnomer. People have an infinite attention span if you are entertaining them.”

Be Flexible and Persistent

The average consumer will need to see your message seven times before they will take action. So you will need to be persistent. Your marketing campaign may not succeed on the first try, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t working on a different level.

Strategies such as drip marketing will keep your audience exposed to consistent marketing communications. However, remember that this doesn’t mean that you should be churning out mediocre marketing content and effectively spamming your customers. Instead, keep it relevant and personal to your audience and your brand.

Treat your audience as individuals and make your content relevant to them and their needs. Be aware of the attention scarcity and treat it as the valuable resource that it is. Be persistent in your campaigns but be flexible to your audience’s preferences. This is how you market to the attention scarcity and earn yourself a larger slice of the attention pie.

If you’d like to find out more about Eventeem, get in touch with ceri@eventeem.co.uk / 02921 676 501

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UK ad spend rose 4.2% year-on-year to reach £6.0bn in Q1 2019, marking the 23^rd consecutive quarter of market growth and covering the three-month period leading up to the original scheduled Brexit date of March 29, 2019. The figures highlight growth coming from areas including search, online display, TV VOD, online radio, out-of-home and cinema, are contained in today’s Advertising Association/WARC Expenditure Report, which is unique in its collection of advertising spend data from across the entire media landscape.

The report forecasts growth to £24.6bn for 2019, equivalent to a 4.6% increase, with the UK’s ad market expected to grow a further 5.3% in 2020.

Online advertising expenditure performed notably across a number of formats, with online radio seeing standout year-on-year growth of 26.5% in the first quarter. TV VOD achieved an increase of 17.5% in the same period, while total online display saw an increase of 16.6%. Digital out of home also experienced a good Q1 with growth of 10.9%.

These figures reflect the recent Advertising Pays 7 report from UK advertising’s think tank, Credos, which demonstrated how Britain is the largest online advertising marketplace in Europe and that the UK has the highest per capita online spend in the G20, boosting businesses up and down the country.

Across traditional formats, cinema saw respectable growth of 12.3% in Q1 2019 versus Q1 2018. Growth is forecast for 2019 across the majority of formats, with the greatest increases predicted in online radio and TV VOD.

Stephen Woodford, Chief Executive at the Advertising Association, said: “These figures are testament to the resilience of UK advertising during an uncertain period for business, leading up to the original Brexit date. We see online advertising in all its forms continuing to perform strongly, demonstrating again how the UK is Europe’s leading online advertising marketplace. We hope that the new administration can deliver a business-friendly outcome to our relationship with the EU, ensuring the UK’s domestic advertising market remains robust and our advertising exports, which are world-class, keep growing.

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