Anyone not living under a rock knows that the landscape of experiential marketing has been undergoing a radical transformation; the digital metaverse has emerged from its cyber parameters and plugged into the physical everyday. This metamorphosis has pushed marketers to develop fresh strategies to engage audiences surrounded by an ever evolving version of ‘reality’, resulting in the widespread adoption of "phygital" marketing. This new - (and admittedly uncomfortable on the tongue!) - portmanteau redefines public engagement with brands and products, pushing the industry to continually play with the dynamic of the reality-virtuality continuum.
In case you’re wondering what we’re banging on about, think AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality), touch screens, DOOH (digital out of home) screens providing demographically targeted advertisements, projection mapping, and so on. Even something as simple as embedding QR codes into IRL photo-ops to allow for immediate social sharing; some years ago this was a novelty, now it’s the norm. There is no denying the power to expand upon the IRL that the inclusion of digital brings to the table; speed, convenience, a boost to eCommerce, the ability to extend the reach of your activation beyond the capacity of your physical space. Even as purveyors of real world ‘spade invading’ (with a penchant for analog), we’re continually inspired by physical activations that are bolstered by their use of the virtual. Just take a look at some of our most recent EDNA’s Picks…
- ‘The Butterfly Trail’; a collaboration with Pixel Artwork which filled Outernet’s grandeur spaces, utilising their 4 storey screens with immersive projections, and delving further into the digital with a supplementary AR app that allows visitors to encompass a virtual butterfly hunt with real time response from user-mobile to screen
- Marina Abramović chaptered her expansive career at the Royal Academy exhibition. Visitors navigated their own journeys around the space's LED installations; towering screened sculptures and a hall of billboarded projections. The array of immersive, digital documentives retold past performances, and fused retrospective physical works with live audience experience
- FX's recent activation of ‘A murder at the end of the world' corroborated state of the art technology with immersive theatre. Guests were transported into the Nordic set series; using a mix of personalised R-FID wristbands, 3D mapped arctic scenery, live AI-style voiceover announcements and a small army of actors
However - and maybe it’s because EDNAEDNA are rooted in real world experiences - we can’t help but believe that the essence of a brand’s identity more often than not thrives in the ‘physical’. And we’re not alone in this belief…whether it’s in neuroscience, psychology, philosophy or sociology, there is a common understanding that tangible human interaction and experience create longer lasting memories and deeper associations within the human psyche because they engage all of the senses, whereas digital experiences tend to activate only sight and sound.
The more senses that are engaged, the higher the emotional and intellectual connection, and any marketer or sales person worth their salt will tell you: emotion is king! (More on the senses to come in a future article). To paraphrase from Brand Experience: What Is It?, the facilitation of physical spaces and human face to face interaction echoes an innate human emotive need for connection, and the valuable yet unquantifiable outcome of cross-sector stimuli is ‘experience’. So, the more a brand evokes multiple experience dimensions, the more satisfied the consumer and the more the primary drive is for return and repeat.
You have your staunch traditionalists who want to shop in store and still watch adverts between TV, and you have your digital natives who almost certainly have ASOS Premier Delivery and shudder at the thought of confronting ye olde Argos catalogue. Then there are the masses; those of us who live in this confusing, beautiful, fluid ‘phygital’ no man’s land; religiously posting our Spotify Wrapped each December and stocking up our Kindle for holidays, whilst growing our enviable vinyl and paperback book collection at home. We cling to some less convenient ways of being to ratify our need for nostalgia, comfort and connection, whilst striving for speed, ease and practicality in other areas of life.
The truth is that we’ve been living in an age of ‘Bridged Realities’ for a long, long time, and dependence upon the ‘digital’ is irrevocable and expanding by the day. But something Danny Boyle said in the BBC’s ‘The Factory: Made In Manchester’ recently stuck with us. He said ‘AI is inevitable, but it doesn’t mean the end of hope [for human experience]’, and we couldn’t agree more. If the isolation of the Pandemic, remote working fatigue and our frustration with the world of online dating are teaching us anything, it’s that there is still - and we think, always will be - a need for real world experiences. How we approach those experiences and integrate the plethora of dynamic technology at our disposal, however, will require brand activation and event specialists across the world to eternally adapt, and we say bring it on!
Anyone not living under a rock knows that the landscape of experiential marketing has been undergoing a radical transformation; the digital metaverse has emerged from its cyber parameters and plugged into the physical everyday. This metamorphosis has pushed marketers to develop fresh strategies to engage audiences surrounded by an ever evolving version of ‘reality’, resulting in the widespread adoption of "phygital" marketing. This new - (and admittedly uncomfortable on the tongue!) - portmanteau redefines public engagement with brands and products, pushing the industry to continually play with the dynamic of the reality-virtuality continuum.
In case you’re wondering what we’re banging on about, think AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality), touch screens, DOOH (digital out of home) screens providing demographically targeted advertisements, projection mapping, and so on. Even something as simple as embedding QR codes into IRL photo-ops to allow for immediate social sharing; some years ago this was a novelty, now it’s the norm. There is no denying the power to expand upon the IRL that the inclusion of digital brings to the table; speed, convenience, a boost to eCommerce, the ability to extend the reach of your activation beyond the capacity of your physical space. Even as purveyors of real world ‘spade invading’ (with a penchant for analog), we’re continually inspired by physical activations that are bolstered by their use of the virtual. Just take a look at some of our most recent EDNA’s Picks…
- ‘The Butterfly Trail’; a collaboration with Pixel Artwork which filled Outernet’s grandeur spaces, utilising their 4 storey screens with immersive projections, and delving further into the digital with a supplementary AR app that allows visitors to encompass a virtual butterfly hunt with real time response from user-mobile to screen
- Marina Abramović chaptered her expansive career at the Royal Academy exhibition. Visitors navigated their own journeys around the space's LED installations; towering screened sculptures and a hall of billboarded projections. The array of immersive, digital documentives retold past performances, and fused retrospective physical works with live audience experience
- FX's recent activation of ‘A murder at the end of the world' corroborated state of the art technology with immersive theatre. Guests were transported into the Nordic set series; using a mix of personalised R-FID wristbands, 3D mapped arctic scenery, live AI-style voiceover announcements and a small army of actors
However - and maybe it’s because EDNAEDNA are rooted in real world experiences - we can’t help but believe that the essence of a brand’s identity more often than not thrives in the ‘physical’. And we’re not alone in this belief…whether it’s in neuroscience, psychology, philosophy or sociology, there is a common understanding that tangible human interaction and experience create longer lasting memories and deeper associations within the human psyche because they engage all of the senses, whereas digital experiences tend to activate only sight and sound.
The more senses that are engaged, the higher the emotional and intellectual connection, and any marketer or sales person worth their salt will tell you: emotion is king! (More on the senses to come in a future article). To paraphrase from Brand Experience: What Is It?, the facilitation of physical spaces and human face to face interaction echoes an innate human emotive need for connection, and the valuable yet unquantifiable outcome of cross-sector stimuli is ‘experience’. So, the more a brand evokes multiple experience dimensions, the more satisfied the consumer and the more the primary drive is for return and repeat.
You have your staunch traditionalists who want to shop in store and still watch adverts between TV, and you have your digital natives who almost certainly have ASOS Premier Delivery and shudder at the thought of confronting ye olde Argos catalogue. Then there are the masses; those of us who live in this confusing, beautiful, fluid ‘phygital’ no man’s land; religiously posting our Spotify Wrapped each December and stocking up our Kindle for holidays, whilst growing our enviable vinyl and paperback book collection at home. We cling to some less convenient ways of being to ratify our need for nostalgia, comfort and connection, whilst striving for speed, ease and practicality in other areas of life.
The truth is that we’ve been living in an age of ‘Bridged Realities’ for a long, long time, and dependence upon the ‘digital’ is irrevocable and expanding by the day. But something Danny Boyle said in the BBC’s ‘The Factory: Made In Manchester’ recently stuck with us. He said ‘AI is inevitable, but it doesn’t mean the end of hope [for human experience]’, and we couldn’t agree more. If the isolation of the Pandemic, remote working fatigue and our frustration with the world of online dating are teaching us anything, it’s that there is still - and we think, always will be - a need for real world experiences. How we approach those experiences and integrate the plethora of dynamic technology at our disposal, however, will require brand activation and event specialists across the world to eternally adapt, and we say bring it on!
