Suss Out The Best Experiential Work For Our B&T Awards Finalists

It’s a three mere weeks until we’re all graced with the presence of the fabulous B&T Awards, and leading up to it we’ve been showcasing selections of our finalists’ entries, to give you a snapshot of just how brilliant these awards are going to be.

Today we’re looking at the participating finalists for Experiential Agency of the Year, featuring the finalists of M&C Saatchi Sports & Entertainment, Traffik, Colenso and Leo Burnett.

Tickets are still available here (although you might have to bribe B&T event organisers).

M&C Saatchi S&E

We create impact through the things people love. How do we do that?

We take passion, insights and pioneering creative, and we blend it all together to create brave experiential campaigns.

This is work that people love. It is work that delivers commercial impact for clients. It is work we are proud of.

Last year, we put a stake in the ground and launched the experiential arm of S&E. Year one was about creating impact. Impact has a butterfly effect. It resonates across everything we do. Work. People. Methods. Technology. Play.

This year we have created events that have been witnessed directly by over 1.5 million people with a further 30 million + reached through social sharing and media coverage.

We have an ambitious long-term goal but a clear plan on how we’re going to get there. And that goal is to be the most influential global experiential agency by 2020. This year was about creating impact. Next year is about disruption.

We won’t rest on our laurels, it’s an exciting time for our discipline, clients are getting braver, technology is allowing us to engage with people in unique ways and consumers are seeking out shareable experiences. We have the team and technology in place to shake up the landscape even more next year. Watch this space.

Traffik

To create transformative work means a continual evolution of your approach, processes, people and offering – and 2016 has been Traffik’s most transformative year to date.

Seeing the opportunity to provide clients with the ability to influence purchase decisions from point of contact all the way through to store, Traffik rolled shopper marketing and activations into one core offering to form the Traffik Group.

In the past 12 months they have overhauled their entire creative process, developed bespoke data analysis tools and implemented a framework designed to interpret purchase drivers, scan data and behavioural insights in order to output a qualified path to purchase matrix.

This matrix allows them to identify key areas of focus and moments of receptivity – a tool that will provide a level of intelligence and targeting that will set them apart from other agencies in 2017 and beyond.

Culturally, Traffik took the bold step of handing all cultural development to its staff. Beyond simply planning outings and sporting events, the newly formed Culture Club has completely overhauled internal processes, office environment and even their structure.

And with an imminent partnership with a leading North American activation agency on the horizon, the next 12 months are likely to prove Traffik’s most transformative ever.

Watch this space.

Leo Burnett

Disruptive innovation can hurt, if you’re not the one doing the disrupting.

We’re going to disrupt ourselves, before we get disrupted. And we’re not trying to preserve a model of yesterday.

This has been our driving ethos over the past 12 months. To remain relevant and ensure Leo Burnett is a creative business that excites, challenges and keeps our people wanting to thrive for greatness, we had to change.

We have taken a big step into unchartered territory, in terms of both how we operate and the work we produce for our clients. We restructured our business model to ensure we were solving business problems with innovation at the core.

Innovation now sits at the heart of everything we do. As our clients are being put under increasing pressure by external forces driving change and competition, it’s vital that we use innovation and creativity to solve their business problems. So we’ve made innovation inherent in how we operate.

This change in focus has led us to bring in new minds, talents and skillsets into the company, injecting a new energy and ambition. It has also resulted in amazing new creative output, creating new world technology firsts, new products, media firsts and tech-enabled ideas.

We created a World First sports concussion detecting product for Samsung, the Samsung brainBAND. We created a new product for Bundaberg Rum called Lazy Bear addressing an unmet consumer need.

We created the most Instagrammed cookie in the world by joining NYC’s Momofuku Milk-Bar and Singleton Whisky. We created a media first using data & precision targeting to launch a new Samsung Tablet by targeting Apple devices only.

Our ambition is to be the most innovative advertising agency in the world. And our relentless focus on innovation made us the 6th ranked Creative Company in the World (The Gunn Report 2016).

Colenso

To truly be commercially successful as an experiential agency, you need to excel in three areas:

1. Consistently produce great work that works, across a healthy cross section of your clients
2. You win the right new business without losing clients
3. You make a healthy profit.

To be successful at one is hard, two is very rare, and all three – near impossible.

This year, we have surpassed any other ANZ agency in all three measures and are now the most impressive experiential communications and PR offering in the ANZ marketplace.

Our experiential work has been recognised at Cannes, D&AD (Black Pencil) Spikes Asia, NZ Axis Awards and NZ’s Sustainability Awards.

In the judging window our agency’s revenue has grown 20 per cent with 17 per cent profit growth.

Contributing to this growth has been a number of new business wins including; DB Breweries, Fonterra, Samsung, Burger King, New World, IAG and Visa.

This is on top of executing some of the agency’s biggest ever pieces of work, like DB Export’s Brewtroleum – a campaign driven by our experiential business, or BK’s Backyard Burger King which resulted in BK’s highest ever sales in history.

This has been made possible by our restless approach to building depth of capability – which now spans brand experience and activations at scale through to Media Relations and Brand Ambassador recruitment and management.

We’ve got in excess of 400 staff, and we’re building a trademarked (confidential) talent management application that facilitates rostering, pay, brand immersion and tutorials and training modules.

As the lines blur between what constitutes a direct execution, an activation or a digital experience, with access to the broader communications mix at Colenso BBDO our ability to deliver memorable and highly tangible brand experiences in the right way is making our agency a very compelling proposition.