Feature: Face up to self-regulation

When I first got involved with live marketing, if you were a little creative with what your field staff were wearing or if something they handed out was particularly well designed, you were considered to be real innovators. However, today these techniques have become commonplace. In fact one of the reasons behind the growth in experiential marketing is the fact that it allows brands to be far more creative and innovative in how they communicate with consumers.

Of course, in this time the consumers themselves have also changed, both in terms of how they consume media and how they interact with brands. They are becoming increasingly experientially savvy and immune to brand activities that would once have been seen as cutting edge and dynamic. This in turn is forcing experiential agencies to push boundaries further and to become more adventurous and risqué with the experiences they create. The reality is that the top line of most creative briefs these days is to produce something that shocks and surprises consumers.

This is fuelling the growth of areas within experiential such as guerrilla marketing, stunt marketing and other non-permission-based techniques. Currently these are extremely popular mechanisms – everyone wants to be famous and get in the press for their latest ground-breaking campaign, whether that’s grassing over Trafalgar Square, creating an urban beach or projecting Gail Porter onto the Houses of Parliament. But with increased pressure to shock and capture people’s attention it is inevitable that these techniques will at some point push boundaries to such an extent that practitioners will either overlook promotional regulations or transgress the limits of what is deemed appropriate in the consumer’s eyes, particularly when brands are targeting families. We need to put careful thought into recognising when experiential stunts become a nuisance, and we need to know where to draw the line.

Changing methods

Experiential and field marketing tactics have changed over the years, and often with the benefit of hindsight we can sit back and question our methods. Cigarette companies used to have people going into pubs and swapping half-empty packets of one brand for full packets of another, and this was once seen as a fantastic creative mechanic.

Fast forward to today and we think it’s a great idea to have undercover actors or actresses in bars recommending you try different drinks. What are we going to be thinking about this technique in 10 years time? I would imagine that a lot of agencies in that time will be looking back and questioning whether that was the right thing to be doing. I should add here that I’m passionate about the power of experiential because it can be so creative. What I don’t want to see is any form of regulation taking the sting out of its tail, but we as agencies do need to be able to stand back and make sure any campaign is both relevant and appropriate for its target audience.

With the budgets behind experiential growing, the sector needs to get its house in order and look at best practice, self-regulation, training and standards across the industry. I know various trade associations, including the ISP and the Marketing Communication Consultants Association, are looking at experiential in terms of training and codes of practice, but agencies need to start addressing this for themselves before someone actually imposes it on them. This is particularly important with a lot of experiential agencies trying to move out of their remit and do all the add-on bits, such as the sales promotion mechanics. The areas of the industry that would traditionally be supplying these skills all have the backing of training and codes of practice, and experiential should be duty bound to have the same standards.

I have been involved in discussions with the ISP about establishing an experiential diploma, and the meetings have served to highlight the huge differences of opinion within experiential and through this the need for set standards within the industry. Although short-lived, one of the best things about the Live Brand Experience Association when it was set up was that it set out to create best-practice guidelines for its member agencies.

Taking the lead

Although this is something that the individual agencies need to be considering, it is the trade bodies that will ultimately take a lead role in pushing forward the ideas of self-regulation and best-practice guidelines, and uniting the industry behind them. It would be difficult for a group of individual agencies to agree on what those issues are and how to regulate themselves, and I think that the first below-the-line association that takes ownership of this will draw the experiential agencies into the debate, as it’s something we all want to be part of.

However, I’m not suggesting that we instigate the experiential equivalent of a copy-checking process similar to the one offered by the ISP as this would I believe stifle the very thing that sets experiential apart. Also, I’m not trying to condemn experiential, and I believe regulating the creative expression of execution in terms of what is and what is not appropriate is something that agencies need to include in their own processes.

Instead we need to be looking at the media channels of experiential and our different touch points with our markets as areas where self-regulation should take root. One of the most obvious places to start would be with the current grey area surrounding promotional staff. All agencies are employing promotional staff as freelance workers to implement campaigns for them. A lot of these agencies are just pulling students off the street and paying them low wages and giving them no training. A quick search on any social networking site such as Facebook will provide you with the evidence of this.

At the moment there’s very little regulation in terms of agencies’ duty of care to promotional staff or towards health and safety issues. But these brand ambassadors, as we now call them, are directly responsible for interacting with the public and there is a risk to brands down the line if there is no regulation, best practice or training for them, and the brands themselves need to be as aware of this as the agencies creating the promotional activities.

While companies recognise the power of experiential, few, if any, would grill agencies on these types of issues, but that is all likely to change. As corporate social responsibility gains importance so issues like this will become increasingly prominent to our clients, and in turn we may find that they will force our agenda. But not only that, more and more experiential agencies are facing up to the sorts of procurement-led tender processes that most other below-the-line agencies have been used to for a good many years. Having standards in place would make this process a lot easier.

So far I’m not aware of an experiential campaign that has crossed the lines of acceptability, but I’m sure that if we don’t impose restraints upon ourselves in the near future, this cannot be far off. And do we really want the government imposing legislation on us? For many reasons and on many levels, it’s time for us to get our house in order.