Experiential Marketing Now Enjoys Greater Budget Commitment – AEMS CEO

In the past five years, top brands have been considering experiential marketing as a more effective channel to create sales and consumer experience than the traditional point-of-exposure. With increasing budgeting for the channel, Chief Executive Officer, EXP Nigeria, Mr. Wole Olagundoye speaks with ADEDEJI ADEMIGBUJI on how experiential marketing is fast-changing the industry.

There has been sudden interest in experiential marketing. Where is this coming from?
To be honest, it is purely coincidental that the things have to follow each other like this but the truth about it is that the time for experiential marketing has come.
Spend is moving towards experiential marketing, it’s about time people start to take it seriously and try to give it the respect it deserve within the marketing mix so that we can harness from it the proper dividend experiential marketing has.

Nigeria hosted the first African Experiential Marketing, AEM, Summit, how would you rate the participation and the acceptance so far across all sectors of the economy?
As you can see for yourself I think we’ve had a full house. We have diverse audience raging from FMCGs, banking, telecoms, clients, agencies.
So I think, for a very first event, we’ve done very well. What we are looking at is building on the success of this first edition and taking that to the years that will come by, and we also intend to keep doing this event. For us this is how to differentiate ourselves in the market. Things are involving and we need to get into the mix.
The world is moving on a fast pace and we cannot be left behind. Whereas we can do all these things, the clients on the brand side need to begin to develop the courage to be able to do these things because they are always scared of doing anything that is beyond traditional realms. So, we have to start challenging that.

The Editor of Event Marketer magazine, the world’s leading provider of experiential marketing content, Dan Hanover, cited some case studies; do you see some of those case studies as a reflection of what happens in our marketing environment?
Yes, of course. To put things in proper perspective, some of the things that he showcased in some way or form have happened here and has been done here already but we haven’t chronicled them properly. So, we don’t have the documentation of them such that we can show them.
People don’t have faith in the fact that it’s going to happen like this or just haven’t really followed the process properly, but in some way or form some of these things have happened here.
But to tell you the truth, a lot of those things can be done here, it’s not even the technology, we have the technology and we can do them but what we need is collaborating clients, brand managers that that can take the bull by the horn and do things that has not been done before.
Everybody fears for their career and they fear that if anything goes wrong their careers will be on the line, and because of that, they stay with things that are normal, sounds usual so that if anything goes wrong they will say they’ve done it before. But we need to start challenging that line of thinking and start to push things away.
We can do anything we set our minds to in this country and it is one of the reason I personally have been in this industry because I wake up every morning thinking “what is the next big thing we are going to do”. There is no limit to what you can do in this business.

Much as I agree with you that the time has come, I still don’t see more of your work in the financial sector and public service. Do you think you have something to add to those sectors too?
Most definitely, every single sector can benefit from experiential marketing and the reason why you are not seeing too much work on that end is because of how things are done in that sector.
Conservatively, normally the banking sector are very conservative, they hardly do stuffs. But go and check the banks that are doing things, they are doing it using experiential marketing. GTB is one bank in that space, Enterprise which was formerly Bank PHB, Keystone Bank are on.
We have done stuffs with them before on experiential marketing. It’s not as if they are not doing anything, it’s just that the number that are doing are very small because they are a conservative industry and they don’t do too much of that.
This is why I’m saying we need to start challenging the status quo because that is what is lacking.

With what we have heard here today, do you see more organisations who are not having experiential marketing mindset look into becoming experiential marketing agent?
That is the hope and that is what we have been praying and going through all these trouble for. We pray that with this kind of activities we have pulled together, they will be inspired and they will discover that this thing truly works because there is nothing that best showcase than demonstrating the fact that it works and that is what we are bringing to the table, to say ‘‘experiential marketing delivers” so we believe that people are going to be signing up to experiential marketing if they haven’t been doing so.

One of the most influential figures in this industry, Carol Abade the Group CEO, EXP International, has pronounced Marketing 101 dead today which means the likes of radio, the traditional marketing platforms are no longer working. Now the Marketing 200 where experiential marketing is placed is now involving. Where do you see the future of traditional marketing models and the involving ones?

The truth of the matter is, what she meant was that the mindset of Marketing 101 is dead, that is the truth. Gone are the days when you think that if I put my ads on the radio that means that there is going to be off takes on the shelves or those days when you think because you’ve shot a great TVC your product will be moving, those days are gone.
What she was saying was that you need to now start engaging people on the back of whatever thing you are doing because if you don’t do that you product don’t get to move, so that is exactly what she meant there.

So what is the future of the traditional model in this new evolution?
They will evolve. Advertising has a big space, without advertising there is no existence. Everything has to be amplified but what is the media for amplification that is what we need to start looking at. There are lots of newspapers in other climes that don’t have physical forms anymore, they are purely online.
Who will ever think about that, but does the newspaper still exists? Yes. The only thing is that it has changed form. We need to start thinking “what is now the form that things have to take?” we can’t keep holding on to old things. Thing are evolving and I want to evolve with it, that is just it.

source:national mirror