By Remy Raitt

After working in experiential marketing for three and a half years in the UK, Silver noticed a huge gap in the market of his home country. He came back to South Africa and started Stretch Experiential Marketing in 2009, and my, how it’s grown. “We used to have to beg for some extra budget to chuck samples out the back of a truck, and now we’re sitting at boardroom level along with the agencies,” says Silver.

He believes experiential marketing is indispensable because markets are constantly evolving, and wizening up as they do. “Consumers are more sceptical than they’ve ever been,” says Silver. “They are wary of advertising, they want to experience things for themselves, in their own ways, and make up their own minds, and they don’t want to be told what to think.”

Experiential marketing allows consumers to be immersed in a brand, and if the campaign is pulled off successfully, positive sentiments should abound. “The main thing is that the campaign has to be memorable,” says Silver, “and this all starts with insights”.

Silver says he started collecting insights into the market back when he was a student at Vega with a book called Experience the Message. “Back then people like Red Bull and the tobacco companies were doing things, they were the only brands playing in that space,” he recalls. But, when he moved to the UK and saw how the industry was taking off, he managed to acquire more than just insights; he learnt how to weave experiences into a successful marketing mix.

“Overseas experiential marketing was just exploding, there was already integration between experiential and social media, everyone in the UK was doing it and yet no one in South Africa was,” he says. With local experience in events and party planning, Silver already had the right relationships with brands and sponsors, so when he returned home he wasted no time approaching them with concepts for campaigns.

Fast forward a few years, and now Silver shares the heavy lifting with strategy director and fellow shareholder Pete Hutchings, and Catherine Mavrocoleas, who is the third shareholder and oversees the accounts. Stretch Experiential currently has a staff compliment of 34, who work across their “three and a half business units” namely; experiential marketing, employee engagement, public relations and staffing.

Silver believes the reason Stretch has succeeded in clinching brands like Lipton, Chivas Regal, Hollard and Telkom is that they have “an amazing strategy team”. “The intellectual capital we have now has been the major change since we started,” says Silver. “Our strategy team members all have different backgrounds in fields like copywriting, art direction and digital. Together they gain insights from what’s trending and working globally.”

Being on-trend is a key element of experiential marketing. “The big ideas are often trend-driven, on-trend ideas generally resonate well, things like pop-up shops and flash mobs,” he says. “But still, it all starts with insights. You have to ask; ‘What are the opportunities or nuggets you can use to create something for a particular market?’”

Understanding your consumer in a particular space is also key. “We do research into what the behaviour is like in a certain environment, and then decide how we can disrupt or enhance this environment,” he says. A good example of this is Stretch’s work for Mountain Dew. Their Dew Tour has run for three years on campuses across the country, and thanks to the highly interactive digital integration and live event marketing, has won the agency awards in the process. Silver says some of their campaigns have done so well locally, that they’ve been moved across the border, leaving Stretch in consultancy positions as they do.

Silver believes experiential will keep gaining traction for a number of reasons. Firstly, the measurement of experiential marketing is now credible. “Now with social media we can see how much data has been captured or how much chatter we’ve caused online,” he says. Also, profits can now more easily be pinned to experiential. “I read a white paper called the Experiential Economy and it talks about how consumers now value experiences as commodities,” says Silver, “they talk about it and flaunt like they would a new wristwatch.” This, he says, allows experiential marketing to create new retail spaces.

This seriously excites Silver. “Experiential has elevated to a key element and has become a driving element of campaigns,” he says. And they have the stats to back it up: 93% of consumers say live events are more effective at engaging and 63% of people tell others about brand experiences. And because word of mouth is one of the driving ways in which agencies are amplifying the brand experience as key content, we can understand why Silver is smiling.

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