Field marketing leagues tables 2008

Instead of merely setting up a demonstration stand at outdoor festivals, many brands are now staging their own annual shows, giving them greater control over how they communicate with visitors.

Events such as Nike Run London and the Red Bull Flugtag are proliferating, and field marketers are getting a piece of this action. The Innocent Village Fete, GSK's Ribena Harvestival and Sony Ericsson's Ibiza Rocks are all run by brand experience agencies.

'Creating our own event allows us to work with brands that share our values and ethos. It ensures we create a great experience - a "thank you" to our drinkers,' says Innocent Drinks marketing manager Andrew Bullock.

There are changes on the traditional side, too, as a greater reliance is placed on field marketers to provide intelligence about which distributors to target to boost sales, instead of being told where to aim for by their clients. Companies are also looking to combine experiential campaigns with merchandising activity, to ensure maximum sales uplift.

Indeed, Gary MacManus, managing director of Reach, suggests that the traditional field marketing model no longer exists. Instead, he says, successful agencies offer an integrated service that includes traditional field marketing, events, direct activity and telemarketing.

MacManus believes that small-to-medium-sized firms that specialise solely in experiential will struggle, and predicts a round of consolidation as the bigger players snap them up to complete their integrated offer.

Increasingly, field marketing and experiential agencies find themselves sitting at the top table with other agencies, and sometimes even directing creative input. Some are even being paid retainers instead of being hired for ad hoc tactical activity.

Carbon Marketing helped to launch Sharpie highlighter pens recently, and found itself in the unusual position of being the lead agency on all activity. When it felt the US brand was pursuing the wrong approach for the UK market, it stepped in to set matters right. 'We had to be bold in getting the brand to change direction, but it worked,' says managing director Wendy Hooper.

When it comes to the responsibility for mounting large-scale events, yet further skills and expertise are required. These range from finding brand partners and helping to market the event to other brands, down to working with local authorities to meet health and safety commitments.

A case in point is the Innocent Village Fete, which is organised by Sledge, and took place at the beginning of the month in London's Regents Park . It combines live music with traditional activities such as ferret racing, morris dancing and coconut shies.

Owning an event means a brand can mould it to its character, says Sledge's managing director Jez Paxman. This manifested itself at the Innocent event in touches such as placing tags on visitors' bikes to thank them for cycling to the event, echoing the messages that the products' labels carry. Catering, too, can ensure that the event meshes with the brand ethos. 'If a brand runs an event, it gets more control over things like that than if it were simply sponsoring it,' points out Paxman.

This is also true of Sony Ericsson's Ibiza Rocks, for example, a series of guitar-band concerts on the Balearic island and the UK aimed at a 16- to 24- year-old audience and handled by Iris. The event involved the creation of a 300-room hotel in Ibiza where field marketers showcased the brand's handsets to guests.

The reach of this sort of activity can be extended by deploying other channels. The Ibiza Rocks gigs are small, but the content is supplied to a wide audience via a Channel 4 TV series and video of the concerts was streamed via the internet. In addition, Sony Ericsson has tie-ups with radio station Xfm and music magazine NME.

TV coverage of the event drew an audience of 1.5m last year, while more than 1m sought out streamed content, clips and mobile ringtones on the event's website. This kind of integrated offering not only helps to sustain momentum, but also ensures that consumers continue to use the brand.

'A lot of what we do at live events is followed up with a digital CRM campaign. Clients are starting to understand that if you engage with someone, you need to continue that relationship afterwards,' says Cameron Day.

In the instance of Ibiza Rocks, this is done by email, with the tone of the message based on data gathered. 'We find out what visitors are interested in, and filter it through to ensure we can affect their longer-term behaviour,' adds Day.

A similar approach is being used in a Sony VAIO campaign at Heathrow. Brand experience teams talk to travellers to raise awareness of the computer range and gather data, which is then fed to the digital team to send out emails directing recipients to a microsite.

Other experiential campaigns are also making use of the internet. Carbon's Sharpie campaign, for instance, involved sending pens to 200 leading designers in the media and creative industries, and encouraged them to go online to talk about the product's uses.

In a recent Pot Noodle roadshow, which was run by Closer, consumers were invited to challenge a stunt dwarf to a Gladiator-style food fight. The match was then filmed and uploaded to the website. 'This makes experiential more measurable, and helps to ensure the campaign delivers real return on investment,' says Closer managing director Liz Richardson.

Many brands are also coming to realise that field marketers are in a good position to support their experiential campaigns with targeted merchandising activity. Ribena's Harvestival, a series of traditional-style country fairs, is staged in locations across the UK, with both the sales and experiential activity for the branded event handled by CPM.

In the lead-up to a Harvestival, reps visit local retailers to raise awareness and ensure that they are sufficiently stocked to gain maximum sales benefit. 'Maximising sales and marketing resources is as crucial as ever,' says Peter Mulholland, third-party sales controller for Ribena's owner, GSK Nutritional Healthcare. 'Sales drives ensure that local retailers benefit from the experiential work, and that key brand messages continue to reach consumers after the activity, which helps to boost sales over a wider area, for a longer period.'

Mulholland adds that the onus is on the agency to maintain excellent communication, both with the brand's sales and marketing departments and within its own teams. This requires high-level account management from CPM, with senior executives keeping in close touch with key field personnel.

In terms of distribution, the focus has shifted from targeting the most profitable outlets to homing in on those that are under-performing. The logic is that they are in greater need of attention. The task of identifying these has become easier since supermarkets started making EPOS till data available.

Consultant Nick Fennell, managing director of Archway Management, points out that rising petrol prices have added to pressure to minimise costs by keeping store visits to a minimum. 'Rather than behaving as automatons, making the same journey every quarter, brands use data

to tell "good" stores from bad and decide where visits are needed,' he says.

Agencies' usefulness as providers of this information is even greater now that the convenience sector is regaining popularity. Many franchise stores now trade under names such as Spar, Londis and Costcutter, and agencies have been building databases to keep track of their characteristics.

One is Blue Water, which provides clients with information about size, rate of sale, and propensity-to-buy of outlets. It has a database containing more than 45,000 records, of which it estimates 20,000 could benefit from visits by brand reps.

The agency's success in this area was recognised last year, when it won a DMA Gold Award for a sales drive for Johnson & Johnson's Nicorette, in which it secured listings for the product in about 12,000 independent outlets that had previously never considered stocking it.

'In the past, clients would just give us a call file and ask us to get on with the visits,' says the agency's managing director, David Louis. 'Now they treat us as the experts, with us telling them where to go.' He believes this trend will gather pace. 'In the past year, companies have been demanding to see ROI models far more,' he adds. 'We are experiencing a definite shift toward brands spending less money on activity in the field and more on data manipulation and analysis.'

Reach has been building a similarly sized database of the convenience sector, in which stores are tagged with up to 60 attributes. This gives an overview of each individual outlet and how it has been contacted during various campaigns. The information is made accessible via the web, as well as any piece of hardware used in the field.

'The insight means we can go to the client with special opportunities,' says Reach sales director Matt Lloyd. 'The data allows them to see where you are not getting a return from a particular outlet and may need more resources, which is invaluable.' Moreover, being accessible online means clients can see what happened in a store as little as two minutes ago.

Reach has also begun to develop its service by starting to offer its data for use by clients' own field teams. 'We can provide the insight, the data capture, and the vehicle by which the client accesses all of the information, leaving the in-house team to decide how to act on it,' says Lloyd. One such client

is Nestle. Its Rowntree confectionery brand is represented by the agency in the convenience sector, and is looking to use Reach's data insight for its own field work in supermarkets.

Developments such as these are signifiers of an industry in good health. Whereas some disciplines have struggled to come up with fresh ideas, field marketing has widened its boundaries, offering clients innovative approaches, and growing the potential for return on investment.