Fuel, which is based in Dublin’s Camden Street, employs more than 70 people and works for some of the world’s biggest brands, staging events and activations across 55 countries.
Part of what keeps it at the leading edge of experience marketing is the fact that, as well as bringing brands to life through events, experiences and entertainment, it hosts its own.
It has a portfolio of high-profile annual festivals including WellFest at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Kaleidoscope in Russborough House and Beyond the Pale in Glendalough Estate, each of which it owns, operates and runs from start to finish.
Demand for experiences, pent up during the pandemic years, made a solid recovery thereafter, if not a spectacular one, says Jonny Boyle, executive creative director at the company. He left the sector briefly to work in advertising and found not much had changed when he returned to take up his current position with Fuel three years ago.
READ MORE
The sector is “growing, but not explosively,” he says. “There’s more work but the budgets are the same.” What has changed, however, is the clients’ demands.
“They’re saying, ‘We don’t want to just sponsor culture, we want to be in it. So how can we be in it?’ And that’s a really positive sign,” he says.
Feelings about the brand aren’t created in one big bang moment but rather over the course of 1,000 small ones. Boyle points to the traditional Japanese hospitality concept of omotenashi, a culture of anticipating and meeting guests’ needs as a matter of course rather than as a matter of commerce. “It’s a kind of proactive hospitality,” he says. It’s why so many first time visitors to the country are beguiled by it without knowing precisely why.
“It’s not one big thing, it’s an accumulation of detail after detail, all those small bits of consideration, that gives you that feeling,” he says.
That’s exactly what good experiential marketing should provide, before, during and after the event.
There is, he tells Winterlich, a fallacy “that experiential equals events. For us, it’s actually everywhere your brand can be felt, that accumulation of moments that creates feeling.”
In a festival setting, that means ensuring that the big tent-pole moments provide a big wow and the queue for the loo is short.
Get all of this right and the impact of events on a brand can be hugely powerful, not just because of the event itself, but because of the dopamine hits contained in the anticipation beforehand and the memories afterwards, just like a holiday, Winterlich adds.
When it comes to being part of the culture, brands’ experiential activities must resonate and not just chime.
It’s why now old-fashioned notions about advertising’s job being to interrupt, to disrupt, or even to persuade, are just that. Indeed, more than outdated, they were deliberately designed to evoke negative feelings in people, he says. In fact, good experiential is about moving people, which requires a different starting point from traditional marketing.
“Rather than asking what you want people to do, it’s how do you want people to feel?” says Boyle. “That creates a different brief, and different creative, strategy and media decisions along the way, and gets you to a different place.”
When it comes to wanting to be part of the culture, that should be self-evident, he adds. After all, “isn’t the best part of culture the stuff that moves you?”
The advertising industry of old often leveraged culture beautifully, and had the power to move audiences to feel things, but it’s a power that is less in evidence today, suggests Boyle.
That’s despite the fact that getting it right is not the prerogative of big brands with big budgets either, he adds, pointing to a new short film produced to mark the 50th anniversary of west of Ireland knitting company Inis Meáin as a case in point.
“It is stunning and it absolutely stopped me in my tracks, an unbelievable film with beautiful music by Martin Hayes and incredible direction that weaves the sea and the wool,” he says.
With a festival such as Beyond the Pale, it’s about creating the kind of resonance that moves first-time visitors to put it on their calendar each year, and say “we are going to bring other people with us”.
It all comes back to the idea of starting your event, or your brand’s activation at an event, with a different question: “Rather than ‘how does the brand look, does it look good?’, it’s ‘what do we want people to feel when they come through here?’. Not enough brands ask that question yet it might be a good lens to look at everything through,” he says.
The hospitality sector is one in which businesses live and die according to how they make their customers feel, which is why so many examples of experiential best practice come from the world of restaurateurs.
Boyle points to two-Michelin star chef Sat Bains who was so keen that the conversations of guests enjoying his multi course menus weren’t endlessly interrupted by staff changing cutlery between plates that he designed a special wooden cutlery box for each diner, so they could change them themselves as required.
“It’s thinking about every detail and the feelings those details give,” says Boyle. “It’s not about looking for recognition for it but about trying to ensure that people walk away from that experience going, ‘that was amazing’.”
Or take Will Guidara, former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park in New York City. In his bestselling book Unreasonable Hospitality, Boyle points to a tale of how front of house staff were empowered to become what Guidara called dreamweavers, creating what Boyle suggests are magnetic moments.
In one instance wait staff in the restaurant heard diners who were on the last night of a trip to New York lamenting that they had not sampled a traditional New York hot dog. So the staff went out, bought one, and presented it to the delighted family.
As with all good experiential marketing, it’s a story those diners are doubtless still dining out on to this day.
Discover more Inside Marketing podcast episodes at irishtimes.com
