A truly engaging pop-up experience

Joss Davidge, Business Director of brand experience agency BEcause, continues his weekly search for creative marketing ideas. 

This week he focuses on a campaign that shows how clear, genuine experiential thinking can inspire action and leave a lasting impression.
 
In a world where engagement is double underlined in the notebooks of many marketers, we are seeing more and more campaigns that use an experience to involve consumers in core brand messages, spread awareness, incite action and, quite simply, get people talking.  
 
This week I’ve come across an interesting charity campaign that uses an engaging pop-up experience to leave a lasting impression and champion a cause. It is a lesson in the power of a well-timed and well-executed live experience.
 
The Empty Shop

At BEcause we are big fans of pop-up experiences, and by that I do not mean squeezing a branded display into a shopping centre and hoping that it gets noticed simply because it’s there. A truly effective pop-up experience is engaging, alluring and sensitively disrupts consumer’s day-to-day life in order to encourage them to connect with the featured brand.  
 
The Empty Shop (A Loja Vazia), which recently sprung up in a busy Sao Paolo shopping centre, is a fantastic example of the impact a pithy experiential campaign can have.
 
The charity also sparked conversations by releasing the blueprints for the structure and creative idea online as open source material. Instead of keeping the idea close to its chest, which is sometimes seen as a fortified brand approach from yesteryear, the charity championed transparency and encouraged those seeking donations for other causes, in other cities, to use the core creative idea. Not something every brand will want to do I know, but a nice way to tap into ‘the spirit of the age’.

Read more from Joss Davidge in our Clubhouse.