Experiments in digital experiential marketing

For a long time now, Red Ant has been involved in using digital technologies to back-up experiential marketing campaigns, including the pre and post seeding online, mobile app development and our obvious passion for geo-location promotional services (4Square and Gowalla), so to back this up with interaction on the day, we put together a virtual stand hidden away in our actual stand at Internet World for those people queuing for seminars.

The idea behind the virtual stand was to create a WIFI walled garden; that is, a wireless network where people, once connected, could not get beyond the web pages that we made available to them. For the show, we created a small 4-page site that looked much like this one, including blog articles and the white paper as something for people to read whilst queuing up for the seminars or taking a break on the stands. We didn’t promote it verbally or put signs up, and we didn’t try to hide what it was (calling the network free WIFI would have been naughty), calling it Red Ant Garden (which had the unfortunate effect of putting it towards the bottom of alphabetical lists of 30 odd networks). The idea was to see what could be achieved organically (no seeding, no advertising, no marketing), so we could have a base perception of any success. From this, we can build models for promotion from what we already know through other experiential marketing techniques based across audiences.

What we found was quite interesting; about 2.5% of all Internet World attendees (approximately 18% of our target audience) logged into the site across the 3 days, and the average visit length was about 12 minutes 30 seconds. Most traffic was on the home page, with the Facebook F8 (still fresh in the news) blog, being the next most visited page. From browsing trends, is appears that people in the queue for seminars were our most avid readers. By running some tests whilst at the show we determined that access to the virtual stand was possible at about 100 metres (it was difficult to get further than that since due to the layout of the building that seemed to be the maximum distance from the stand at Earls Court 2), so all of the theatres were covered.

As for browsers, general mobile traffic accounted for 43.5%, the most prevalent of these being Android based phones, with iPhones accounting for 16.15% of all traffic and the Blackberry coming in at 4%. The remaining 36% were various workstations and laptops of those exhibiting. An unintentional but interesting bit of information that was captured was a snapshot of the web activity (all anonymous), that was happening on the phones. Here, eBay, Google and Twitter are favourites, along with things like the HTC weather widgets on Androids, with LinkedIn and the BBC also as notable mentions.

In terms of browsing, the right hand side of the screen was the least followed with people happier to scroll down than scroll across to reach the same content, or, since this was focused on smart phones, use the main column to access information.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about how virtual stands can back up experiential marketing campaigns, please feel free to contact us.

This blog post was written by Richard Conyard

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