LO:DOWN 2.0 HAS LANDED!

By Neil Jones, CEO and founder of location:live

"2022 represented another year of firsts for location:live, filled with significant advances, rapid expansion and as always, curveballs that kept the industry on their toes. It was the first full trading year post-pandemic, presenting us with a clearer perspective of industry behaviour; mapping the full four quarters for the first time in three years. 2022 was also a year of recovery, reflection and optimism that was resilient despite the unforeseen domestic and global events that impacted the UK economy and consumer confidence.

Q1, although beginning with a healthy flourish of activity, came to an unfortunate conclusion, caused by the sensitivities and ‘wartime’ mentality brought about by the invasion of Ukraine and the resulting economic effects. Nevertheless, a peak in temperature translated into a peak of bookings as brands made up for lost time, with record-breaking Summer planning activity that extended into September on the promise of extended favourable weather. We saw an unsurpassed number of space searches up to the end of October, before brand activation activity cooled down as cost-of-living crisis concerns manifested themselves ever more strongly, which restrained space bookings ahead of Q4 and the traditional spending sprees of Black Friday and in the run-up to Christmas. Again, brand sensitivities are at an all time high, with experiential, as a serious investment in space and infrastructure, keen to remain on the right side of the conversation.

Despite the challenges – and in some cases because of them - the marketplace evolved across a number of metrics: with a broadening of the type of businesses procuring experiential space, a greater diversification of the genre of locations becoming available for brand activations, and a widening of the geographical bandwidth in marketing horizons. We see these as positive signs of the industry maturing through information sharing, innovation, and an increasingly insightful understanding of how experiential can touch consumers most effectively. Significantly shorter campaign lead times - first seen during the pandemic but now the norm - are also keeping brands more in step with real-world events and more responsive to resulting consumer reactions.

lo:live makes it easier than ever for brands to compare and book spaces in a transparent way, with shorter turnaround times and flexibility around their options.

Snowballing in popularity in 2022 and already commonplace at the beginning of 2023, the shift to outdoors and larger experiential spaces, coupled with the rising demand for ‘total-takeover’ venues, is part of a new dynamic in the industry. The desire to create ‘magic moments’ in major public arenas: truly memorable immersive activations that generate stunning media content for digital transmission to global audiences. These potentially shorter-duration but bigger-budget activations are not wholly reliant upon footfall or the immediate audience demographic and are more focused on huge, far-reaching digital impact. Massive investment budgets are mollified by similarly large KPIs, as 4 activations rely on social engagement and the viral factor to spread their message. It’s a new brand of hyper-local: brands now endeavour to reach consumers via social media as opposed to in their local shopping centre, high street or town square. In what might appear to be polarisation within the marketplace, we are seeing a spectrum of extremes, with these high-budget, Instagrammable activations at one end of the spectrum, cascading down to more modest, yet consistent, campaign activations at regional locations at the other, where brands look to immerse themselves more geographically broadly in a target demographic.

As experiential marketing is now an integral part of holistic marketing strategies, we are seeing the creative integration of digital innovation coupled with physical brand presence, amplifying the messaging in public spaces. We have been active participants in campaigns using projection technology to bring to life buildings and transport hubs in conjunction with brand activations on the ground. The competitive tension between these marketing mechanisms has gone; and they are now complementary. What we are witnessing is the dawn of ‘live media’ infiltrating traditional experiential, so that by association, our own place within the marketplace is broadening. We are not only establishing a worldwide portfolio of physical spaces for use on the platform, but also documenting the evolution of spaces, horizontal, vertical, transient and virtual, that are suitable for different genres of live media. In other words, we are developing an inventory of digital-enhancement spaces that never existed before. The classification of ‘space’ as a brand activation medium has become more mercurial than ever before, needing new definitions and terminologies that bypass the restrictive vocabulary associated with physical locations. This is something we define as 'On Live': a fusion of experiential brand vehicles that convey a message of activation spaces without boundaries.

In a similar vein, the traditional patterns of seasonality have changed, bucking expected industry behaviour and the quarterly movements in activity we usually observe. Brands are happy to activate outdoors throughout the year if they have the right backdrop for content creation to supplement their physical presence. We are also seeing a massive elongation of Summer experiential, with a similar shift in the supply-demand-driven price structure of space, where space providers are upwardly revising the price of what was previously considered ‘low season’ inventory. With more unpredictability in brand movements, lo:live has become more useful than ever.

The number of lo:live platform users doubled to over 1,900, coupled with the significant growth in our location inventory across the UK. To meet the rising demand, we integrated strategic system enhancements to improve lo:live’s end-to-end space “search-plan-book” functionality and to ready the platform for international inventory as we expand further into Europe and beyond.

Was this first post-pandemic year one of readjustment with its own unique set of macro and micro events at home and abroad skewing market behaviour? Or have we truly seen more-permanent shifts in brand activity by location, season, genre and planning time in a brave new experiential world? We unveil some of the evidence here and will be closely monitoring and reporting on these fascinating changes to the experiential landscape as we progress into 2023. We hope that LO:DOWN 2.0, highlighting useful trends, initiatives and supply and demand indicators will help the industry plan and validate its strategies for the year ahead."