Experiential Marketing Has Helped To ‘Rejuvenate’ Regional Town Centres. Industry Leader, Location Live, Explains How & Why

Location Live has orchestrated some of the most ambitious brand activation campaigns ever seen over the last decade. In 2020 they launched the first ever digital platform enabling landlords, brands and agencies to engage directly and conduct ultra-efficient transactions of ‘experiential space.’ ‘Experiential space’ is a location with natural footfall where brands can proactively engage with consumers.

The Location Live digital platform is modestly named lo:live, and we asked Chief Technology Officer, Kevin Cavilla, for insights into how experiential marketing assisted by next-generation technology is contributing to the reenergising of regional town centres.
 

How did lo:live respond to the Covid pandemic?

 
Launching lo:live mid pandemic was both the very worst and very best timing: in prevailing market uncertainty we were able to support negative industry interruption with a positive technological disruption, re-energising the market with much-needed virtual tools.

The arrival of lo:live, with its 3D graphics and immersive imagery, meant experiential space could be discovered and viewed remotely, then strategically shortlisted to very specific parameters and demographics. All of which gave agencies and brands flexible and agile campaign planning tools that became crucial due to the pandemic market volatility.

Campaign lead times were slashed with space booked much closer to activation, as a result the immediacy of access to information and speed of planning and booking using lo:live became hugely important to the market. The platform also gave landlords a forum to engage and update the marketplace in response to shifting rules and regulations.
 
 

 

How can experiential marketing help rejuvenate city centres?

 
The pandemic saw a shift in demand to outdoor experiential spaces and urban hubs closer to consumers. Regional town centres benefitted and lo:live offered a direct route to exciting spaces previously under the radar of brands and agencies. Overlooked locations were activated or repurposed for brand campaigns seeking local consumer touchpoints.
 

 
For example, we worked with Nivea in partnership with Cancer Research, and we managed to book 36 spaces for a summer campaign, many of which had rarely if even been used for experiential marketing. In these situations, word gets out through social media, increasing curiosity in town centres whose steady footfall is attractive to brands. A clear symbiosis emerges: a regeneration in town centre creative energy, coupled with a rejuvenation in the desire by agencies and brands to engage with consumers there.
 

Your aim is to ‘democratise’ the marketplace; what does this mean?

 
lo:live filters landlord inventory into unbiased ‘best-fit’ search results, so it doesn’t restrict location options, but significantly widens the choice. lo:live’s impartiality also fostered a level playing-field between more established landlords and new entrants to this media with limited marketing budgets, enabling them to digitise their inventory and present it to the market in a way they couldn’t before.

All of which supports lo:live’s core goal: to provide agencies and brands the ability to find the right space and audience for their campaign, with lo:live facilitating better landlord engagement to fulfil the demand. Taking away these entry barriers widens the participant marketplace.
 

Do you see this trend repeating in 2022?

 
It remains to be seen whether the uptake in town centre experiential marketing was a short-term pandemic response or a more permanent shift to outside spaces. Fortunately, lo:live platform usage continues to grow at pace with commensurate increases in inventory, searches, and harvestable data, so we will be able to identify trends in real time and feed this back this to our clients. In this tactically competitive media, forewarned is to be forearmed.