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From Innocent Drinks’ 6,000-plant wildflower garden in London’s Trafalgar Square to Netflix’s neon Stranger Things experience in New York, brands are going big on experiential marketing, post-lockdown.
After the marketing events industry was brought to its knees by Covid-19 in 2020, in-person experiences have well and truly rebounded in the U.S., U.K. and across Europe in the last two years. Brands’ events budgets grew 11.1% to $75.16 billion in 2022, according to the global Experiential Marketing Forecast, with analysts predicting spend will return to pre-pandemic levels in 2024.
But whether they’re potting urban plants or opening the gate to the Upside Down, marketers are now under more scrutiny than ever to ensure the experiences they deliver don’t come at a cost to the planet.
While the environmental impact of no-expenses-spared promotional events can hard to calculate, they are often carbon intensive by their nature. Transport, temporary installations, paper, cardboard and waste can all add up, resulting in an experience that has the potential to go viral for all the wrong reasons.
Brands, and their agencies, are all too aware that sustainability is top of mind for consumers—66% of all people say they consider sustainability when they make a purchase, a number that rises to 75% among millennials, according to McKinsey.
Against this backdrop, the ad industry is working out practical, measurable ways to strike the balance between leaving customers wowed while lessening the carbon footprint of physical activations.
Rethinking raw materials
The easiest place to start? From the literal ground up.
Brand pop-ups and temporary installations have been described by critics as the “fast food” of landscape architecture; they’re built with single-use materials and plastics and springing up and down within the space of a few weeks. However, brands are now creating temporary shops and structures that both highlight their products and reduce the waste traditionally associated with doing so.
Eco-designer Stella McCartney was way ahead of the pack with her 2016 Ibiza pop-up store, which was made using only recycled wood, natural wool curtains and energy-efficient LED lighting. More recently, brands including Dior have been experimenting with how to build more sustainable physical activations.
The French fashion house recently worked with 3D printer manufacturer Wasp on a pop-up store in Jumeirah Beach in Dubai. The structure was made up of two cylindrical modules, 3D-printed by combining clay, sand and natural fibers. Wasp initially developed the technology to produce sustainable, low-cost housing for developing countries, before the luxury brand opted in.
