What’s your name and position within the organisation?
Fredda Hurwitz – Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, RedPeg
How did RedPeg come to work with Rights Holders and Brands? What ‘bigger picture’ did this relationship seek to meet?
It’s important to first understand our history before answering this question, as it makes a lot more sense in context.
RedPeg is an award winning, independent brand engagement agency, set up by our founder & CEO, Brad Nierenberg, nearly 25 years ago. At the time, RedPeg was almost exclusively focused on delivering excellent point-of-contact interaction, through what he felt was the make or break of a “meh” experience, to one that created long lasting memories: in other words, phenomenal brand ambassadors.
I can hear you rolling your eyes and thinking: “oh, you’re a staffing agency!”. No, we weren’t then, nor are we now, but we genuinely believe that great strategy, awesome creative and flawless execution can easily come tumbling down if that essential human connection is sub-par. With a strong foundation in place, our work naturally began to evolve, due to the absolute trust we created with our brand partners. Increasingly, we were creating and delivering holistic brand engagement experiences for and on behalf of brands such as GEICO (the 2nd largest insurance company in the US), TD Bank, Amazon, AT&T and Volkswagen to name a few.
And those brand ambassadors? They’re still a key component of what we provide, as and when the need is there, but, unlike many agencies, we don’t outsource this service. We have an in-house Talent Team with a database of nearly 26k people that they have personally interviewed and vetted.
Although the majority of our work is B2C, we also work with rights holders to help them deliver best in class fan engagement experiences, including the PFL, the Washington Justice and WTT.
How is the effectiveness of the relationship(s) measured? What metrics do you use?
We’re not, nor will we ever be a “typical sponsorship agency”. Having said that, we have a Venues & Sponsorship team that works almost exclusively on behalf of our clients to assess, value and negotiate venues, properties and talent to ensure that they’re paying the right price, based on insight, fact and experience. We’ve built an extremely robust proprietary database that allows us to track historical data and compare today’s prices. Far too often, brands are quoted ridiculous prices because of who they are. We circumvent this by doing the upfront negotiation.
Additionally, we have a Data & Analytics team that customizes measurement and tracking, based on each client’s needs and objectives. Quant, qual, pre/ during/ post, surveys, baseline assessments based on previous data… there are a ton of tools that we deploy to ensure that we’re constantly optimizing our clients’ investments and working to deliver against their bottom line, drive qualified leads or achieve ROI/ ROO/ ROE, all while ensuring that we’re creating memorable and engaging experiences.
As an example, we’ve been working with GEICO for 15 years and have been mining extensive data from every event we undertake for them, which typically consists of 10 national tours annually along with ComicCons, Esports & Gaming Tournaments, music festivals etc. The millions of lines of code that we gather allows us to confidently state what our contribution to their bottom line is, by isolating the value of experiential vs OTS etc.
What are the current trends within your business area, and how are they affecting how you work and how you deliver on strategy?
There’s an expression being bandied about at the moment: we’re in the golden age of experiential. This may or may not be true, depending upon your POV, but what I believe we can all agree upon is that experiential has firmly positioned itself as a must-have for any brand that is people-facing. There are endless stats right now affirming the value emotionally and financially of experiential within the marketing mix.
Customers with an emotional connection to a brand have a customer lifetime value that’s 4x higher than the average customer1
After a good experience:
98% are more inclined to purchase2
94% are more likely to remember the brand2
93% feel more connected to a brand2
70% become regular customers2
47% of consumers won’t engage with a business after a moment of brand disappointment3
Source: 1. Montista 2. Event Marketer 3. Accenture
Given the prominence and continued growth of the experience economy, we’re seeing a surge in atypical businesses buying up experiential and creative agencies e.g. Accenture and Condé Nast, or traditional ATL agencies trying to claim their piece of the experiential pie through acquisition, or the creation of new business units devoted specifically to experiential. This, inevitably, is adding new levels of challenge and complexity, however this scramble by the larger networks has actually been a bit of a gift for us. Time and again we’re hearing how brands prefer working with smaller, independent agencies who are proven specialists and are myopically focused on treating each opportunity as if it’s our first date: the courtship never ends! In fact, I recently spoke with the Global CXO of a very well-known company who flat out said that she would only work with agencies like ourselves, having had numerous experiences with the larger networks that simply didn’t deliver what she needed and/ or just didn’t understand what true brand engagement meant.
What are the key changes in your industry over the past few years and what does the future look like?
There have been a number of key changes in our industry, namely that brand engagement/ experience has been recognized as a key component of the marketing mix, not simply a nice to have.
By this, I mean that the experience economy is showing no signs of slowing down, given people’s desire to collect memories vs things (think Airbnb’s experiences the Trivial Pursuit Hotel in Moscow, and KLM’s the Bonding Buffet) and brands’ acceptance that engagement via passion points is far more meaningful than awareness alone.
With this as the foundation, I’m extremely confident that experience has definitively moved past being known as the nice fluffy bit, or the icing on the cake – it is the cake!
What challenges have you encountered, and how have they been overcome?
One of our clients recently answered this question far better than I could.
According to her, one of the key reasons she hired us was because we assessed her brand, got fully underneath the skin of the people she was trying to engage with and genuinely reviewed the broader marketplace in order to bring her a solution based on a new insight. Not only were we the underdog that beat out the incumbent agency, but thanks to our problem-solving approach, we found a way for her brand to be accepted and feted by a fickle community in a new environment.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
This past year has been nothing short of amazing for RedPeg.
In November, we received a Platinum Award for our Brand Refresh, in December, we opened our first office outside the US in Dubai and were named to Chief Marketer 200, in February, we made Fast Company’s Global Top 50 Most Innovative Live Event Agencies (#10).
In addition to the lovely accolades, we’ve experienced unprecedented growth through new clients, colleagues and external support, notably in May, when we announced the appointment of former Coca-Cola executive, Scott McCune to our Board of Advisors.
Contact Fredda Hurwitz:
e: info@redpeg.com
w: https://redpeg.com
