Jan 5, 2025
Insights
The Department is a leading immersive marketing company in the UK. Providing real-life experiences on behalf of some of the world’s biggest brands. The brief was to provide insight into "talk-value" focused campaign based on consumer attitudes to advertising and brand experiences.
We live in a world where youtuber/celebrity backed products are now the fastest growing and most popular brands in the market. How these individuals have managed to attract and engage large audiences isn’t well understood yet, but there are early lessons to be learned. We looked into authoritative voices that build audience as an indicator for where brands need to go next. The results revealed new/exclusive/one-off ‘experience’ shared in an authentic way is now a requirement for successfully building audience, something The Department specialise at.
White space identification
With every project we engage with, phase one involves ensuring the client is engaging with ‘whitespace’ narratives. There has been a sea of commentary in this space in recent months, due to the changes in data regulation governing consumer privacy, and the waning return on spend in traditional advertising channels, so the challenge was to find uniqueness in a thriving conversation. The gap identified was in the consumer centric approach, why do consumers think the shifts are happening?

Building authority
In order to build authority on this narrative, we surveyed respondents on their attitudes to content and messaging from individuals versus traditional brands. The findings highlighted the importance of authenticity, exclusivity and real experience:
︎55% say online content that covers ‘new or an exclusive experience’ is the most interesting to them. Ranked number 1, ahead of content that covers ‘topics that matter to me’ and ‘culture’
︎︎︎44% say that this is due the brand providing genuine value through authentic experience, 48% say this is due to the ‘one-off’ or exclusive nature of these experience
Generating talk-value impact
This insight forms the core of a whitepaper which is targeted at senior-care by The Department’s target market, innovative marketeers at the top consumer facing brands.
Further opportunities lie in generating media coverage with the proprietary insight.
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