A brand activation agency

Brand activation is a campaign or live experience that gets people interacting with a brand directly – building awareness, changing perceptions and creating the kind of connection that leads to sales. Unlike ongoing marketing activity, an activation is a defined moment: a product sampling campaign, a pop-up, a live brand experience.

Our guide to brand activation explains the different formats and how to choose the right one for your objectives.

The best brand activations create a moment people remember and talk about. Recent examples of ours include the Malibu Confession Booth, a Heineken 0.0 takeover of New York’s Grand Central Terminal and sampling Philadelphia cream cheese on the Intense Tour – each one putting the brand in front of the right audience at exactly the right moment.

Browse our brand activation projects to see how these campaigns worked and what they achieved.

The two overlap, but the emphasis is different. Experiential marketing is about immersing people in a brand – engaging the senses and sparking an emotional connection. Brand activation uses those experiences to drive a specific, measurable action: a trial, a purchase, a sign-up. In practice, the best campaigns do both, which is why we plan every experience around the action it needs to drive.

We’ve explained this in more detail in experiential marketing vs brand activation.

Yes – when the activation is designed around a commercial objective from the start. Sampling puts your product directly into someone’s hand, and live experiences build the recall that drives purchase and repurchase: 91% of consumers say they feel more positive about a brand after taking part in a live activation. Campaigns disappoint when they’re designed for awareness but judged on sales, so we agree the commercial goal first and measure everything against it.

Read our brand activation insights for driving sales and the metrics every campaign should measure.

A brand activation agency plans and delivers the campaigns that bring a brand into direct contact with its audience – and takes responsibility for every stage, from strategy and creative through to the people on the ground. At Purity that spans brand experience campaigns, product sampling and the trained promotional and event staff who bring them to life, across the UK and US.

If you’re comparing agencies, here’s what to look for in a brand activation agency.

Every activation follows the same arc: strategy and creative shaped around your objective, then location planning, production and staffing, then delivery and reporting against the KPIs we agreed at the brief. We run the whole process in-house, drawing on a pool of over 2,500 trained brand ambassadors and a production team whose experience spans the Olympics to the Eras Tour – so nothing gets lost between the idea and the day itself.

See how a campaign comes together from concept to execution.