Toronto agency Fuse is going Live with the launch of a division that blends its experiential and social capabilities in a single offering.
Fuse Live (Fuse is using upper case and an exclamation mark in the name: FUSE L!VE) is the culmination of a months-long effort to boost the agency’s capabilities in both experiential and social and then blending them together. “It is a new service offering because it is the two in one,” said Stephen Brown, president of the independent agency.
The division represents a cultural shift within the agency to deliver better, more engaging live brand experiences that reach further and deliver more impressions for marketers, said Brown.
With mass media fragmented into countless channels, brands and agencies have increasingly looked toward experiential marketing as an opportunity to connect with consumers for several years now. But, brands have been slow to think about experiential and social as complementary pieces of a larger consumer engagement puzzle, and agencies usually deliver them as distinct offerings, said Brown.
“The briefs that I still see, and a lot of the work I see, starts with one and they have to retrofit the other,” he said. “You can’t just play in one and be really good in the other. You have to be really good in both,” he said.
“That is where Fuse Live started from, this belief that we can do things differently and better… Bringing them together under the brand of Fuse Live is about that identity and cultural shift.”
The path to launch Fuse Live began just over a year ago with the addition of Nicole Gallucci to enhance the experiential offering, and Adam Bleau and Laurie Dillon-Schalk to boost digital/social a few months later.
“[Gallucci] brought events to a very strong level; stronger than we were ever doing before,” said Brown. On the digital side, Bleau and Dillon-Schalk “bring a rigour around analytics and planning and strategy in the space,” he said.
At the same time, Fuse has been making “fairly heavy investments” to improve the technology, both software and hardware, that will drive Fuse Live, including the in-house development of proprietary software that will enable more powerful social listening and analysis of their live events.
“We are just in final beta testing of real-time live tracking of events in social,” he said. “The dashboard we are providing clients is not like that three-weeks-later-here-is-your-results summary. It is live tracking of an event or social opportunity you can be watching and monitoring and judging on the spot.”
When the experiential experts are working with the social experts, and they are armed with that kind of data and insight, the result should be a virtuous circle for clients: social content extends and amplifies the impact of the live experience past the day (or days) of the event, while consumer interaction with that social content helps the agency understand what kinds of experiences will be most resonant with consumers, said Brown.
Fuse will now be able to effectively “reverse engineer” live branded experiences, he said.
“We can figure out what content resonates with this consumer and that content we are doing in social is now often driving the strategy of what is going to happen in a live experiences,” he said.
“There’s no need for a guessing game,” added Dillon-Schalk, partner and vice-president strategy and insights, in a release announcing the launch of Fuse Live. “The data tells the whole story that allows us to build a content plan that is connected, relevant and scalable.”
