The Institute of Promotional Marketing (IPM) today announces an innovative collaboration with SpaceandPeople, Europe’s leading commercialisation space specialist, to launch CORE (Campaign Optimiser for Retail & Experiential), a ground-breaking insights platform designed to empower campaign and brand activation teams with valuable data.

Research carried out amongst major agencies in 2023 by SpaceandPeople identified that better insight into campaign effectiveness was critical to measuring ROI and, as the premier trade body representing the promotional marketing industry for over 90 years, the IPM also recognised the pressing need for robust metrics and benchmarks in experiential marketing.

By using CORE, campaign managers, agencies, and brands can gain access to comprehensive insights gleaned from live experiential, sampling and pop-up retail activations, including footfall analysis, sample distribution metrics, sign-up rates, and category preferences. Agencies are invited to submit data on an ongoing basis via CORE ensuring that the data is always current.

 “Experiential marketing campaigns often face challenges in substantiating spend and demonstrating effectiveness. While tangible metrics can be integrated, a universal benchmark has been lacking. CORE addresses this gap by aggregating anonymised data to establish benchmarks, enabling agencies to position experiential campaigns as an indispensable component of the marketing mix. Additionally, it facilitates more accurate spend forecasting and enhances ROI reporting to clients.”

Emma Kirk, IPM General Manager

“At SpaceandPeople we’re very familiar with the reasons why experiential excels as a medium; its ability to deliver qualitative deep and meaningful brand education to live audiences is just one advantage it has over other mediums. But we’ve also found these advantages can get overlooked at the campaign planning and budgeting stage in favour of mediums that are perceived as more quantitative.

CORE is an investment in our belief that experiential and retail activations are uniquely measurable – the launch of this benchmarking tool is a major step towards providing agencies with an industry recognised means to justify spend and location choice, and to assess ROI.”

Nancy Cullen, CEO SpaceandPeople