Prelude: How do you deliver a fully immersive and engaging brand experience when your very well-travelled audience is stuck at home? That was the challenge that Campari Group and digital events specialist SharpEnd sought to resolve with the innovative ‘Fly Campari Group’ presence during the inaugural Virtual Travel Retail Expo in October 2020.
The disruptive digital concept embraced a radical approach to delivering an immersive and engaging brand experience. It has since been awarded five global design, experience and marketing awards from some of the world’s most prestigious bodies.
The experience was designed around the company’s ‘The Campari Way’ ethos and blended professional elements with warm and friendly user-engagement. The response was extraordinary, with Fly Campari Group becoming the most-visited #Virtual Stand at the event and 45% of attendees making return visits.
In this interview, The Moodie Davitt Report Brands Editor & Digital Marketing Manager Hannah Tan-Gillies sat down with Campari Group Global Travel Retail Marketing Director Biancamaria Sansone, Campari Group Global Brand Manager Jennifer Smith and SharpEnd Client Lead Eddy Peters to discuss the inspirations behind the ground-breaking virtual concept; the evolving role of virtual and digital events to Campari Group’s strategy; and how Fly Campari Group gave the channel wings at a time when real-life travel was at a stand-still [Campari Group is returning to the Virtual Travel Retail Expo this year as a Gold Partner].
SharpEnd – Campari Virtual Fair Case Study from SharpEnd on Vimeo.
“The idea was a creative response to the pioneering Virtual Travel Retail Expo, which took the exhibition experience from the physical to the virtual realm,” says Campari Group Global Travel Retail Marketing Director Biancamaria Sansone.
“Going completely virtual allowed us to go beyond a physical stand and offer something so much more unexpected,” adds Sansone. “We partnered with SharpEnd to develop a 3D Model of a plane instead of a conventional booth and took our visitors around the world. More than a simple experience, our presence had an emotional concept behind it. It is a positive message for the future of the Campari Group and the travel retail industry as a whole.”
That message reflected the Italian drinks group’s own optimism for the future of the channel. The next step was how to express that optimism.
“We wanted to create an experience that defied the laws of gravity,” recalls Campari Group Global Brand Manager Jennifer Smith. “Given the restraints of a virtual event, we created an entire flight-related concept from start to finish so we could fully engage with our partners.”
Campari Group and SharpEnd certainly explored some ‘gravity-defying’ innovation at the Virtual Travel Retail Expo. The Fly Campari Group activation landed a virtual private jet on the exhibition floor and took Expo attendees on a flight to the homes of three core Campari Group brands – Aperol, The Glen Grant and Wild Turkey – through experiential 360-degree environments.
The experience began with boarding pass invites. Once onboard the virtual private jets, Expo visitors were served pre-flight cocktails that matched their choice of destination. Passengers could travel to Venice, the home of Aperol; Wild Turkey’s base of Kentucky; or Speyside, birthplace of The Glen Grant.
“The virtual nature of the event gave us more freedom creatively,” Smith says. “We gave visitors boarding passes, invited them to have a virtual Aperol Spritz together and even had themed Microsoft Teams backgrounds when holding meetings. They visited the homes of our brands, discovered our products and new digital in-store tools. We wanted to ensure that the concept was as approachable and welcoming as possible and really bring the ‘Campari Way’ to life.”
Each environment was filled with interactive touchpoints that invited visitors to learn more about each brand. Visitors had their virtual passports stamped and could either embark on another journey to visit the next destination or return to the Fly Campari Lounge and speak to a brand representative. The experience also offered live cocktail-making masterclasses led by Campari Group Global Brand Ambassador Davide Fornasiero.
Commenting on the freedom that a virtual format provides, Smith says: “Obviously, in a physical show we wouldn’t have been able to build and land a plane in the middle of the exhibition hall; nor could we take visitors on a real-life flight around the world. Doing something unexpected resonated really strongly with our retailers and the travel theme gave them a boost of optimism for a return to flight and channel recovery.”
The concept’s flight theme certainly resonated with travel retailers, many of whom spent much of their pre-COVID lives up in the air. In keeping with its Expo mission, Fly Campari Group gave retailers wings during a time when real-life flights were impossible, allowing attendees some much-needed escapism.
According to SharpEnd Client Lead Eddy Peters, the challenge of delivering best-in-class virtual experiences is a matter of upscaling the senses. “The way we approached this in early development was to look at the senses that you tap into both in a physical and virtual event,” he says. “In a physical space, you have touch, taste and smell but those are things you can’t portray in a virtual event. This means you have to upscale the other senses and look at what you can do in a virtual space that you can’t do in a physical space.
“For example, in a physical space you can’t put people in a plane and transport them around the world, but you can do that virtually. It’s all about playing the senses off each other and dialling up the senses that matter. This way, you can create a fully immersive experience that people weren’t expecting.
“We achieved this through a focus on details; realistic surroundings, ambient lighting, tactile materials and atmospheric sound design all combined to create a palpable environment.
From the tranquil rolling environment of Scotland to socialising on a bustling terrace in the heart of Venice, each environment heavily contrasted the other further elevating the sensory experience,” added Peters.
“A lot of feedback we received was that people felt they were actually in Venice, Scotland and Kentucky, and for us that is the best compliment.”
Beyond the overwhelmingly positive visitor feedback, The Fly Campari Group concept was recognised by a diverse and internationally-renowned array of awarding bodies from the fields of marketing, design, events and experiences. The concept was named the winner of Best Marketing Campaign in the Management Today Business Awards and won the Virtual & Hybrid Brand Activation Award (VEI).
It also won the Bronze Award for Exhibition Experience at the Campaign Experience Awards; the Platinum Award for ‘Best Pivot to Virtual’ from the World Exhibition Stand Awards; and the Silver prize for Virtual Experiences in the Alcoholic Beverages category at the EventEx Awards.
Campari Group and SharpEnd were also named as finalists in the Campaign Tech Awards for the Best Use of Experiential Technology and at the Campaign Experience Awards in the Virtual Experience B2B category.
“We are very happy and grateful for this external recognition which is a further confirmation of the success of the collaboration with SharpEnd,” Sansone says. “The most interesting thing for us is the fact that these awards came from different fields, different categories and different industries – from marketing, planned resilience and events.”
Campari Group and SharpEnd’s partnership is only just beginning and Smith says that it opens the possibility for more collaborations. “We teamed up with SharpEnd because of their expertise in digital events as this is something we would like to explore more as a company in the future. Our partnership has been very collaborative. We challenged ourselves to do something stand-out in the digital and experiential realms — and succeeded.”
One of the main criticisms about virtual shows is that the format poses certain inherent engagement limitations and is therefore unable to offer the same level of experience as a physical event. For Smith, the biggest challenge was missing out on the in-person conviviality that Campari Group was known for.
“We pivoted to rectify the lack of the in-person element,” she says. “In the past, we always offered the in-person experience of having an Aperol Spritz together on the terrace of trade shows, which obviously wasn’t possible with COVID-19. So, we tried to overcome this with our immersive around-the-world virtual experience to bring a little bit of magic and engagement to retailers in an unexpected way.
“The Virtual Travel Retail Expo was a great platform and we really embraced everything it had to offer. We hosted a virtual masterclass and engaged our global brand ambassador to do cocktail education and engagement in real-time. It was a challenge, but we leveraged all the elements available on the platform, which exploded into this truly personable ‘Campari Way’ experience.”
Offering the agency perspective, Peters says: “The biggest part of the brief was interpreting ‘The Campari Way’ in a virtual format. This is all about human-to-human contact and building connections and so we had to make sure that we built that into it.
“We weren’t able to see on their faces how they were responding directly to the experiences. However, thanks to the analytics of the Virtual Travel Retail Expo, we were able to see in real-time how people were engaging with the concept, where they were spending the most time, and if there were there any pain points. We were able to adapt any issues quickly to truly offer the best experience possible.”
He added, “The immersive nature of the experience combined with the freedom to navigate freely at the users own pace were the main reasons the experience received over 29 hours of engagement and saw nearly half of visitors returning to repeat the experience.”
As for the future of virtual events in the post-pandemic landscape, Peters says: “Last year accelerated the need for virtual experiences out of absolute necessity. Virtual is here to stay and when physical events go back into the mainstream, the lines between the two will be more blurred.
“The next step for virtual is to blend the two,” he adds. “Physical experiences will be more augmented, offering entire virtual worlds in a physical environment. It was great to see people from all over the world coming into the stand at all hours of the day. One of the best things about the Virtual Travel Retail Expo was that it didn’t close [after the initial ‘show week’] for 30 days, so anybody could come enjoy the experience at any time.”
Given the success of the Fly Campari Group project, the big question is what role will virtual and digital play in Campari Group’s future strategies? According to Sansone, Campari Group has already embarked on a significant digital transformation.
She says, “As Campari Group we are committed to our digital evolution path, which is key for the entire Campari Group and not just for travel retail. This was already there before COVID, and then it was further accelerated during the pandemic.
The Moodie Davitt Report Founder & Chairman Martin Moodie applauds the ‘Fly Campari Group’ for the daring way it embraced the digital opportunity rather than being deterred by any perceived constraints of the virtual model.
“It’s no coincidence that the Campari virtual stand was the most popular among those of 124 exhibitors. Just as with a physical exhibition stand, you can’t simply build it and hope that they – the retail visitors – will come. The key to this successful case study, as Eddy Peters suggests, was the way that Campari Group and SharpEnd focused on the aspects and senses that could be accentuated in a virtual setting.
“One of the criticisms of virtual events is that they don’t allow engagement. ‘Fly Campari Group’ proved that to be a nonsense. It’s just a question of ambition, of embracing the art of the possible. That is what this Campari and SharpEnd achieved, and I cannot wait to see what they have planned for this year’s Expo, for which we have enhanced several aspects of the software platform. I have no doubt that they have several exciting surprises in store.”
