Analysis. Romania’s BTL advertising market – fragmented, highly competitive and digitalized

With 2018 looking set to bring bigger budgets, due to clients’ clearer views and understanding of the need for direct contact with consumers, and that qualitative interaction requires investment, pundits say the Romanian BTL advertising market seems more and more promising in creating relevant and innovative experiences for consumers, doubled by creativity.

By Romanita Oprea

Tempo Advertising recently launched its events division, Tempo BTL, which is led by Carmen Zahiu, the former general director of MediaPro Studios. Zahiu returns to the agency at which she started working as junior executive in the BTL department in 2004. “Any moment is optimal to have a great proposition for our clients, this time specifically BTL services. Basically, this agency is the fruit of our special relationship with Carmen and her team, a marriage between their creative and executional skills and our power to support entrepreneurs in advertising. Think of the careers of highly visible and successful professionals such as Radu Ionescu of Kinecto or Eliza Rogalski and Alina Damaschin of Rogalski Damaschin PR, and you will find Tempo at the base of their foundation, on which they manage to build, using their exquisite skill sets, very valuable businesses,” said Corina Grigoriu, managing director of Tempo Group.

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The idea of launching Tempo BTL came because Tempo’s business model of working with entrepreneurs is based on shareholding, rather than employment, therefore they were partners in this new venture. “A new structure was needed as clients and key people are different from Tempo Advertising. We like to motivate our key professionals and help them achieve not only impressive professional performance, but also financial performance. This results in a higher degree of motivation, responsibility and accountability, more attention to detail and care for the business, which is why our companies were always attractive to investors,” added Grigoriu.

When it comes to the agency’s positioning, Zahiu said that the vision was to bring a show business approach to BTL work. As any event or activation is a show, the firm wants to impress, inspire emotions and reactions, and start conversations with people. “For this we need rigor and maniacal attention to detail in planning, but also the courage to always do more, bigger, more glamorous, more impressive. The more is put in at the planning phase, the more natural it all seems to those enjoying the experience you’ve prepared for them,” said the Tempo BTL representative.

The newly launched division enters a very competitive market, where big and experienced agencies are fighting for clients with smaller agencies, run by experienced people that have been working in the industry for more than 15 years.

Moreover, consumers now have more power: they can pick up the remote and change the channel to avoid adverts or block advertising on the internet. “In BTL we are used to that since forever, because in a one-to-one interaction you have only one chance to convince a consumer to listen to you or to involve him or her in a brand activity. BTL is like a play: you have one chance to show what you want and if you miss that chance, you cannot take another shot,” said Adrian Paculea, executive director at Mercury360 Communications. Therefore, brands and advertisers need to find the best way to reach their consumers, to bring the brand message to them. That’s why most campaigns are now treated as integrated. In this context it also becomes clear that BTL has a role in almost all integrated campaigns, big or small.

According to Paculea, Mercury360 is receiving more and more open briefs from its clients, describing the problem with no channel already decided. The challenge is to understand the target consumer, the places where they can be influenced, and how to talk to them depending on their mood at that moment. “How we interact with consumers to be relevant in a store is different from in a park where they have time to listen/play or an event where they want to have fun. But at the same time, we have the same brand message we want to communicate. So, this is the challenge: to integrate all these touchpoints and be relevant. It’s a dialogue, no longer a monologue, and we often adapt our campaigns in real time taking into consideration the feedback that we receive from consumers,” said Paculea.

According to Marinela Guina, chief operations officer at g7, the BTL market is still a young one for marketing services overall, and, in her agency’s view, what’s happening today in BTL is shaped by three major forces. First of all, the labor costs. “Working with people is still a relatively inexpensive communication solution in Romania. That’s why we can roll out over 1.000 promoters each week throughout the country. As we are part of the EFMP group, we can see clearly the difference between Romania and some developed markets. In the West, having brand ambassadors in the field is a premium solution, used more by high-value industries, like technology, rather than FMCG,” noted Guina.

The second factor is the shift of the power balance towards retailers. “We are constantly faced with the question of whether the retailer will be on board with this idea. This is changing, as retailers are also starting to value the shopping experience more and in some cases even partner with brands to deliver a better experience for shoppers. The third notable issue is the fact that clients struggle with internal collaboration between business and communication functions. And this shapes the communication solutions that they are willing to buy. Breaking down the silos requires resilience, but we see encouraging examples, as clients also strive to achieve better results and to innovate,” declared the g7 COO.

In her turn, Zahiu believes that BTL is very much a practical discipline, as well as a creative one. “Some of the boutique agencies have small, inexperienced teams. They compete by offering unrealistically low costs and then disappoint when it is time for implementation. The consequences of compromising quality to achieve an artificially low budget are easily seen where it matters: technical equipment, video productions, catering, print and stage design and so on. BTL agencies that are part of a larger communication group, like us and others in the market, are often best positioned to offer a great product at fair prices. That’s because they have the volumes to help them get good deals from suppliers without compromising quality. And, just as importantly, they have the support of different types of expertise in the group – whether it’s creative, PR, digital, branding and so on,” said the Tempo BTL representative.

The influence of digital

With its growth and powered by the technology behind it, the digital environment has influenced all communication channels and will continue to do so. As the whole BTL sector is estimated to be worth around EUR 122-125 million, Adrian Paculea sees digital’s influence as a blessing. “If we are talking about technology, we can now use so many technological innovations to create experiences and to bring brands close to consumers, to create emotions, to create connections between people, between brands and people. If we are talking about digital communication, often BTL is developed to create content for digital too. A lot of smart BTL campaigns are becoming viral on social platforms in real time, reaching an extended (and sometimes unexpected) target. From a different perspective we also have a very efficient tool to communicate our BTL events, to promote them to a desired target/community,” said the Mercury360 Communications representative.

The integration of technology with offline events is also seen as a positive by Tempo BTL’s representative, as it helps achieve a seamless experience that can reach many more people than those physically present at the location. “Creativity and technology work together, not against each other. In our area of expertise, we see how more and more events have a strong digital component. Both in the pre- and post-event communication phases, and for the activations themselves, as a way of interacting with something ultimately immaterial: the brand. Because of the immense crowding of both digital and traditional media, worldwide trends point toward direct communication and live interaction with the brand. Brands are present at festivals and different events, offer innovative experiences and the battle for attention and sales moves to the real world. At the same time, digital’s most important promise is helping events, which are by their nature limited in how many people they can touch, reaching participants’ friends and their entire social networks. That’s why we believe so strongly in our idea of BTL as show business,” said Zahiu.

Carmen Zahiu

In turn, g7’s representative believes that the omnipresence of technology in all communication channels not only enables shoppers to make a rapid and well informed buying decision, but also gives marketers plenty of data that allow them to analyze modern shopping behavior. “Technology is constantly changing, but human needs are always going to be the same. However, what technology enables us to do today is to understand and address shopper needs on an individual basis, as opposed to segmenting them into broad categories. For the first time in the history of marketing, we are able to operate on a segment of one individual customer,” said Guina.

Wishes for the market

“We think that it is crucial for a brand to become personally relevant for its customers. And, today, technology allows us to understand their needs and every moment of truth. With this in place, we can talk about adding value to their lives, not noise.”- Marinela Guina, chief operations officer at g7.

“We strongly believe in our idea of BTL as show business. We’re giving people a show that’s so great they want to share it with their friends!”- Carmen Zahiu, managing partner, Tempo BTL.

„I wish all my colleagues to challenge each other to be more creative, to innovate. In this field you can see the achievements directly in the consumers’ eyes, so we have all the reasons to be proud of our results and not to consider anymore BTL as a poorer relative of ATL.”- Adrian Paculea, executive director Mercury360 Communications.