A lot is often packed in just a simple ‘etc’. So when a company calls itself ‘experiential etc’,  you know there’s a lot that’s being offered as part of the experiential offering. In fact, the company’s tagline - ‘Helping brands communicate through technology’ - resonates with the current ethos of brand marketing where every piece of immersive engagement with the consumer is quietly driven by a horde of cutting edge technologies. 

‘experiential etc’ covers the whole hog - from anamorphic campaigns, holograms and projection mapping to AR, AI,VR and IOT solutions, besides CGI and VFX. As Karan Bhardwaj, CEO, experiential etc, tells Retail4Growth, “We focus on innovating and experimenting because more and more brands today want to experiment with futuristic technologies to raise the experiential quotient for their customers.” 

‘experiential etc’ began its tech journey with advertising in 2017, creating holograms on a range of surfaces, and gradually becoming a full fledged agency with capability to integrate a range of interactive technologies for any brand campaign. 

Karan shares, recalling the journey, “Post Covid when things changed we did some introspection and looked at how we could up our ante in terms of our digital offerings and that’s when we ventured into AR,  AI, Virtual Conferences, etc. I can now say we have done it all - anamorphic campaigns, CGI, VFX, AI, ML SAAS based applications, etc. And today we are on the brink of scaling up in terms of the number of brands we cater to since we do different things for different brands. So it’s not like there’s one brand that has taken it all. These are all futuristic technologies and many brands are still experimenting with them.”

Further speaking about the brands’ approach to adopting these experiential technologies, Karan says, “They are not really looking at any immediate ROI from an experiential campaign, like they would for example from a newspaper, hoarding, influencer or social media campaign. In the latter they would want to make every buck count. But in experiential, they are just experimenting. They would possibly allot about 5% of the budget for it, but make sure it gets recognised. So they would want to do something that’s never been done before. And I’m sure this 5% will go up to 10% in the near future.” 

The clientele of ‘experiential etc’ is a veritable list of brand names from across segments - Nerolac, Asian Paints, GoodKnight, ThumbsUp, Sprite, Diageo, One Plus, Maruti and Swiss Air, to name a few. Much of the work for these brands involves using state-of-the-art tech tools to elevate the interactivity and customer engagement quotient. 

Moving ahead, Karan feels there’s scope for more players to come into this space. “I see a lot of players like us coming up. Already there are about 5-6 others like us nationally. And we are all making money and working with good brands. So it’s a good thing.”  

Karan is also very clear that he wants experiential etc to be known for innovation and that’s what the company is focusing on. “Rather than doing 10 campaigns a month, I would really love to do one campaign, which truly grabs attention and wins accolades.” Towards this, the company is fast scaling up its content team. “With the advent of AI today, content has become critical. Earlier it was hardware that was critical, but today hardware has become an open market with everyone having access to whatever they want. But ideation and creation of content is where the real challenge lies. In fact, our work has got noticed only because of the creativity that goes into them. So I want to bank on this and double the current team strength so that we can take up as much work as we can,” he sums up. 

Check out an innovative campaign done by experiential etc here.