Ben Mcmahon on experiential productions

Have you always been creative by nature?

Yes, I'd probably say I’m creative at heart. The creativity that I love is the tangible output of it - how it can influence people and how people react to it. Collaborate has been around for six years now. We work in a creative agency space that predominantly focuses on brand experiences. We curate, produce and deliver those experiences, from product launches to live shows, exhibitions, and experiential retail.

Recently we’ve been developing virtual and hybrid digital experiences. That's taken us into the creative space of corporate and internal comms; keeping staff or stakeholder audiences engaged, connected and updated.

What do you think something like a global pandemic does for creativity?

We were already starting to look in 2019 at a hybrid experience - blending a physical and remote audience whilst ensuring there is a genuine human-felt connection. We were doing it because of the sustainability agenda as an alternative to flying people around the world to experiences. We were looking at how we can work with some of our big global clients so that they could still have the same impact of a global seminar without flying people in. The pandemic accelerated that necessity because suddenly we were left with a void of physical human interaction.

Consumers are now more thoughtful about where they want to spend their time and energy having experiences. If you roll back to 2019, every other day there was a new event being created. Everyone was extremely well travelled; we could hop over to Paris or Barcelona for a long weekend. People are now being more considered about where they go, so the experience we create has to be truly outstanding and memorable, it can't be mediocre.

Talk to us about your work in South Africa

We set up Collaborate to be a very fluid global network of team members. Our UK head office is located in Chichester. Our head office for Africa is based in Port Elizabeth in South Africa and we've got regional offices in Cape Town. We have a relatively small core team but we work a lot with contractors or freelancers. It's always about understanding what the client's needs are and selecting the best people to deliver, hence the Global Reach, Local Roots mentality we have.

I saw Africa as an emerging market. South Africa is the gateway to Africa, I think it's an incredible country and an incredible continent.

What excites you the most about the future of your industry?

The opportunity to push sustainability and creativity to the top of the agenda. To work with some really inspiring people and cutting-edge brands. From a brand world point of view, it’s like the reset button has been pushed, which is why you're seeing huge growth in certain new brands and new sectors. The creative unknown is quite exciting, and we specialise in doing the unknown. We have a lot of clients come to us with ideas that have never been done before, and we thrive on that.

How is technology evolving how consumers interact with brands?

We use a lot of technology to understand consumer interaction both physically (such as tracking and heat mapping), and within the social digital space to understand what people are saying and how consumers are engaging.

I think for the first time since I can remember AR and VR have actually got a real purpose, particularly with remote audiences. We're doing a lot of work with second and third screens so the virtual audience can interact in the same way as those actually there at an event.