Agency Spotlight: TRO

This article is brought to you in association with Macroart

Agency Spotlight, the latest addition to the Event Industry News site, profiles the top of the pyramid, the design and creativity behind brand activations, experiences, exhibition USPs and the greater live event model.

Sponsored by print specialist Macroart, these pages will profile agencies of all sizes, looking at how and why they started, with what ambition, key projects, relationships with the supply chain and a whole lot more besides.

If your agency has a fitting story to tell, get in touch: Kizzy@eventindustrynews.com 

Agency: TRO
Formed: 1982
Annual Events: 450
Staff: 158
Offices: 9
Mantra: We don’t just tell brand stories;
we help create them.
www.tro.com

Formation:

TRO was conceived in the UK as an event management and production agency, with a heavy focus on Event Support for automotive clients, delivering car launches and dealer marketing. Our first-ever client was Volvo, who we still deliver award-winning work for today.

Established as experts in the automotive industry, TRO’s objective was to break into other sectors and to offer value and innovation to its rapidly expanding client portfolio.

The board of five shareholding directors forecast the internationalisation of experiential marketing and joined Omnicom in 2008 to accelerate our ability to meet future client need.

Fast forward to today: In response to these evolving multinational brand needs for scalable and nimble solutions and deeply localised brand experiences, we’ve become a global borderless agency network. Our CEO, Michael Wyrley-Birch was one of three co-founders of Omnicom Experiential Group, and TRO joins alongside Auditoire, DOIT! and GMR Marketing, enabling us to spot the latest trends, use the best expertise and move at speed. With 29 offices in 16 countries, we identify ourselves as one creative community, with cultural nuances.

Managing Director: Amelia Shepherd

Amelia Shepherd joined brand experience agency TRO in 2011. Over the past seven years, she has spearheaded large-scale campaigns for a raft of leading clients including BMW, Porsche and British Airways.

Recognised as a true tour de force at TRO, Amelia played an integral role in innovating the agency’s product offering and redefining its business development process, and will now focus on steering TRO through its a new chapter where strategy and creativity sits at the heart.

Key services and sectors served:

Our expertise can broadly be divided into three areas:​

• Live experiences are at the heart of what we do – both B2C and B2B. This ranges from product launches and PR stunts through to road shows, sponsorship activation and conferences.​
• With the rise of technology and the boundaries between real, augmented and virtual worlds becoming more blurred, our dedicated business unit – called Cassette – are experts in storytelling which uses creative technology to enhance analogue environments​.
• We have a partnerships consultancy team who specialist in crafting partnership platforms which tie together cultural consciousness with corporate value.

Case Studies:

We’ve delivered some of our best ever work, and like proud parents, we shouldn’t really have favourites, but these two moments were pretty special for us:

adidas: Scoring with influencers.

To launch the official 2018 FIFA World Cup match ball, adidas wanted to create a spectacular event that would harness the excitement of fans and satisfy the world media’s hunger for visual impact.

Tasked with driving conversation and engagement on social (namely YouTube and Instagram), under the brand’s ‘Here to Create’ platform, we delivered a unique and memorable experience for the top 25 Tango League players from across the world.

Designed to enable compelling content creation, we created a dramatic urban environment in Moscow for our key influencers to take centre-stage in a series of freestyle football challenges – with the new adidas World Cup match ball at the very heart of the experiences. The event culminated in a spectacular reveal of the ball using 3D holographic technology with 120 of the world’s football media ready to capture the moment.

People around the globe watched the reveal via live coverage online, and the YouTube live stream became the most viewed adidas content ever (261k in total to date). The campaign totalled a staggering 18m OTS on social with a massive 4.5m (a quarter) of people engaging with the content. 

Volvo: Escape The City, In Your City.

Consumer insights showed us that the defined target audience for the new Volvo XC60 are relentlessly ambitious, and always fixated on ‘what’s next’.

With its Scandinavian heritage (adopters of slow-life concepts like ‘hygge’), and ‘human-made’ brand values, Volvo has the brand equity to help these time-poor, career-driven individuals consumers to reflect and recharge.

Tasked with gaining exposure with the new XC60 model and creating a sales funnel for the new model, we needed a meaningful experience that would truly resonate in order to create impact.

We designed and created a Swedish-themed retreat entitled ‘Escape The City, In Your City’, offering a host of wellbeing experiences including yoga, massage, meditation, art classes, run clubs and cycle hire – all completely free of charge, at times that fit around the working day – and all courtesy of the new Volvo XC60.

We visited nine major conurbations across the UK, with 27,000 city-dwellers choosing to take time out from their busy lives to engage with our complimentary activities. Over 1.3 million consumers saw the new Volvo XC60, so it’s fair to say we gained exposure. The activity appealed to conquest customers and supported regional dealerships –we smashed the data capture target by a whopping 177%.

What the future holds

• We’re driven by curiosity, and fuelled by making things hyper-relevant. We use data to identify macro trends and real time cultural spotters to establish super-targeted human behavioural insights.
• The current youth marketing model sees marketers / agencies obsessed with the same 1% of cutting-edge youth found in London. Introducing 99HAPPY, our inhouse incubator, dedicated to representing ALL British youth culture (the other 99%).
• With sponsorship continuing to focus on myopic activations, we believe it’s losing touch with culture and community values.  TRO (FOR) GOOD is a partnership consultancy for a Purposeful Age, crafting and activating brand partnerships – connecting a brand’s purpose with what its audiences care about.
• Marketing is always defined by disciplines – TV, OOH, digital, live etc. We believe that people don’t differentiate between live and virtual. We therefore expanded / developed our in-house creative tech team to create CASSETTE.

These expertise come together to create TRO, an agency with a clear vision to make marketing truly immersive.

This Agency Spotlight is sponsored by Macroart

Macroart challenges the assumptions about a ‘typical print company’. With a fair bit of cool kit to turn clients’ visions into reality, Macroart’s enthusiastic, committed and talented team delivers some of the most complex print projects in live events, retail and interiors.

Author: Adam Parry

Adam is the co-founder and editor of www.eventindustrynews.com Adam, a technology evangelist also organises Event Tech Live, Europe’s only show dedicated to event technology and the Event Technology Awards. Both events take place in November, London.