“This award is a massive achievement for the team at Stuart Alexander. To be recognised on the international stage for an experiential strategy that delivered outstanding results for Perrier in what is still a very new market for the brand is a credit to all involved. Thank you must go to our client who was brave enough to commit to an experiential strategy that focused on building brand awareness at a grass roots level. ” says Chris Monaghan, Ambient Group Director.

FLUXX’s creative team chose World Visions’ ground-breaking water foot pump system to turn into an interactive game for visitors to the tent. The ‘Water Pump Challenge‘ pitted farmer against farmer to pump water from place to place. For the kids, FLUXX created an interactive craft zone where families could donate and then paint their own watering can to take home with them.

Already the activation has seen hundreds of people visit World Vision tents in Hawke’s Bay and Christchurch A&P Shows.

“SublimeNZ has always been about creating meaningful and engaging experiences between brands and customers, normally through the use of people,” says founder and now GM – Experiential, Robert Bruce.

“It has been exciting and rewarding watching SublimeNZ grow over the last 7 years; in some respects time has flown, but looking back I realise how far we have come.”

SublimeNZ has recently been awarded 31^st fastest growing company in New Zealand at the prestigious Deloitte Fast 50 Awards and was the only experiential agency to feature in the competition with growth of 215.31%.

But it has not always been plain sailing as Bruce recalls, “Looking back at the GFC, it was a pretty tough time for the experiential marketing industry. I think that period gave business owners an overdue wake-up call because there was a lot of excess going on and the agencies without strong value propositions and reputations somewhat disappeared.

“My mentor Peter Leitch (AKA the Mad Butcher) once told me “you can’t have what you can’t afford” and there is some real truth to that – though it took a while to accept it!”

The agency has contracted in excess of 2000 brand ambassadors nationally to represent its wide range of top clients at events, expos, supermarkets, or outdoors. To commemorate ‘Seven Years of Sublime’ the agency is journeying through time by uploading hundreds of photos to its Facebook page, many of which have never been seen before.

“It has been great fun digging through these old photos and they have brought back a lot of memories. We hope that through this some of our old crew or clients reconnect with us and perhaps share their own photos or stories about their time with the agency. Watching some of the team grow and start their own careers has been a real thrill for me, so we would love to stay in touch,” concludes Bruce.

To view all photos, visit the SublimeNZ Facebook page at www.facebook.com/sublimenz

PPR New Zealand and SublimeNZ have been working together as partners in a growing relationship developing premium styled experiential activities for mutual clients. The acquisition will mean a far closer collaboration and will bring further benefits to clients seeking differentiation for their products and brands in an increasingly cluttered message environment. SublimeNZ founder Robert Bruce will continue with the business in the capacity of General Manager – Experiential.

Mr Bruce says, “SublimeNZ has worked with many of the leading brands in New Zealand and the world in the last seven years, and I am extremely proud of the campaigns we have developed or executed – in particular the work we managed during the Rugby World Cup 2011 where we supplied over 400 brand ambassadors.  There comes a time in every business’s lifecycle where a leap in expansion is the next step, so I am thrilled that PPR has embraced experiential marketing in such a proactive way and appointed me to drive this division within their business.”

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