"I Think We've Grown Much Closer as a Team Due to What We've Experienced Personally and Professionally"
Jack Lamacraft started off in agency land in the early 2000s and was lucky enough to work at some of the best around including Cake, Exposure and Frank PR where he was taught about the power of big, contagious ideas that people wanted to interact with, if an idea was brilliant enough then making it famous and ultimately effective was relatively straightforward.
In 2008 Jack moved to Sydney and set up and ran the local M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment office where he learned about the business side of running an agency. Combining his business experience and passion for great ideas led Jack to setting up The Park with two friends in 2018.
At The Park the team believe that proof beats promise and work with brands who have something to prove, so far The Park has worked with some amazing brands.
Q> What is the makeup of the projects you are looking to deliver in 2022?
Jack> It's a real variety, no two projects are the same. In the next few months we're delivering store launches, a festival partnership and activation, a live streamed hotel opening, two trade show stands and some big activations abroad. All of these projects will have multiple touchpoints across numerous channels, none of them will exist in isolation. We've always approached our client briefs placing a huge amount of importance on the secondary audience, making sure that the work lives and engages consumers beyond the physical experience.
Q> How is this comparable to 2019?
Jack> Our approach hasn't really changed massively since 2019 as we always knew that to drive effective change for our clients we needed to focus on delivering our campaigns to as many people as possible and we knew that digital was essential. I guess we're now thinking more about how we can deliver our experiences live to secondary audiences through a screen, whereas before we were maybe focused more on the content that people would share or that we could push out before and after the experience. We've always had a broad view on experiential, it's much more than just events.
Q> Has your staffing skill set changed since 2019?
Jack> We're an eclectic bunch here at The Park and that's the way we like it. All of our team have experience away from experiential agencies and that influences the way we approach the work, due to the team's varied experience we have experts across many different disciplines so it hasn't really changed since 2019.
Q> Why and how has your agency changed since 2019 and do you see your agency changing its output again as we settle into the new normal?
Jack> I think we've grown much closer as a team due to what we've all experienced personally and professionally over the last two years, we've been through so much together. Towards the end of last year it was tough, people get into this business to collaborate and create brilliant work together, that was hard to do when we were all stuck at home.
Moving forward I think digital will become even more essential to our work, our experience and knowledge in this space has been accelerated due to the pandemic but it's something we knew was coming down the track anyway. I think as a discipline we're stronger than we've ever been, we offer experiences that people want to be a part of after what they've been through and we've now learned how to take them to even more people through the use of technology.
