Katie Peake on the Magic and Potential of Experiential

Katie Peake, creative director and founder of experiential agency Backlash, has always recognised the potential in experiential - even when others weren’t looking in its direction. At the age of just 27, she became the creative director of an agency, where she headed up the Coca-Cola experiential arm, as well as a whopping 21 brands under the Nestlé umbrella.

From there, Katie grew the Coca-Cola account from a small sampling arm of the business to a “multi-million-pound experiential client with best in class creative that became recognisable all over the world.” 

“I was equally incredibly proud and incredibly petrified,” she recalls of the experience. “I was adamant to hold onto the creative part of my role at the time and ensure that everything I created moving forward was inspiring to my team and also attention grabbing for the brand and agency I worked for.”

There, she quickly developed leadership skills focused on upskilling her team and creating disruptive, unexpected content - all while staying kind and lending a listening ear when needed.

She found that managing the team’s workload herself was easier than outsourcing to a traffic manager, as she could realistically relate to and understand the workload her team could take on. “I knew the skill set each designer or art director had in my team,” she says. That kind of empathetic leadership is something she still carries with herself today, at Backlash.

With her role at Coca-Cola, came Katie’s confidence, emboldening her to put bigger and braver creative in front of clients. This, in turn, unlocked bigger budgets and bigger briefs. That was the start of a line of experimental projects in a previously neglected sector that now is bustling with creativity - experiential.

“Having full access to clients and full control over the creative output in the business led to amazing things,” Katie explains. “We were creating never-before-seen social media-activated vending machines for Coca-Cola. I was projecting 3D-mapped animations onto the Coca-Cola Christmas truck and floating magicians around Waterloo Station for Nestlé.”

Katie proudly looks back on the latter as one of the highlights of her career and possibly the project that launched her towards new heights. At the time, she was working on an ATL advertising agency’s existing campaign for Nestlé Cereals - a campaign which was all about the ‘lift’ that cereal gives you in the morning.

“My idea was to have the advertising on a billboard at Waterloo station and then have a series of morning ‘commuters’ floating around as if they had just had their cereal lift,” she laughs. “Myself and my account director had to be initiated into the magic circle of magicians so we could understand how the trick was done and we worked with a magician to create the stunt.”

The activation made her realise that not only are such projects literally magic, but also highlighted the amount of fun you can have through experiential. “It opened my mind to adding humour into my work and not being afraid to put these mad ideas in front of clients. I remember presenting the idea and thinking beforehand ‘What the fuck have I done?’. Then the client absolutely loved it and signed it off on the spot.”

On the other hand, Katie has been in this industry for 15 years, and has seen both sides of the coin. Experiential was far less magical back in the day, and she remembers its humble beginnings. 

At the start of her career, she did a number of internships as a designer for a shopper marketing agency in Leeds, where she worked for FMCG brands such as supermarket Asda and bakery chain, Greggs. As she found her footing, she naturally progressed into the art director role, which she remembers loving from the get-go.

Then followed a move to London and shortly after, a continuation of the journey at shopper marketing agencies, where Katie worked her way up to a middle-weight art director. This is where she was introduced to experiential as a viable marketing option.

“That was the best job I ever had,” she remembers. “I worked with such an inspirational creative director and he gave me the time and nurturing to become the best creative I could be.” Here, Katie discovered novel ideas wherever she went. Nobody at her shopper agency had worked with the type of creative brief that experiential brought, so she was always given them to figure out and have a go - one of them being for L’Oréal at London Fashion Week. 

“No biggy,” she jokes, remembering the experience. “Luckily for me, it was a success and when any of these ‘experiential’ briefs came in, they would come to me.”

The potential she saw back then - and still does - in the sector is the “huge breadth of creativity you can come up with.” She adds, “It’s a truly creative platform, as you are building campaigns from scratch to work in a physical environment that doesn’t exist. You are often not anchored to existing campaigns or ‘ways of doing things’ as the brands are typically looking for something disruptive.”

In simple terms, when there’s no box to think out of, everything is unique. “I am able to push my creative ideas in ways I had never been able to do before and in doing so, I have managed to create some of the most recognised experiential campaigns in the UK,” she says.

Today, however, Katie isn’t the only one who sees the power and possibilities of brand experiences. Experiential is now increasingly being factored into media and marketing plans - a trajectory that, while partially wounded by the pandemic, has continued upwards. 

“Clients and brands are seeing the benefit of experiential and how it can create amazing content, plug into their media plans and also create loyal fans and smash KPIs. This is defying the category because for a very long time, it was an afterthought with minimal budget allocation. It’s becoming a leader.”

And as it comes to the marketing force, Katie expects to see more incredible creative work coming out of event and experiential agencies such as Backlash. “For us, I hope to be leading the disruption and creative experiences. I want us to push the boundaries of what the industry expects to see. As we grow the team, I will continue to inspire them and help increase their confidence. I want them to be brave creatives who can let their imaginations run wild.”

While Katie prides herself on her kind leadership and dedication to ensuring space for her teammates to experiment and discover, she wasn’t always met with the same on her own journey through the industry. As for many others, being a woman was oftentimes the culprit. 

“I have faced a lot of challenges in my career due to being a woman, including workplace bullying and discrimination,” Katie says. “I believe the industry is changing, but really slowly.” When she herself became a creative director at 27, she was part of the 3% club - the global 3% of female creative directors. Today, ten years later, that number has increased to 13%.

“It’s a great achievement. But this is still very low. There are a wide range of factors as to why this is the case but ultimately, we need to be supporting and encouraging women in leadership roles and ensuring they are not burning out or feeling they can’t return to senior roles due to life circumstances, such as raising a family,” she explains. As a company, Backlash is comprised of mainly female employees and Katie refers to them as her “daily inspiration”. “They are a group of women from all walks of life and ages, who can solve any problem thrown at them together in a kind, supportive and respectful manner.”

Katie herself is no stranger to burnout throughout her career and admits she’s spent many sleepless nights under the pressure to be the ‘best’ and a ‘perfect’ creative. 

“In the end, it took its toll on me and I made myself sick. I overcame this by adopting a 75% method - instead of giving 100% effort all the time to every project, I began to give 75%. It’s an incredibly hard task to put into place and is something I have to consciously do every day.”

This mindset also translates into how Katie established Backlash and its DNA. The company’s mission statement is to provide a safe and supportive working environment for a wealth of talent that has experienced poor working conditions, burn-out and discrimination of any kind.

“At Backlash, we treat each other as equals, act with empathy and inclusivity, and we recognise and celebrate that individuals have different life experiences that have shaped them,” says Katie. She has implemented judgement-free mental health days that don’t come out of her staff’s holiday allowance and actively encourages a healthy work-life balance - “Our doors close at 5:30pm for everyone.”

Katie recognised the issues in the industry, both in a personal plan and through the prism of an untapped sector that she wanted to see blossom - her attempt to mend each is evident in the way Backlash operates. The company’s strapline is ‘big agency thinking without the price tag’ and was set up with the goal of attracting what the industry would then deem as ‘small budget’ clients.

One of the things Katie was seeing across each agency she worked with back in the day was that well-known retail or beauty brands’ briefs would get turned down as the budgets were seen as ‘small’. “However, I believed no matter the budget, we would be able to create clever, fun and unique concepts and designs for retail clients and offer them the big agency approach and care. Retail is an incredibly creative area to work in - boundary pushing and innovative - so I wanted my business to reflect that.”

And it did. From then onwards, Backlash got stuck into creating unforgettable experiential marketing, pop-up shops, retail activations and digital experiences for brands big and small - all while staying true to Katie’s disruptive idea that started it all.

Today, everything is looking up. When talking about the future of experiential, Katie knows - like she always did - exactly what she wants to see more and less of. “I want to see the end of influencer-only events and the rise of more combo influencer-and-consumer events,” she explains. “When you look at experiential as a platform, its purpose is to challenge perceptions that customers have of a brand and provide a memorable experience that lasts beyond the event.”

By creating influencer-only events, brands lock themselves into relying on a small selection of people to convey emotions and change perceptions via a channel - Instagram reels or Tiktok, as of late. “By combining a VIP/influencer kick-off day followed by a consumer weekend or week,” she says, “brands can use the content as pre-awareness to encourage their audience to come to the event.”

Katie leaves us with a lesson she picked up from the creative director at her first job and still references every day:  “Be nice on your way to the top, as you never know who you will hit on the way down.”

“At the time, I didn’t see the relevance… Surely, when you’re at the top, you’re at the top. Nobody can take that away from you. But, life happens and a lot of people’s circumstances change. After setting up Backlash, I had a lot of my most senior colleagues and managers reach out for freelance or advice. I was always happy to help.”