Hey, I want to talk really quickly about Pokémon and why I think they've made one of the biggest missteps in brand activation in quite some time and that if they don't kind of course correct, how it can hurt the brand. There are some really fundamental mistakes that Pokémon and their PR company here or whoever staged this stuff for them have made that you can learn from to make sure sort of you don't make the same mistakes and don't, you know, alienate parts of your audience as you go. I spent uh close to a decade working for some of the biggest tech companies in the world where I did work in brand activations and organized huge great big brand activations like this. Um so I have this unique perspective and how these things work but also how you can for quite low budget make things so so so much better. Um because I think there are some real missed opportunities with both of these. History is littered with lots of brands who thought they were the biggest thing in the world and they go on forever. Particularly in like the kids TV space. Trends come and go and these guys have certainly like bucked the trend. They're celebrating like 30 years right now and doing all this stuff to celebrate and kids all over the world love them. I really see the imagination that it inspires the community it brings all that sort of stuff. But what they're doing this year celebrating the 30th anniversary seemingly a really good thing is that they've diluted the brand a lot by doing all these brand activations all over the world. That in itself doesn't sound too bad, right? Like brand activations are great. show up to something, experience the brand live. The problem is, at least in London, the way they're doing these is really lazy and it creates a bad experience for the core fans. Now, there's a couple of different groups of core fans for Pokémon and I think they are forgetting their actual real base and pandering too much to adults and influencers who want to make videos about it and not enough with the kids. Um, and basically a lot of their activations, and this is a trend I keep seeing particularly in the UK, and it's annoying as a parent, um, and then as somebody who wants to see a good brand do well and stay around too. Um, and loves the industry and loves the power of what good communication and good brand activation can do. Um, but they're watering it all down by doing all these pop-up things, which are Instagram opportunities and really not much else. Case in point, two of the things that they did in London recently. They did a natural history museum pop-up and a pokeia garden to go along with the new game that they'd done. Um, the natural history museum pop-up was meant to be part exhibition, part store. You'd walk through an exhibition, get to a store, and a lot of people will tell you the whole point of it was to get this custom branded merch. But no, the brand experience with Pokémon is the core of it. Um, the storytelling behind Pokémon is absolutely critical. And what they did was they lured you in with this Pokecology exhibition which kind of tied into what the natural history museum is all about. Um the ecology of the Pokemon ecosystem. They promised you this little exhibition you'd go through. And not only was it tiny, which fair enough, it's a pop-up. It makes sense. But it was also not very good. It was a bunch of foam board stuck to fake temporary walls and then like one cabinet with a couple of models in on a TV with like a loop of the cartoon on it. But it was such a disappointing thing to have to go through. Um, and for my young son to get there and be so disappointed and so uninterested by something he loved. And to be honest, he didn't even really want much of the merch because they didn't have any of his favorites there. We did eventually walk out with a water bottle cuz he needed one for school and a notebook and we got the free card with Pikachu on it. But wow, it's such a spectacularly disappointing misstep and so aimed at adults and just didn't seem to cater to children. the main audience for Pokémon. So, for the Natural History Museum experience, this could have been one of those crowning achievements, one of these glorious moments in brand activations that people remember for years and years and years to come. Um, and I think actually when you look at previous collaborations that the Natural History Museum have had with other brands, um, it's been done so much better by actually doing less just because they didn't make a promise that they then really underdelivered on like the exhibition at the beginning of this one. And so, case in point with this bit, I've said that a few times in this video, I think, at the Jurassic Park pop-up that they had in actually the same space where they just did a Jurassic Park store, because they already have an exhibition about dinosaurs. Just a bunch of really nice theming and really nice Jurassic Park merch in a theme store, and you didn't need much more than that. Now, except the fact that with this one, with the Pokémon thing, that they don't have a Pokémon exhibition because they're imaginary. So, there isn't a direct tie-in to any of the ex exhibits in the museum. Um, but I feel like what they could have done with this one is they could have taken the spirit of something like Pokémon Go and actually helped get get kids and get adults too interested in the rest of the museum. So instead of trying to create a dedicated Pokecology exhibit, what I would have done with this personally is looked at how you could scatter this out throughout the museum, maybe do a trail where in within each actual existing exhibit within the museum, there is also a little sort of Pokémon pop-up where kids can learn about Pokémon, but then also it guides them through the rest of the museum and encourages them to learn things about real ecology and real natural history, which is after all the uh the mission of the museum. Um, and you could do this sort of seamless blending um of the theme of Pokemon, which is exploring and finding things and catching the Pokemon with learning about all of the real exhibits in the museum, which I think would have been really cool. A little sort of scavenger hunt trail, if you will. You could use Pokémon Go for it perhaps and put Pokétops so the players of that um would be really interested and want to take part in it as well. And exclusive Pokéstops you could spin. in the game. By the way, if you don't play it, it takes you around the real world and you visit real world locations to spin these Pokéstops and have battles with other players. I mean, it's this huge sort of involved community thing. I I don't want to go into explaining Pokémon Go in its entirety to you cuz there's a lot to it, but suffice to say, it's very immersive and very fun, yet encourages people to walk around in the real world and interact with real life things. And you could so have done that so easily um within the Natural History Museum. and I think really introduced people perhaps to parts of the museum that they wouldn't have even have known to visit in the past cuz there are lots of bits which are not the popular exhibits um which I think they could have actually really sort of done a good job of. I think they could have really taken advantage of this and sent people to bits in the museum that you know are often forgotten or bits that they want to highlight or um just create more of a holistic experience um with Pokémon scattered around the whole museum. I don't know, maybe there was some push back to that. You never know what people within an organization are going to say about this sort of stuff, but they are normally so good at being so commercial at these museums, the natural history museum, the science museum right around the corner from it. I'd be surprised if it was the internal people. And again, I don't know them. I've never worked with them. But that's just my thoughts on it. If you didn't want to do that, you could have just expanded the Pokeology exhibit a bit. You know, put some models in or something like that. There were a couple of tiny little models in a glass case and that was it. Um, they could have put some more interesting stuff in there in the place of that. Um, they could have just gone to more effort. It seems so last minute despite the fact this was advertised for months and it's also not the first time that they've done this. Um, I feel like there's just such a missing opportunity with this poker ecology concept. Just very strange orchestration and it didn't feel like all of the parts tied together very well. It didn't feel like this was project managed very well, if that makes sense. that there was like a guiding vision for it. It was just like, "Oh, bang. We'll put a shop in there and oh, we should probably do something that ties in with this museum place. Um, but aside from the design of the merch, which was probably the best bit, um, not a lot of effort went into that side of it. And such a shame. jumping back a step and talking about how we can all learn from this from our various brands whether they're creator brands whether they're businesses is if you're going to create an activation or if you're going to create an experience at all in any way um really try to sort of take a step back from what you are trying to communicate what you are trying to achieve in this case I think it was selling merchandise and probably getting people into the museum and then creating awareness around the Pokémon brand for the 30th anniversary too but really thinking about what it is you want people to experience is so so so important. So if you think about the lyrics for the theme tune for Pokémon, and I'm paraphrasing here a little bit, but it's all about being the very best, achieving more. Um, and then the whole narrative is around catching these Pokémon and um being the best Pokémon trainer you can possibly be. Um and then the mission of the museum is to communicate about uh conservation and ecology and the natural world and um be the sort of best-in-class center for um natural history and science. And I don't think that this popup particularly furthered either of those other than generated some shop revenue. If if I was devising an experience like this for a location like this, I would look at the core, the essence, the DNA of both brands and what it is they do and then figure out what is the most tangible way to bring that to life in a way that comes together for both of the brands. Look, not every two brands are going to go together. And I think in a lot of cases, you're just going to be thinking about what is the main one or what is the one you can create an experience round, but with this one, you are so spoiled for choice. And that's part of why this is so frustrating. there are almost so many parts that you can put together and it's like someone looked at it, it was too overwhelming, so they just didn't do any of it. So again, thinking about like a creator brand, if you're a photographer or a videographer um on YouTube or on Instagram and you're going to be doing real life activations, that might look like a photo walk. That might be like hangouts or meetups with your um audience. That might be lessons that you're doing and paid lessons even. Um really thinking about what journey you can take people on, take your audience on. Um, so for example, with a photo walk, uh, just making sure that if you teach photo basics to all of the people who watch your channel, really think about a journey with a beginning, a middle, and an end that you can take people on. And if you can plot that journey out, and the same goes for this. This is how I would design a pop-up in a space like that. And this is what I did throughout my years at Apple and Microsoft. Really designing journeys for these customers and thinking about every step of the way what their experience was going to be like, how warmly welcome that they were going to feel as they stepped into any one of these experiences. Um what they'd be thinking around about the middle when your presenter is being barged with questions. And so the the kinds of decisions that might then influence is like how many staff am I going to put onto these? At the museum, they just had the shop staff and some security. That was it. So, the first people you were greeted with at Pokémon was the security guards who didn't care. They weren't interested. They weren't trying to engage people or talk about Pokémon or talk about the museum. They just want to keep the line in order. And it's so disappointing to be greeted by stonefaced security guards at the very beginning of what of what's meant to be a fun children's activation, especially when the wait times and the lines are actually already quite long and you feel like you're being shephered a little bit. um when we had to do that at places like Microsoft when we did things like Xbox FanFest, we would make sure that if people were going to be queuing for a considerable amount of time that there were always staff there to have a chat to them, to make them feel at ease, to involve them in something, maybe pop up Xbox stations with games on them. If we could manage that, something to engage them, something to keep them interested. You look at how brands like Disney do this at Disneyland where where you're in the line, there's always often uh animatronic exhibits. I know you can't necessarily do that at a place like uh the natural history museum. There's only so much budget to do a pop-up and you can't necessarily go crazy with this sort of stuff in the same way Disney would. But at its core, just having staff members who were interested and maybe playing Pokémon Go with people, maybe um trading Pokémon in the app or trading Pokémon cards with people. There are so many opportunities. Um you could have someone doing face painting. There are so many ways of engaging people um in that sort of space. Um the pokerology, same thing. If you were going to just have a tiny little corridor like they did with foam boards in it, where is the person doing a presentation pretending they are professor um from Pokémon or nurse Joy or something like that and engaging with kids and making them interested? It takes so little effort. hire one actor or hire a few actors who can rotate throughout the day and cosplay like they or hire professional cosplayers even um they had such a focus on influencers on this. Hire cosplaying influencers who want to play at this stuff, vet them, give them a script and then teach them how to engage with people and it would be a win-win for everybody. And all this was about was entertaining people and creating more of an experience than they did because the the experience as it was was just so lackluster. I could keep going on. I could keep throwing ideas. I feel like I'm giving ideas away for free here. Um but Brenton bringing this back to how you can do things like that. If you're creating, I was using the example of a photo walk. Um make sure that if you're doing a photo walk, it's not just you running it, that you've got a few friends who know how to use cameras, too. and that you can maybe do breakout into groups. Um, when you take people on a photo walk, one of the critical things is to make sure that not only the most talented people are looked after, but also the people who are newbies who actually aren't very good with their cameras, but come along because they like what it is you're doing. We actually had this at Apple. We did photo walks and we'd have people who turned up with just their phones, no idea what was going on, and then their professional um mirrorless cameras and DSLRs as well. And we'd have professional photographers who would be like the celebrity professional photographers running these walks. And then there would be lots of Apple store staff normally who would be photography enthusiasts who'd be able to answer questions and able to give people pointers. What we'd also do was as we went through these photo walks, it was around Sydney and Australia, is there would be challenges per sort of section of the walk. So, we'd break it up into little sections and have little photo challenges where the person who was running the walk, the famous photographer, would stop everybody and say, "Within this next two streets, try and find an interesting uh an interesting take on framing." And then they might show an example of it on an iPad. Everyone would go off and do something and come back and compare notes and Apple store staff would be there to look after them. That sounds like it's quite a heavy lift, but it really wasn't. It was a couple of extra staff on for a couple of hours while we did these just to take care of people and again ultimately make people feel like they were important and cared about and not just an afterthought. Just need to shove some branding in somewhere. Okay, look enough about the Natural History Museum. I don't want to [ __ ] on them too much. I know this stuff is difficult to get in motion, but it's not the first time they've done this. They should have known better and they should have created more of an experience. And after the pretty lackluster experience we had at the natural history museum with the pop-up there, we wanted to try the Poke Pia um pop-up garden in Actton in London. It sounded really promising. This Pokémon inspired garden with all these plants growing and these little biomes they created with Pokémon. Sounded a lot of fun. We traveled like an hour and a half across London and the garden itself was placed in this dingy, dirty square outside a pub. Um, when we went there, there were a couple of druggies/alcoholics having a fight in the street. Lovely area. So, in all honesty, Pokémon can do a little bit better. This is what we came all the way across London for. That's it. In the middle of a busy junction in front of a Morrison's. Bit disappointing. The overall air of the area around it was not welcoming for kids. I don't know what exactly they're trying to do, whether it's urban regeneration or gentrification through Pokétops. This is one of the locations they're sending kids to from all over London in the middle of a busy junction and a car park. Oh, there's a roundabout with a silver tree thing on it. This is what they've uh left the kids to kind of follow up. I've got a very disappointed 8-year-old with me who uh is like, "What the hell? I traveled across London for this?" Yeah. It really ignored the core audience and the base of who it is who's into Pokémon and didn't think at all about their experience enjoying it. It was very minimal. There wasn't anything to explore. There wasn't anything really to do once you got there. There is so much lore around this property. So many different characters they could explore. So many ways they could activate this space and do better and create even some sort of experience for the people visiting. And there was just none of it. There was nothing there. Again, it was printed signage, a couple of plants, a couple of glass balls with Pokémon in them, and that was kind of it. Okay, just wanted to showcase the final Pocopia Garden Poké stop is in this car park. It's like somebody in another country dropped a bunch of these things, not even bothering to check where they were, and paid some company to put up a garden that they didn't know where it was. It's pretty awful. Um, I'm not going to lie, it's really disappointing. An important lesson for brands here, if you're going to go out there and do a physical brand activation, really think about who the core, the base audience for this is. And while I think everybody should be able to enjoy brands like this and celebrate the things they loved as kids, this is a children's brand, and they should be creating an experience that is suitable for an 8-year-old to show up and enjoy as much as it is for a 30-some to show up and enjoy, too. Okay, so the Poke Pier Garden. Now, thinking about this a little bit more afterwards, it really feel like they just hijacked some pre-existing planters that the local council might have had and slapped Pokémon branding on them. And that was one of the really frustrating things. So, in my rant, I kind of talked about the location of it, being right outside a dingy looking supermarket, being right outside a pub. Um, when you're running this sort of thing, you want to look at what the surrounding area is like. Your experience doesn't happen in isolation. And what that means is you've got to take into account sort of who is going to be hanging around the area at 10:00 in the morning when people show up. Particularly my son and I showed up midm morning during the school holidays. And this garden is there for quite a few months. So while I accept it isn't going to be possible to maybe have it staffed full-time cuz they're not selling anything. There's probably no budget for wages or stuff like that. Certainly during school holiday periods, you'd think they could perhaps get some staff down there, add something kind of more interactive there. Um, actually make a little bit more of an effort. This was all to promote a Switch game, a Nintendo 2 Switch game, Pokémon Pokeia. They could have had playing stations where there were pop-ups where you could actually give the game a go. Um, with something like this where it involves something like the natural world and gardening, which apparently you do in the game. I've not tried it yet, but I've watched the trailers for it. But they could have a gardening experience. Maybe every Saturday morning, have a gardener come down and teach kids about growing their own plants. There is a unique opportunity for education here where um if you're using Pokémon as a way into thinking about the natural world and thinking about gardening, my god, you could like how to do your own Pikachu planting and just give it some fun name and then have someone teach kids how to plant daffodils or something like that cuz they're yellow. It could be that simple. And I guess just there was nothing there. Even if I'd showed up and there was like a timetable of events sort of posted there where it said if you come back on Wednesday we're doing a free planting class um make your own bouquets with the plants from the garden. All of these sort of quite low lift things where you've just got to bring in one presenter maybe a couple of security guards if you're really worried about things. Maybe a couple of sort of events or promotional retail staff depending on who it is who's paying for all this just to make sure it's a smooth experience. And again, take care like we like I was talking about before with photo walks with any of the stragglers, any of the people who were struggling to help the sort of the subject matter expert along. But there's so much you can do for relatively small amounts of money. When you're talking about activations like this, when you're talking about brands like this, for other people who don't have Pokémon level uh budgets, you might not be hiring out squares um in some London burough to be able to put a dedicated garden or slap your branding on an existing garden. as I say, which I think is what has happened here, but you might still have an opportunity to, you know, sponsor something. Um, there's all sorts of ways you can do this. Now, there's a local cafe near me. It's recently changed ownership and they kind of don't do this stuff anymore, but it was one of my favorite cafes in the area, and they're just lovely people. Always created a great experience when you went in. What they started doing is on the weekends, the owner of it would be in one of the nearby parks with a little coffee cart um making cutpric coffees for people. And it was a really nice way for him to not only give back to the community by serving sort of like cheaper coffees um but also do something that connects with people where they are going to be. And I think that's a prime example of how you can do something um really nicely with really well. They had this nicely produced coffee car and I wish I had visuals of this. Unfortunately I don't. But it's very little small things you can do um which can go a really long way as long as you create um a fun enjoyable experience for people. And as far as I'm aware, what he would do, I only turned up for once, but he would post on Facebook, he would get people to come out. He would meet with the local community, chat to people, hear what they liked and didn't like, sort of discuss business in the area, that sort of stuff. And it's just such an easy, such a low lift way of creating community around something and putting and and making people making your customers feel valued by, in this case, selling coffee cheaper. It's not even like he was giving something away for free. He was just creating a sense of gaining something or getting something cheaper than the normal product he sold in his normal cafe and creating a sense of community in a community focused space around it. Going back to the poke pia garden, I think they should have put it in an actual park or in an actual playground or something like that. I don't know, maybe acting council, whoever the counselors are who they're talking to wouldn't let them. Um, but just the desolate space they put it in was so terrible. So with this garden, what I wanted to bring it back to, so before I was talking about with the experience at the natural history museum, having the beginning, the middle of the end, and having those really clear, making sure that the audience, the people who are visiting know where they are at any stage and that they feel kind of like looked after the whole way through, it's really critical for your experience. Okay. Well, with something like a pop-up garden like this, that's slightly more difficult because you don't have staff necessarily on site to do all that. And like I said, unless you are actually running a workshop of some kind or activating that space in some way, what you've got to do is still create that sensation, create that feeling. Um, but people have got to be able to guide themselves through the experience even more. And that's why I think it's very important to keep it very simple. So, I mean, they've done that with this garden in a way. They've kept things so simple that they've just put a garden there with a couple of signs on it, but there is nothing else to do and nothing else to experience other than Pokémon Go. And the Pokémon Go Poké stops were so poorly placed. They were actually in dangerous locations. It felt like nobody had actually been to the location to sort of scope out where these were put. Um so straight away you could bring the two experiences together a little bit better. Um you could make sure that somebody actually does a wrecky of the area and puts the Pokétops in safe locations. Then what you need to do is not just assume that everybody is going to be on Pokémon Go because they're not going to be. So, the garden could have done with signage, pointing people to the app, maybe a QR code to scan to download it if they haven't. Suddenly, it's driving people to Pokémon Go as well. It's signing people up to a brand new experience they didn't expect, which is fantastic. And I guess then what you could do is create Pokétops that sort of take people around the surrounding area, maybe take people to safer spaces like playgrounds, maybe like a local cafe. You could do a partnership with them, have a signature drink. I don't know. There's all sorts of different ways you can look at this sort of thing. And but ultimately, I think regardless of how much budget you've got and whether you have an app like Pokémon Go to lean on, what you want to do is make sure with an experience like this, that there is a really obvious journey for people to take and that even though that there's no staff there and it's just sort of this thing that people come and look at and without anybody to guide your visitors through, that there is a really clear journey. but not only a really clear journey, but a really clear purpose um for being in this space. Something that feels rewarding for people to actually do. Um I love gardens and I love parks and I love plants. Um and I'm really passionate about visiting great ones, but this was a bunch of flower boxes in the middle of a square. And I guess ultimately there was no payoff for having visited it. Um spinning Pokéstops, but even then when you spun the Pokéstops, there was no other reason to be there. They were quite generic. They didn't give you anything within Pokémon Go. And for the average person who doesn't play Pokémon Go because not everybody does. There was no other reason to be there. You know, they could have had free seeds or something like that. I know that can be difficult, like maybe a self-service machine where you scan something and you get something, a chance to win a copy of the game. This was all about promoting a game after all. There could have been something that tied into the in-game experience, something you got in game for having visited this. um or an NFC tag that people could scan for having been there and go into a draw to win a prize at least, if not winning a prize. There are so many ways to do this. You know, a plushy competition perhaps win a Pikachu. Um, something fun to make people feel rewarded for having gone all the way there. Or not even rewarded, but something to make people feel like they had some kind of experience once they got there instead of kind this passive, oh, there's a couple of signs with some really basic information. This is another thing coming back to Natural History Museum. the signs with the information about the Pokemon was so generic and so lackluster that anybody who's interested in the brand already knew this stuff about these Pokemon anyway they didn't give anything new to my son and really not even for me and you know it's my kid who was the fan and even then I felt like I knew everything all the signage in these exhibits and in the garden said which yeah it shouldn't be that way there should be some tangible reason for having gone there even if it's just learning something new That can be such a powerful thing. I feel like I'm throwing lots of ideas at the wall here. I'd be interested to see if any of these get stolen for the next iteration of it. Look, Pokémon Company, if you do ever need help with this kind of thing, give me a shout. You know where to find me. I really want to make sure I'm really clear with this simplifying this for people who are running small businesses, who are individual creators, those sorts of thing. How you can take these learnings and make them apply to whatever it is you're doing. And again, this is contingent on the fact that you do have some sort of further um community that you're trying to build or a product you're trying to sell or an event you're trying to run. But really be so conscious about the experience you're creating for people who are visiting you either online but particularly in person as well. Um, if it is an experience where people are going to be lining up and queuing for things, make sure that you don't give people the chance to get bored, to get frustrated, to wait in line for too long and feel like they want to just go and do something else and come back later. Cuz that's a lot of what happened at the Natural History Museum. Um, even if it is just by having staff on hand who can help out, who can engage with people, talk to people, they don't need to be chatting constantly. They just need to be there to make sure that if people do look bored, if they do look like they need a glass of water or they need to go to the toilet or something that there is somebody there to enable those things and to help people feel like they are valued and wanted there. And then throughout the entire experience and this goes for both a manned or an unmanned thing is making sure that there is a beginning and a middle and an end and people feel like they have actually had some kind of experience and at the very least there is some payoff. there is some reason, some satisfying feeling for being there. Natural History Museum, that was obvious. It was the shop, it was buying stuff, it was consumerism. Um, for the garden, although this does lead into consumerism, there was no consumer thing to happen at the place. So, either have something there, it means staffing it, it means having staff, and then thinking about all the things I've just spoken about, but really then giving people a self-guided but bookended experience that feels worth their while to travel to get to something. Um because people do, especially with brands like this, it's really important. Um but they will with your brand as well. Um if you build up enough trust online with people, they will be excited to come and meet you. They will be excited to come and experience, you know, your exhibitions and things like that. Um an exhibition is a very different thing. You know, if you're exhibiting your art, if you're exhibiting photographs or doing a screening of something, that in itself is the payoff. That in itself is the experience. The joy of experiencing art in some way is that. Um, with a brand like Pokemon though, I don't think it's enough to have a few planters, a couple of graphics, um, and then to leave that and go, "Oh, this is art. People are going to experience it." And because it is a huge consumer commercial brand with a massive backstory where people are invested in the story and neither of these experiences really played into that enough at all. So, look, I hope that helped people. I hope people learn something from this, take away something from it. I'm not just trying to [ __ ] on other people's work and [ __ ] on the experiences, but they were terrible and they can do much better and we can all get learnings from it. Um, if you got any questions, chuck them in the comments, reach out to me, DM me on places like Instagram. I'll be happy to help. And, um, yeah, I hope this was valuable. Take care. Thanks so much for watching. Bye. Love you.