Which BTL streams does your agency deliver as core in-house capability (shopper, on-premise, sampling, experiential, sales drivers, creative services)? Which streams do you partner or outsource for?

We have 2 core divisions in our business - Retail & Live.  Our Retail offer creates strategies and ideas to connect shoppers with brands where it matters most to the purchase decision (Shopper, Sales drivers etc.).  Our Live division focuses on immersive brand building experiences to foster brand salience & ongoing relationships and conversations with customers (experiential, sampling, On-prem activations).  Both divisions are supported by an inhouse Strategy, Creative, Design, Production and finally Account Service team.  We collaborate with many different partners / suppliers especially in the experiential field - think builders, producers, merch suppliers, staffing agencies etc. etc.

Please outline your experience delivering BTL activations in the beverage category (alc & non alc) beverage sectors. What makes your agency particularly well-suited to this category

Across our collective team, we would have over 60 years of alc & non alc category experience which is invaluable - we are also passionate about it.  Our client experience includes Diageo, CUB, Schweppes, PepsiCo, Lion Nathan, Brown Forman, Suntory, Heineken, Penfolds and Vinarchy to name a few.

How does your agency approach creative ideation and artwork development for BTL campaigns? Please share examples where your creative work directly enhanced execution or consumer engagement.

Strategy underpins our work and outputs.  We consider the challenges and objectives of our partners holistically to unpack the consumer, shopper, customer and brand context and identify the most impactful opportunities to activate. Supporting this we have diverse in-house capabilities from Comms Planning, Creative Ideation, Concepting and Finished Art to Experience Design, CAD Drawing and 3D renders.  Our team have the connectivity and flexibility to move fast on opportunities, whilst maintaining creative control throughout the process to execute in market work brilliantly. 

Describe how your agency has shaped activation strategies for clients — from NPD launches to portfolio campaigns. What role do you play in aligning activity to broader brand or channel strategies?

At Activation Union we exist to close the gap between brand ambition and retail reality. Our role is to connect what the brand wants to mean with what the retailer needs to sell and what the shopper chooses to do.

We don’t start with a channel plan — we start with a growth problem and build the activation system around it. Whether launching a new product or elevating an entire portfolio, our goal is to make every activation earn its place in the brand and retail ecosystem.

From NPD to Portfolio: building systems, not stunts.

For every client, we build a Strategic Activation Framework - a blueprint that translates brand strategy and category ambition into executable behaviour across retail environments.

For example:

•    Define the category purpose

•    Build occasion-based playbooks that flex across channels

•    Created retailer-specific value propositions e.g. “Help Dan’s trade-up; help BWS recruit new drinkers.”

•    By doing so, we aligned brand ambition to each retailer’s commercial goals, enabling the brand to grow category share while building long-term equity

•    Aligning activity to brand and channel strategies

We see ourselves as an activation architect - sitting between the client’s brand planning, category strategy, and customer teams to ensure coherence.

Our process joins the dots between:

•    Global brand strategy: purpose, positioning, and core assets.

•    Channel strategy: role of on-prem, off-prem, e-commerce and emerging retail media.

•    Retailer reality: customer mission, margin drivers, and execution levers.

•    We ensure every idea ladders back to a strategic north star - and every activation earns its place within that system.

•    Our role: to turn disconnected activations into a connected retail growth story.

The way we work is deliberately different:

•    We co-design strategies with marketing and commercial teams - not take a brief, but build it.

•    We apply data-driven tools (audience modelling, mix planners, retail performance indexes) to make every activation accountable.

•    We design modular playbooks that scale from hero launches to everyday visibility, ensuring brand consistency and commercial efficiency.

We believe the future of activation belongs to agencies that can:

• Think like a brand, act like a retailer, and deliver like a production partner.
• That’s the role we play  shaping activation strategies that turn brand ambition into retail performance, one connected experience at a time.

To what extent can your agency manage end-to-end delivery across BTL — from strategy and creative through to activation and measurement? Please provide recent examples.​​​​​​​

Our 2 biggest BTL clients include Diageo and our most recent partner win being Vinarchy (merge of Accolade and Pernod Ricard Wines) whereby we manage everything from strategy and creative ideation through to full roll out, production, execution and evaluation. Some clients or specific projects we work closely alongside an agency village for final execution and delivery of campaigns.