“Galleries are overwhelmingly visual. But people are not – the brain understands the world by combining what it receives from all five senses. So can taste, touch, smell and sound change the way we ‘see’ art?”

This was the question that prompted the creation and launch of the Tate Sensorium – an award-winning small but beautifully formed installation that has been receiving great reviews and proved so popular that it was extended until October this year.

It featured four famous paintings, but rather than simply letting visitors view them, it built a sensory experience around each one encompassing smell, taste and touch inspired by the art. The result was a far more immersive experience than you would get in any traditional gallery. This enabled people to make a deeper connection with the paintings and get a better understanding of each one.

Christmas ads have become a bit of an event in themselves. No longer do consumers wait for the Coca Cola Christmas truck to grace their screens to mark the official start of Christmas, but a host of other brands have earnt themselves a bit of a name in bringing in the festive season. And this year has served up quite a few Christmas crackers.

Check out our pick of the top 7 festive ad offerings of 2015 so far…

‘Man on the Moon’

Brand: John Lewis
Agency: Adam&Eve/DDB
No of video views: 13,391,765*

One of the most eagerly anticipated Christmas ads of the year, British retailer John Lewis tells the story of a young girl determined to bring Christmas to a lonely old man living on the moon.

As the saying goes: “If you spoke to people the way advertising does, they’d punch you in the face.” Today, it is necessary to communicate with people like they’re people, not treat them as if they’re machines made up of consumer data. Even more important is to understand that consumers are in control of your brand. Brand success today is about interacting with your customers to address joint needs. Finding out the challenges your audience faces and making sure your business answers those needs with the products and services it develops is key.

Therefore, it makes sense to build participation or ‘co-creation engagement’ into events so you can collect relevant customer information that can be used to drive innovation within your business that solves real customer problems.

A double win

Events offer the perfect co-creation engagement platform, where customers can personalise their experience through being able to give feedback about their needs and challenges. This can significantly increase the return you get from your live marketing.

It is a double win because not only does co-creation lead to the development of relevant products and services that your customers want, but it also delivers your field research, as you gain a deep understanding of the customer’s state of mind and their decision-making process for purchasing your goods.

The term “programmatic” is getting bundled about everywhere these days and while some of us have managed to get to grips with all the terminology, others are still struggling to understand it.

Well thanks to the guys over at Headway Digital, this infographic ‘Periodic table of programmatic elements’ aims to give marketers a route-map designed to help make sense of the myriad of options available in today’s programmatic landscape for inventory, platform, creative, data and goals.

"We believe education is fundamental to supporting the success of marketers worldwide. This route-map contains the concepts and solutions that are available today, as well as shows how they work together to contribute to a marketer’s goals. It clearly defines all of the elements for marketers that want to add programmatic media buying to their marketing stack,” said Dario Diament, VP of Product & Strategy at Headway Digital.

Check it out below and click to enlarge for more information.

With Halloween now behind us, British retailer John Lewis sure knows how to get us in the Christmas spirit and what better way to mark the start of the festive season than unveiling its 2015 Christmas ad this morning (November 6).

In fact, it has become quite the tradition now as consumers around the world eagerly await this day every year (in fact, I even heard one say that they get more excited about the John Lewis Christmas ad than Christmas itself!)

And this year’s offering certainly doesn’t disappoint. Taking the key elements that have proven so successful in its past campaigns – tapping into customer emotions, centring on the connection between two characters and linking perfectly with the message to ‘Show someone they’re loved this Christmas’.