Let Your Freak Flag Fly.
Lessons from Katie Peak, co-founder and Creative Director of Backlash
Katie Peak once had to join the magic circle to float people around Waterloo Station for a Nestle guerrilla campaign. That is the level of commitment to a creative idea that built Backlash into the agency behind pop-ups for Pandora, Marc Jacobs, Space NK and L'Oreal. The lesson running through everything she does: the best ideas win. Not the safest ones. Not the ones that follow every guideline. The best ones.
Experiential Marketing Is the Only Channel Where Customers Feel Something
Every other marketing channel is passive. Social media, TV, print, you are talking at people and hoping something lands.
A pop-up is different. People are physically inside your brand. They are touching things, tasting things, talking to your team. They leave with a memory, not just an impression. And that memory is what gets shared, talked about and remembered long after the campaign ends.
Takeaway: If your brand has never given a customer a physical experience, you are missing the most emotionally resonant channel available to you.
Start With 20 Ideas. Present Three. Save Your Best for Last.
Katie's creative process starts with 20 concepts per brief. She whittles them down to three or four before anyone else sees them. Two solid ideas and one wild card, the idea she would run with if it were her money. That wild card rarely gets chosen exactly as presented, but it shows the client how far the thinking can go and earns the trust to push harder next time.
The brief is not the ceiling. It is the starting point.
Takeaway: Always include a wild card in your pitch. It demonstrates creative range, builds trust and occasionally gets picked.
Laser Focus Wins More Business Than Blanket Outreach
Backlash does not send generic agency credentials decks. When they want to work with a specific brand, they put together a bespoke proposal for that brand alone. The feedback from clients is always the same: you are the only agency that bothered to do this.
It takes longer. It wins more.
The same principle applies to small brands trying to get into bigger spaces. The ice cream brand that approached Backlash with a £4,000 budget did not get the job that day. But they got remembered. Months later, when Backlash needed an ice cream partner for a Covent Garden pop-up, that founder was the first call.
Takeaway: Be specific about who you want to work with and build something tailored for them. Generic outreach gets ignored. Specific outreach gets meetings.
Pop-Ups Take Four Months. There Is No Shortcut.
Location scouting, concept development, 3D renders, technical drawings, production, build. Every counter, every surface, every piece of branded material is custom made from scratch. Backlash does not take briefs with less than three months to live date because the work simply cannot be done properly in less time.
The management fee is not for the presentations clients can see. It is for the four months of daily work happening behind every one of them.
Takeaway: If you are planning an experiential campaign, start the conversation four months out minimum. The brands that leave it too late get a worse result and a more stressful process for everyone.
The Best Ideas Often Come From the Most Junior People in the Room
Backlash was named as a backlash against agencies that stifle creative thinking. Katie's approach is the opposite. She nurtures every idea, regardless of where it comes from. Some of the most iconic campaigns in advertising history came from interns who had not yet been told what was supposed to be impossible.
The older you get in this industry, the more you need to listen to the people around you who are still closer to what the actual audience cares about.
Takeaway: If you want genuinely fresh creative thinking, ask your most junior team members first. Then build on it together.
No One Died. It Is Just Marketing.
A campaign did not land. The client called. Katie braced herself. The client said: no one died. Things go wrong when things go right, they would not be calling to complain.
That line has stayed with her ever since. She uses it with her own team now whenever the stress of a live build threatens to overwhelm. It is just marketing. Do your best, plan your contingencies, build your budget pot for emergencies. And when things go wrong anyway, fix them and move on.
Takeaway: Be kind to people on the way up. You never know who you will need on the way down.
Katie Peake: Linkedin
Suds Singh B2B Video Content Specialist London for Interesting Content, LinkedIn.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/B5v5ntzfaWo?si=94wkHP9ZUEL5B4oD
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6elhtgDUnO2A2nQPkaWUw0?si=tKq071XtRNiuo5Umon2Ttw