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People ask about the name. 1977 was the year The Clash released their debut and the Sex Pistols put out Never Mind the Bollocks. Star Wars arrived in cinemas. Studio 54 opened its doors in April, and Saturday Night Fever closed the year by putting disco on every dance floor in the world. Punk, disco and blockbuster cinema had almost nothing in common — except that nobody focus-grouped any of them into existence. Culture that year moved on instinct. Scenes formed in basements

Before Circa77, I spent years inside the machine — leading brand partnerships at Paramount Pictures and later working with Creative Artists Agency across film, television and live entertainment. A few lessons from that time shape how we run partnerships now. Timing beats almost everything A film release is a cultural moment with a hard date. The brands that did well around our releases weren't necessarily the biggest spenders. They were the ones who committed early enough to

Luxury marketing has an experiential problem, and it isn't a lack of budget. Walk through any fashionable district in London and you'll find the evidence: beautifully built pop-ups with nobody in them past the opening night. The production values are immaculate. The thinking behind them often stops at "be seen in the right postcode". The mistake, as we see it, is treating experiential as a billboard you can walk into. A pop-up built around the brand asks people to come and ad

For the past few months we've been building the partnerships strategy for The Lost Estate, the London producers behind some of the most ambitious immersive theatrical dining in the country. Their shows run for three hours or more. Guests book weeks ahead, dress up, and hand over their whole evening — dinner, story and music built into a single world. Compare that with the standard unit of brand marketing: an impression. A few seconds of half-attention, bought at scale and mea