Why experiences belong at the heart of your comms plan

The lost weight of cultural moments

I recently pulled out a box of old vinyl records I hadn’t looked at in years and was struck by how much intention there was in every detail.

The artwork wasn’t there just to decorate the sleeve. It told part of the story. The typography, the photography, the smell of the paper, all of it felt considered. Even the slight wear on the corners meant something. It was evidence of time passing, of where it had been, of whose hands it had travelled through.

The weight of the record in your hands mattered too. The feel of the sleeve. The soft crackle as the needle found its place. Listening wasn’t just something that happened in the background. You made time for it. You sat down. You looked at the cover. You read the liner notes. You gave the music your attention, and in return, it gave you memory.

There was something ceremonial about it all. Not in a forced way, just naturally. Music asked you to show up. It brought back a time when music felt earned rather than streamed. You might tape a song off the Top 40 radio show on a Sunday evening, listen all week for it to appear on Top of the Pops, then queue up at HMV on Saturday to buy the single. There was anticipation. There was friction. And because of that, there was feeling.

Contrast that with now. Everything is instant. Music, film, photos, information, even our conversations. Convenience is extraordinary, but it comes with a cost. With no waiting, no effort, no physicality, very little of it lingers. We consume, scroll, and move on.

Memories used to accumulate slowly, like sediment. Now they wash past. What’s been lost isn’t quality, it’s weight. The small rituals that made things feel solid. The sense that moments arrived with consequence. That you could hold them, not just experience them fleetingly.

Why real experiences still win

This is why, in an age where AI can create content endlessly, instantly and effortlessly, the things that cut through aren’t digital volume or production value. It’s presence. It’s atmosphere. It’s the physical feeling of being somewhere and knowing something shared just happened.

Brands can make more content in a day than entire creative departments could make in a year twenty years ago. But people don’t remember throughput. They remember moments.

When I think back to the recent Eurovision work in Basel, nobody talks about impressions or metrics or reach. They talk about standing on the BASEL bench taking their photo. About walking through the experiential booth and feeling part of something larger than themselves. About the emotion in the stadium when the winner was announced.

Those weren’t assets. They were experiences. They worked because they asked something of people. To show up. To feel. To be there. They were sensory and shared, yet deeply personal. And crucially, they couldn’t be skipped.

Experiential work still matters because it introduces friction into a frictionless world. It makes you slow down. It gives you something to hold mentally and emotionally. It breaks the endless flow of content with something physical, human and specific. In a world obsessed with scale, experiences offer weight.

What stays

The moments that endure are not the most polished ones. They’re the ones that leave a mark. The shared look between strangers at a concert when a song lands. The chill down your spine when a stadium goes quiet. The feeling of standing in front of something made with care.

We don’t remember content. We remember what it felt like to be there. In the rush towards automation and infinite creation, it’s worth reminding ourselves of this. The future isn’t won by producing more. It’s won by creating things people can stand inside, not scroll past.

The moments that still matter are the ones designed to be felt, not measured. Those are the ones that leave a trace.

This is exactly where experiential marketing earns its place. Not as decoration, but as a communications channel in its own right. Not something bolted on for visibility, but something designed for memory. Experience does the work that content cannot. It’s where brands stop telling stories and start hosting them.