The allure of experiential marketing
From idea to reality
There are certain words that still have an effect on me, and experiential is one of them.
Not as a category or a discipline, but as a feeling, that moment when something moves from an idea into a place, when people step into it, react to it, ignore it, engage with it, and you find out very quickly whether it works or it doesn’t.
That feeling really took hold at Jack Morton Worldwide, where I spent six years in the US, living in Princeton, working out of the New York office and later Boston, travelling constantly across the country and back to London, working on programmes that rarely looked the same twice but all had to do the same thing: land in the moment. It was like Photosound only bigger, more capabilities, and a much larger range of clients and industries.
My role sat across the full arc of the work, finding opportunities, opening conversations, shaping ideas, pitching for them, winning them, and then seeing them through into something real. That progression, from outreach to execution, is what makes this world so compelling, because you don’t hand the work over, you stay with it until it either holds up or it doesn’t.
A bigger canvas
And the range was ridiculous. One week you’re in New York building a licensing show presence for Nickelodeon, where everything is competing for attention and you have seconds to earn it. The same work then stretches into retail environments like Walmart, different audiences, different expectations, but the same requirement to stop people mid-stride and hold them.
A few weeks later you’re in Las Vegas for CES with Texas Instruments, working on DLP programmes that had to make complex projection technology feel immediate, physical and worth stopping for, before that same platform becomes a NASCAR tour, complete with a mobile 3D theatre, moving from major events to completely different environments and expecting it to hold up in all of them.
Then you find yourself standing on the National Mall in Washington DC on Earth Day, delivering a Siemens electric power exhibition to a broad public audience, open air, unpredictable, where the work has to speak for itself without explanation.
Or walking into Exxon’s headquarters to shape Mobil 1 motorsports work where the expectations are high, the scrutiny is real, and the detail matters just as much as the overall idea.
Where it all connects
Some of the work stretched further. A fan experience for ESPN that connected to broadcast and on-site activation and went on to win an Emmy. Programmes for Sprint Corporation around NFL games, operating across fan zones, partnerships and campaign layers in the American heartland. Work for BlackBerry alongside agencies like McCann, Weber Shandwick and Octagon, where your work has to sit comfortably inside something bigger without losing its edge.
There were also moments where relationships carried forward. A connection from my Photosound days resurfacing and turning into a significant account with Pfizer across our European offices, a reminder that in this world, how you work matters as much as what you build.
Why it still matters
What ties all of this together isn’t the format or the channel, it’s the fact that you stay with the work all the way through. You help bring it into the world, and then you stand there and watch what happens when it meets the audience it was built for.
That’s the part that gets under your skin.The early conversations that turn into ideas. The pitch room where it either clicks or it doesn’t. The moment the work is awarded. The build. The last-minute fixes. And then the doors open, and you see people step into something that didn’t exist a few months earlier.
That feeling never really leaves you. And it’s why, even now, I still get a lift when I hear the word experiential. Because I know what it actually means.
Some images on this page have been re-rendered using AI to improve clarity and consistency, based on original project photography. The integrity and design of each element remains true to the original.