How Experiential Marketing is Evolving: The Production POV

Oversized pop-ups. Basketball games that teach software. AI tools that sort 25,000 photos in a day. Brand activations are way different from what they were even last year. We caught up with Cory O'Donnell, Group Production Director at TEAM to talk about how brands are thinking these days, using tech in ways that make sense for on-site experiences.

Immersive tech has come a long way.

Brands are putting more dollars towards tech integrations in their events that can entertain as well as educate, and it comes down to the imagination of the programmers and the creative producers to figure out how to package that up in a fun way.

It also opens up the possibility to work with some new digital creative teams you might not have known about that are doing very cool things. In January, we worked with our sister agency, Code and Theory, to build their booth for the Adobe Summit. We brought in our trusted partners at Mnts Moved XP to give attendees a hands-on interaction with Code and Theory's signature supply chain software using Adobe Firefly. They brought this software solution to life with a tech-savvy spin-off on the classic pop-a-shot basketball game we all grew up with at arcades.

The game used Adobe Firefly to layer on images with each basket, which resulted in a custom digital take-away at the end, sent to your phone. It was fun and engaging, and also created a way for the sales reps to explain how the tech worked and give some real-life scenarios of use cases, all while playing a fun arcade game.

AI helped us move faster.

At TEAM, we specialize in content capture. We have an incredible and robust content team in-house, and therefore, at Sport Beach, one of TEAM’s responsibilities is capturing content—both photo and video—of all the events, sponsors, programming moments, and details throughout the four-day event.

This is a ton of content to capture. In years past, we would need days to sort the photos and videos into online folders, which would be available for sponsors and the like. Everyone wants their content and photos as soon as possible, so this is always an all-hands-on-deck work stream post-event and uses a lot of man-hours to complete quickly.

This year, we invested in a tech tool software, an AI photo and video platform, think Pixiset, but on steroids. It automatically identified and sorted most of the photos into folders so sponsors and talent could see their photos instantly.

The tech is still new, and there are kinks to work out, but we saved a considerable amount of time and energy. Cory remembers looking at the platform on day two of the event, and it said we had already sorted over 25,000 pieces of content.

We’re into working smarter, not harder, and this was a win for us.

Invest in AI to Stay Ahead.

If you’re not investing in an AI platform to uplevel your knowledge base and scalability, you’re behind.

AI isn’t going to do the work, but it will help your people do better work. In the event marketing world, AI-driven experiences are key.

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