Alignment and Success for your 2025 Experiential Campaigns
Total read time 4 min | Read continuously or the sections relevant to you.
Outline
INTRO
Post-pandemic experiential marketing has presented numerous challenges. Rising fabrication costs, longer production timelines, and higher sponsorship fees—paired with the growing popularity of experiential campaigns—make these programs inherently risky. Drawing on my experience with brands, agencies, and production companies, I’ve developed a holistic approach to evaluating partnerships in experiential marketing. This approach, centered on strategic alignment and a back-to-basics brand marketing approach, provides a solid foundation for navigating these challenges.
In 2025, successful experiential marketing will tether campaigns closely to brand omnichannel strategy, building on existing consumer touchpoints to create memorable experiences. As digital marketing strategies grow more central to the brand ecosystem and the fusion of digital and physical spaces reshapes our industry, maintaining clear communication across project partners becomes even more crucial. Here, I’ll cover the essential alignment points for brands, agencies, and producers, emphasizing each party’s role in ensuring effective communication to bring impactful experiential activations to life in 2025.
Brands
Brands should start with a well-defined brief that outlines specific KPIs, integration points with ongoing marketing efforts, and core brand values. What are your goals for this activation? Which consumer engagement strategies have proven effective, and how can they be amplified? Brands focusing on these questions can effectively allocate marketing dollars to reach and engage loyal advocates. Look at your current consumer engagement strategies and ask yourself, “How can we turn up the volume on our successes?”
Play up to your internal team’s strengths. Pinpoint your team’s strengths and weaknesses and ensure your brief reflects the domains you will control and those you need assistance with from production and agencies.
Clarifying work domains avoids double work and helps your partners ensure they have the right people on their teams aligned with the project.
The location of your activations makes all the difference. How does the location or event tie into other current marketing efforts? To effectively use your experiential dollars, consider leveraging assets like flagship stores, online virtual communities, and festivals with your consumer base inherently built into their demographic. An effective experiential campaign builds brand affinity and should direct audiences directly or indirectly to the point of sale.
Agency
While pushing creative boundaries is exhilarating, it’s crucial to prioritize which elements need innovation and which should remain grounded. Good creative boundaries allow your work to shine where your clients want input. Work the brief. If the brief is not clear, clarify. The better you augment your brand partners’ needs, the more likely they will see your value. Agencies that strike this balance will work less on pitches, safeguard client confidence, and produce impactful experiential activations that stay on-brand and on budget.
It is pivotal for account managers and project leads to identify the critical areas for maximum creativity and align your team with them. Internally, you need to understand who on your team is best suited for the brief and advocate they be on your project. Looking towards the endgame, defining the project scope and deliverables as early as possible is beneficial. When your creative pushes technical boundaries and has specific needs, you ensure everyone is informed and aligned on their role to implement your creative effectively.
Production
For production and fabrication partners, transparent budgeting and resource allocation are not just important; they are everything. Often, my role involves guiding production teams in reallocating budgets from arbitrary buckets into specific scopes. Early conversations about materials, technical hardware, IT, and pre-production requirements ensure alignment between design intent and final execution. Whether I am planning LED installations, designing custom art rigging, or specifying hardware for interactive AV installations, the transparency in budgeting builds trust and confidence, aligning technical execution with the brand’s experiential objectives.
My approach, grounded in the methods of a theatrical technical director, empowers production teams to ask the right questions and formulate risk mitigation plans. In 2025, production requires you to hold your brand and agency partners to the deadlines you lay out. Whether it be hardware lists, mechanical graphics, or final designs, you must drive timelines in a stern, polite, and well-intentioned way for the sake of the project.
Futures
We are at a point where we have to be open and receptive to new concepts as they are swiftly moving from idea to implementation faster than at any point before. All three parties can use the above alignment strategies to hold each other accountable. It is okay for a brand studio manager to have direct questions for production and vice versa. 2025 will be a turning point as technology pushes experiential marketing into new territory. We’re seeing the emergence of digital twin simulations, using generative AI to analyze physical and digital consumer experiences in real-time. These simulations are more than just fancy tech; they will provide new insights into how we create and measure consumer experiences. Digital twin simulations can allow brands to test their experiential campaigns using generative AI before implementing them in the real world, thus optimizing them with brand objectives.
Let me introduce a concept I’ve coined: IRL-Metaverse Holography (IMH). This concept merges in-person experiential activations with digital and metaverse platforms. It aims to create equally engaging experiences for both in-person and digital attendees. IMH broadens the audience reach, tying a broader consumer base into more experiential events and brand objectives by enhancing consumer experience at every touchpoint. Imagine a scenario where a brand hosts a physical event but also creates a virtual replica of the event in a metaverse, allowing a global audience to participate. Creating cohesive, synonymous in-person and digital activations is the power of IMH.
With massive cultural events like the 2026 FIFA World Cup on the horizon, brands must be ready to blend in-person activations with cutting-edge digital strategies to engage audiences both on the ground and in virtual spaces. Those who master this hybrid approach will create experiences that echo across global touchpoints, driving consumer action. The World Cup has the highest discrepancy between those attending in person and those experiencing it elsewhere. What better place to put these concepts into action?
My comprehensive strategy in action
Strategic Brand Alignment
Focused Creative Direction
Innovative space & UX designs for brands and consumers to unite.
Technical Planning
Minimizes technical risks, executes cohesive phygital space bolstering consumer experience.
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Jessey Zepeda
Experiential Marketing Consultant
Jessey Zepeda is a leader in the field, producing top-notch experiential marketing activations. Beyond consulting, he brings a roster of designers, fabricators, creative technologists, and small businesses to complete successful projects with agencies, event teams, and brand marketing teams. Whether you need a crucial role filled or want to build a team from the ground up, his advice will set you on the right path.
