As brands invest more heavily in experiential marketing and live activations continue to win the industry’s biggest creative awards, one question remains: why are events still treated as an afterthought in the creative process?
Jorge Narváez-Arango, SVP, Head of Creative for EMEAI at George P. Johnson, believes it’s time experiential was recognised as one of marketing’s most powerful creative channels.
At Cannes this year, Pinterest handed out stickers encouraging people to cover their phones and spend more time in the physical world. “Less URL, More IRL” was a smart line from a platform built around online inspiration.
Mercado Livre’s Field Barcode won the Outdoor Grand Prix after it turned a football pitch into a giant scannable barcode. Broadcast viewers and the crowd could scan the field with their phones to unlock a discount. The idea was simple, effective, and contributed to the live experience.
The latest IPA Bellwether Report shows events and experiential was the strongest-performing marketing category in Q2 2026, recording a net balance of +11.0%. Some 27.4% of respondents increased their events budgets, compared with 16.4% who made cuts.
That investment deserves more attention from the creative industry. Events are still often treated as the final layer of a campaign, brought in once the platform and look have already been decided. The experience is left translating an idea designed for somewhere else.
A different kind of creative brief
An event has its own creative grammar. It works through space and the presence of other people. Audiences decide whether to enter, then whether to stay. Every detail influences how people perceive the brand in its real-life form; from the welcome at the door to what people share afterwards.
That calls for a different starting point. The central question is how someone should feel while they are there and what they will carry away. The ambition is to make a brand world compelling enough for people to spend time inside it.
It’s why the strongest events are conceived around human behaviour from the beginning. They give people a role and leave room for the unexpected. The creative idea unfolds around the audience, creating participation that cannot be added during production.
Bellwether respondents said they were focusing on more targeted events to engage audiences directly and drive commercial outcomes. This is happening while confidence in companies’ own financial prospects has fallen to a net balance of -9.6%.
Events are earning budget in a difficult market because they can build relationships with a depth that is hard to reproduce elsewhere.
Physical attention has a premium
AI has made the case for live work even stronger. Synthetic content is quicker and cheaper to produce, filling feeds with polished work that quickly disappears from memory. The Bellwether report captures that anxiety neatly, with one respondent naming “the threat of mediocrity from AI” as a concern for the year ahead.
As content volume rises, meaning becomes harder to hold onto. Physical experiences ask for more time and commitment from people, but that is exactly their value. The effort to travel and the decision to spend time with others creates a form of attention that social feeds cannot generate.
This makes experience a form of proof. A claim people can test for themselves. They can see how a product works and whether the brand’s promise holds up when made real.
Digital still has an important role. A live event can travel beyond the room through content and conversation, while attendees carry the memory into their own networks. Online amplification works best when it has something genuine to amplify.
A bigger creative role for events
Cannes gives strong experiential work a dedicated space for awards and recognition, while live ideas are also credited across other integrated campaigns. Yet the creative status of experiential still feels fragmented. Work that builds an entire world around a brand can end up described as an execution, rather than its own creative endeavour.
That framing underestimates the invention and craft involved. Experience design combines creative direction with operational judgement. Ideas must work in real time, with a live audience. When it succeeds, the result can create lasting brand memory and a sense of belonging that conventional media struggles to match.
The continued growth of events shows marketers are already treating events as a serious route to gaining commercial results. Creative institutions now need to reflect the same reality and give experiential work greater recognition at the highest level.