We just got back from the Experiential Marketing Summit, and we’re still processing everything we heard.
Megan Fraboni, VP of Marketing, and Stacy Colson, Director of Strategic Growth at NPARALLEL + Atomic Props attended this year’s event and between the sessions, hallway conversations, and a few moments that genuinely stopped us in our tracks, there was a clear through-line: the brands winning on the show floor have figured out the same thing: AI takes the busywork, humans make the moment. The ones doing both well are in a different league.
Here are some of our takeaways:
At EMS, the prettiest exhibits weren’t the busiest ones
This was probably the most striking observation from the floor.
The highest-performing exhibits weren’t the most polished. They weren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the most impressive visuals. They were the ones with the most personalization and engaging, and truly inviting people.
One example that kept coming up: an exhibit where attendees could grab a hat or bag, pick out patches on the spot, and have them pressed on immediately. Another: a breakout session where everyone received a bucket hat and a calligrapher personalized it on the spot with any message, any name, anything they wanted.
Those were the busiest spaces at the event. Not the installations with the most impressive visual design.
The lesson here is that novelty beats beauty when it comes to the show floor. People will stand in a long line for something they can make their own. They’ll walk past a stunning visual without stopping if there’s not something, or someone that draws them in.
Customization. Personalization. Customization. Personalization.
We cannot say this enough. If your exhibit gives people something to do, make, or take away that feels uniquely theirs, you will outperform every competitor who spent more on AV.
Strategy has to come before everything else
One question came up repeatedly across sessions, and it’s one we think every agency should be asking at the start of every project:
Why are we going, and what do we hope to accomplish?
If those two questions don’t have clear, specific answers before the work begins, the work shouldn’t begin. Not because that’s a rule but because without clarity on those two things, every decision that follows is a guess.
This framing was reinforced throughout the conference. Before every internal meeting, one of the speakers, Senior Experiential Marketing Manager Justin Tabas, from Bosch, suggested asking a single grounding question at every meeting: “Everyone knows what the objective is, right?” It sounds obvious, but so helpful to lead with this question at every meeting.
We also loved hearing Global Head of Experiential Marketing Jimmy Knowles, from Canva, say, “your agency is only as good as the direction you give them.” That’s true whether you’re working with us or anyone else. The brief isn’t paperwork, it’s the foundation. A strong brief produces strong work.
And connected to that: your agency should be helping you write a better brief. Getting upstream and being part of the strategic conversation before scope is finalized is what separates a production partner from a true partner. We aim to be the latter.
The speakers who stopped us in our tracks
Nicole Focke, Ecolab — on using experiential for employee engagement
One of the most meaningful breakout sessions of the summit came from Vice President, Experiential Marketing Nicole Focke at Ecolab.
Nicole shared how Ecolab’s brand activation programs aren’t built primarily for customers or prospects, they’re built for their own people. Their partnership with Formula 1 gives employees something rare: a reason to love where they work, a chance to collaborate with colleagues they’d never otherwise meet, and experiences that deepen cross-team thinking in ways that no internal meeting ever could.
It was a reminder that experiential marketing doesn’t have to face outward to create value. Some of the most powerful activations are the ones that turn inward, investing in the people who show up every day and asking what they deserve to experience.
We’re proud to count Ecolab as a client, and hearing Nicole speak made us even more proud. They are genuinely leading the way on what it looks like for a large organization to invest seriously in its people. If you’re a brand with big employee engagement goals, her session was a masterclass in how to connect those goals to the experiential programs you’re already running.
Jimmy Knowles, Canva — on the relentless pursuit of creative courage
Jimmy Knowles, Global Head of Experiential Marketing at Canva, did something simple and rare: he pushed everyone in the room to stop settling.
His session was a sustained challenge to ask harder creative questions — to bring a brand to a place no one had imagined yet, and then ask whether you could go further. Not bigger. Not louder. Further.
What stayed with us wasn’t a specific tactic. It was the posture. Creativity isn’t a deliverable you hand off at the end of a concepting phase. It’s a discipline. It requires getting out of your own comfort zone, staying curious about what B2C brands are doing (even if you’re a B2B brand), and being willing to push clients past the safe version of an idea, even when the safe version is perfectly good.
Ken Madden, George P. Johnson — on what it actually looks like to lead with AI
Ken Madden, Global Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for George P. Johnson, was one of the most talked-about voices at the summit, and for good reason.
He spends 90% of his time on AI. Not talking about it. Not budgeting for it. Actually in it — educating his team, building custom tools and code, and systematically investing in making AI do what it’s genuinely good at so his people can do what they’re genuinely good at.
His perspective wasn’t abstract. It was operational: identify the tasks that obstruct your best people, automate them, and redirect that freed-up capacity toward human work — creative thinking, relationship-building, being present in the room.
Our takeaway from Ken’s session: every one of us should be spending dedicated hours each week learning how AI can solve more of our personal and workplace challenges. Not because it’s a trend worth following. Because the teams doing it now are building a compounding advantage, and the gap between them and everyone else is widening.
KPIs that actually measure what matters
Measurement came up often, and the conversation has matured significantly. The three KPI categories that kept surfacing:
- Advancing sales or pipeline: Did this activation move deals forward? Create new ones?
- Increasing purchase intent: Did attendees leave more likely to buy than when they arrived?
- Return on experience: How did the brand make people *feel*? This one is underutilized and undervalued.
The third one deserves its own moment. One presenter framed it this way: the goal isn’t just awareness or leads. It’s the feeling of being seen by a brand that sees you back. That’s the emotional outcome that drives loyalty, advocacy, and repeat engagement and it’s the hardest one to engineer without being intentional about it from the start.
One question worth asking your team before any activation kicks off: What do we want people to feel, do, or think? Not what do we want them to know. Work backward from that answer.
Surveys aren’t old school. They’re underused.
There was strong consensus on this: surveys are one of the most reliable ways to measure activation performance, and most exhibitors aren’t using them effectively or at all. There are so many ways to measure with RFID tracking, heat mapping, gamification, emotion recognition, but surveys are more human, more relational, and more accurate.
Best practices shared at the summit:
- Keep it under five minutes. Ideally under one.
- Align every question to your KPIs. If a question doesn’t connect to pipeline, purchase intent, or brand experience, cut it.
- Offer a real incentive. A $10 Starbucks gift card was cited as a consistently effective driver of completion.
- Measure at the show or after, both have value. At-show captures immediate emotional response. Post-show captures retained impressions.
AI should do the things that get in the way of human work
This was one of the most important conversations at the summit, and critical for our industry right now.
We loved how Ken Madden pushed the conversation deeper and said that AI isn’t replacing the creative work, but AI is handling everything that used to obstruct the creative work.
The framing that landed hardest: AI is an accelerator, not a replacement.
Specifically, AI is being used to:
- Prove out business cases and ROI before a project is approved
- Test concepts against synthetic audiences to pressure-check ideas before production
- Speed up operational work: budgeting, documentation, asset management, templated communications
- Generate improved concepts and spatial visualizations during the concepting phase.
What AI is not good at: human connection. Looking someone in the eye. Reading a room. Building a relationship. Making a stranger feel like the brand actually sees them. That’s still entirely human work, and it’s the work that determines whether an activation succeeds or fails.
The implication for our teams, and for yours: the time you free up by automating operational work should go directly into the work AI cannot do. Creative thinking. Relationship-building. Being present at the event. Generating ideas that surprise people.
One question worth asking about your own workflow: if AI can handle rough pricing, templated proposals, and standard documentation, are you actually using it for those things? If not, why not?
The B2C playbook belongs on your trade show floor
The themes that repeated across experience design sessions and conversations weren’t new to consumer brand marketers. They’re just underutilized in B2B and trade show contexts:
- Exclusivity. Give people access to something they can’t get anywhere else.
- Customization. Let them put their mark on it.
- Nostalgia. Analog experiences and things you do with your hands, things that require you to put your phone down are are in demand. Audiences are actively asking for them.
- Community. Create a sense of belonging, not just brand exposure.
And connected to all of these: technology should enhance the story, not be the story (less you’re a tech company). The trap we see repeatedly is “tech first, then find the narrative to justify it.” It should always be the other way around.
Define what you want guests to think, feel, and do. Build from there. The technology that serves that goal is the right technology.
Key Takeaways
If you’re heading into your next activation planning cycle, here’s what we’d encourage you to pressure-check:
- Do you have a clear answer to “why are we going and what do we hope to accomplish?” If not, that’s a great place to start.
- Are your KPIs measuring pipeline, purchase intent, and brand experience and not just attendance and impressions?
- Are you surveying? If not, you may be missing key intel.
- Is your exhibit giving people something to make, personalize, or take away? The data suggests that matters more than how it photographs.
- Is AI handling your operational work so your team can focus on the human work no algorithm can do?
- Are your creatives getting out for inspiration? It’s a huge opportunity to find inspirational work that sticks.
The summit confirmed something we already believe: the brands that win in experiential marketing aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones who ask better questions before the build starts and partner with people who help them answer those questions well.
If you’re planning a trade show exhibit, brand activation, or OOH installation and want to think through the strategy before the creative kicks off, we’d like to be part that conversation.