Festivals & Fan Cons
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B-to-C Events
Ideas from NYCC 2025: Paramount’s Botany Lab, HBO’s Horror Show, Walmart’s Gaming Retreat and More
Like its counterpart San Diego Comic-Con, New York Comic Con (NYCC) offered a treasure trove of activities and activations built for pop culture superfans this year. The 19th annual event was packed with panels, cosplay competitions, workshops, talent shows and, yes, brand experiences. From multisensory booths on the show floor at the Javits Center, to […]
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Festivals & Fan Cons
Experiential Trend of the Week: Hotlines
The days of the landline are long gone. Pay phones are a rarity. And kids today don’t know what a rotary phone is. But with the takeover of digital communication, there’s now a kind of novelty to the phone call that brands are capitalizing on this year. Enter: the hotline. Not just for information, emergencies […]
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B-to-C Events
The Brief: Farmer’s Barkets and Hair Monsters
This week’s hot takes on hot topics in experiential marketing cover Farmer’s Barkets, Pizza Plazas and Hair Monsters.
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B-to-C Events
CI Games Disrupts Gamescom with a Dark Fantasy Tattoo Sanctum
Fans of video game Lords of the Fallen are hard core, and CI Games knows its audience. So for the sequel reveal at Gamescom 2025, held Aug. 20-24 in Cologne, Germany, the independent video game developer and publisher brought the game’s dark fantasy world to life on the show floor with a themed activation called […]
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B-to-B Events
Four Insights on SXSW’s Evolving Brand Activation Landscape for 2026
SXSW has long served as an annual barometer for the experiential marketing industry with its roster of brand activations throughout the city of Austin helping to inform spending forecasts and tactical trends. The soon-to-be, 40-year-old tentpole was an early example of festivalized conference experiences, and has served as a breeding and proving ground for earned […]
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B-to-C Events
From Pancakes to Karaoke, Nine Activations that Struck a Chord at Lollapalooza 2025
Lollapalooza annually takes place during peak music festival season, with this year’s four-day passes selling out in under an hour back in March, once again proving the event to be a huge draw for music lovers. About 115,000 people attended each day of the festival from July 31 to Aug. 3, organizers confirmed, saying that […]
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B-to-C Events
So Delicious Talks Multisensory Sampling in a Giant Pint at Lollapalooza
A little mystery and the promise of a sweet treat drew Lollapalooza festivalgoers into a nondescript, oversized frozen dessert pint. A minimalist design on the exterior of the black box that included just “The Pint of No Return” messaging and So Delicious Dairy Free’s logo didn’t give a hint of the colorful, multisensory adventure that […]
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B-to-C Events
How Band-Aid Made a Splash With a Pool-themed Pop-up at Summerfest 2025
If you’re going to promote a waterproof bandage, there’s no proving ground quite like Summerfest. It’s a sentiment that Band-Aid put to the test during the first two weekends of the Milwaukee, WI-based music festival as this year’s official bandage sponsor. As a relative newcomer to the festival scene, the brand wanted to make a […]
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B-to-C Events
10 Minutes With… Shawn Silverman, Global Head of Marketing at Pluto TV
Our monthly interview series continues as we sit down virtually with Shawn Silverman, global head of marketing at Pluto TV. The free streaming television brand brought to life its integrated “Summer of Cinema” campaign with a giant popcorn bucket-inspired activation, which was also housed in Paramount+’s The Lodge experience on-site at San Diego Comic-Con. In this […]
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Festivals & Fan Cons
Podcast: EM Editors Take San Diego Comic-Con 2025
San Diego Comic-Con is the epicenter of fandom, annually bringing together thousands of fans at the convention center and across the city at off-site brand activations to celebrate the latest in comics, movies, TV and pop culture. The Event Marketer editors were on the ground to take it all in and bring our firsthand coverage […]
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