Festivals & Fan Cons Archives

BravoCon 2025’s Brand Partners Help Deliver the Ultimate Fan Experience

NBCUniversal brought back BravoCon this year after skipping the event in 2024, and it pulled up to the Caesars Forum in Las Vegas in a big way. Not only did the convention showcase Bravo’s most popular reality series across four jam-packed days of live events featuring more than 150 Bravolebrities but it also provided plenty […]

B-to-C Events

Experiential Marketing Trend of the Week: Listening Booths

In the age of distraction and content overload, experience builders are leaning on the five senses to tap into the memory-making circuits of the brain. And this year, more events are incorporating moments for brands to literally get in the ears of their target audiences (and effectively, be one-on-one) with listening booths that surround them […]

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B-to-C Events

Field Report: Everything We Experienced at Netflix House Philadelphia

Tucked inside a suburban mall about 19 miles outside of Philadelphia sits a vibrant playground where lights, cameras and calls to action transform superfans into the heroes and villains from their favorite films and series. The fog is thick, the plots love twisting, and the rivalry is real. Welcome, outcasts, pirates, demon hunters and debutantes… […]

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B-to-C Events

NBCUniversal Breaks Down its Growth Strategy for BravoCon and Brand Partners

Social media algorithms were buzzing this past weekend as one of the industry’s titans of superfan events, BravoCon, went down in Las Vegas. Beyond the tea that was spilled and the spicy moments that emerged at more than 100 panels, parties, reunions, game shows, photo ops and off-site celebrations, 22 brand partners—15 of which were […]

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B-to-C Events

Experiential Marketing Trend of the Week: Block Parties

Block parties are built on community. Whether it’s a holiday celebration or an opportunity for neighbors to socialize and share food, the spirit of the street gatherings is the same: to foster connections, reinforce a culture of support and create a sense of belonging. Brands are curating block parties of their own to bring together […]

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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 (Oct. 9-12) was packed with panels, cosplay competitions, workshops, talent shows and, yes, brand experiences. From multisensory booths on the show floor at the Javits […]

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Festivals & Fan Cons

Experiential Marketing 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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