Paul Saville, Senior Vice President, Experiential
As brands prepare for a blockbuster summer of sporting experiences, success will not be judged by creating fan moments, but by unpacking their behavioral impact. Because experiential has a measurement problem – and brands can’t afford to ignore it anymore, says The Team’s experiential lead Paul Saville.
This summer’s packed calendar of global sporting events will kick off a new wave of immersive brand activations, fan experiences and live marketing moments – putting experiential firmly at the centre of the marketing industry conversation just as the sector is experiencing explosive growth.
Experiential has been the standout marketing winner so far this year: the latest Bellwether Report found face-to-face engagement outperformed every other marketing category, with significantly more brands increasing experiential and event budgets than cutting them. Meanwhile, the market is set to soar to $107.1bn by 2032.
And that’s because marketers know that experiences create something digital advertising increasingly struggles to deliver – brand engagement that people actually remember, which is an antidote to algorithms and AI.
But (whisper this) the industry is sitting on an uncomfortable truth.
The conundrum at the heart of the experiential boom
Here’s the thing. Despite all this investment, experiential remains one of the least effectively measured disciplines in modern marketing. The industry has got great at creating moments. But, measuring their behavioral impact? Not so much.
Recent industry research found that nearly half of experiential briefs still lack clear KPIs. Other studies suggest almost two-thirds of Fortune 500 CMOs either can’t measure, or are unsure whether they can measure, the impact of experiential campaigns on commercial performance.
That gap is becoming impossible to ignore.
As budgets tighten, marketers are under increasing pressure to justify investment through measurable business outcomes, not impressions or attendance figures. These days, as any weary CMO will tell you, good vibes and social buzz don’t really cut it.
Memory matters even more now
That distinction matters more than ever because audiences are harder to reach, attention is fragmented and traditional digital channels are becoming less effective at creating lasting memory structures around brands.
Experiential has an enormous advantage here because experiences are uniquely capable of generating emotional intensity, sensory engagement and memory encoding in ways most advertising can’t.
But emotion alone isn’t enough.
If experiential wants to command bigger budgets and more strategic influence, then it needs to find a clearer way to connect memorable moments to commercial growth.
So, what’s the answer?
The missing link: brand salience
Brand salience is such an important part of the puzzle because it bridges the gap between a memorable event and actual buying behavior.
In a nutshell, salience measures how easily a brand comes to mind in buying situations. Not whether consumers like it. Not whether they engaged with a campaign. But whether the brand comes to mind more readily when decisions are made.
Experiential is one of the most powerful salience-building tools available to marketers. But, until now, the industry has lacked a framework for measuring that effect properly.
Moving past the usual metrics
That’s the thinking behind XIM, The Team’s new Experiential Impact Model, which was co-developed over the last 12 months with the agency’s in-house behavioral scientist, Dr Andy Davey.
Built around behavioral science, salience theory and commercial impact, and informed by our 20+ years of award-winning experience, XIM focuses on whether experiences genuinely influence future behavior. It serves both as a measurement framework for assessing impact and as a design methodology for creating experiences that deliberately drive salience and behavioral change.
The important shift for the industry here is philosophical as much as technical.
Experiential marketing has often been treated as a communications channel, something designed to create buzz, PR moments or short-term engagement spikes.
XIM reframes it as something much bigger – a measurable growth driver which engineers memory, increases salience, creates influence and drives long-term commercial impact.
The future: proving what happens when the event’s packed away
That argument lands at an important moment for the industry because experiential itself is evolving rapidly. Brands are no longer building isolated activations. They’re building interconnected ecosystems spanning social, influencer, hospitality, live events, digital experiences and community.
Increasingly, they want evidence that those ecosystems are moving consumers closer to purchase and loyalty over time.
That’s why the future of experiential marketing will belong to those agencies capable of designing experiences which drive change and measuring their impact, by combining creativity with behavioral insight and commercial accountability.
Because as experiences become more central to brand growth strategies, the expectations surrounding them will inevitably change too. And, because the brands winning the next era of experiential will be the ones proving those moments changed behavior long after the event itself packed up and left the arena.
