Every year, the week after Labor Day, the same email goes out.
What are we doing for holiday? Should we be at Art Basel?
It should have gone out in January.
It didn’t, because CES, the Super Bowl, NBA All-Star, SXSW, POSSIBLE, Coachella, Cannes and the list goes on. Nobody thinks about holiday until it’s under our noses.
Here’s what you get when the work starts that way: fast fashion. Cheap, cheery, looks good on social media for a few minutes, and then it’s on to the next. Nobody remembers it. Nobody was changed by it.
And when every team in the industry works this way, something worse happens than any single mediocre activation. The work converges. The same footprint. The same photo op. The same influencer at the same step-and-repeat. And the lines around the block are no longer there.
These are status quo experiences, made at speed, by people who never had time to ask the only question that matters: Why are we doing this, and what are we hoping to achieve?
Experiential done right is strategic and thoughtful, and it requires real investment up front to pay off at the other end. The work that gives people goosebumps and transforms how people see the world was not dreamed up on a Tuesday for a Thursday three weeks out.
Culture moves fast, and brands should move with it. Speed is fine. Asking one team to do all of it is the problem. The permanent flagship. The Coachella build. The internal town hall engineered for company-wide rah-rah. And the thing that has to exist by Wednesday because of something that happened on TikTok on Friday.
Those are not the same job. They’re not even the same sport.
Breaking news: You need four experiential teams
Experiential matters more than it ever has. The floodgates are open. We are no longer the side dish. And we need to start acting like it.
Look at what happened on the agency side: they specialized. You’ve got your spectacle agencies, your permanent builds, your stunt agencies and your immersive studios. You’ve got your white-glove, high-touch types and your regional specialists. Meanwhile, your internal team is still one overworked department doing everything.
The smartest in-house teams I’m seeing have already caught up. They’re splitting into specialized sub-teams, each pointed at a different kind of work.
My take: Carve your team into four.
The long game: owned and operated. Your Capital One Cafés. Your Netflix Houses. Your Dreamforce, your INBOUND, your Canva Create. These are standalone businesses, with their own audiences and their own multi-year roadmaps. Staff them like businesses.
The ride-along: spectacle and tentpoles. The big build at Coachella or Cannes. Somebody else’s party, your house on the block. It’s still a year of work and still serious money. But you’re borrowing the audience, not building it, and the stakes are different.
The home crowd: internal and employee experience. The sales kickoff. The all-hands where leadership announces the thing. The leadership summit, the field rally, the holiday party everyone complains about and nobody skips.
The quick hit: speed to culture. Small, fast, arm in arm with your social teams. This squad reacts to what’s happening in the world this week. Yes, it’s the cheap and cheery stuff. It also matters, because it’s how a brand proves it has a pulse. Fast fashion is only a problem when it’s your whole closet.
Give each one its own people, its own budget and its own clock. The person running your flagship should never get pulled off it to open a pop-up by Friday.
Oh, wait—you need a fifth
Here’s the other thing I’m seeing: experiential divisions are going from marketing line item to revenue generator. That is a big step for our industry and for the people leading these teams.
It’s also a different animal. It needs a strategy and product team whose whole job is to build and test new business models, and to find ways to commercialize the experience without losing the soul of it. Attention CROs and CFOs: This is also the team that helps pay for the other four.
The part where I warn you
When CareerCast ranked the most stressful jobs in America, event coordinator came in fifth. Two years running. The four ahead of us: enlisted military, firefighters, airline pilots and police officers.
Everyone above us on that list decides whether people live or die. We decide whether the doors open at 7. The cortisol does not seem to know the difference.
The burnout is already here. There is no off-season anymore.
Our industry runs on people who care about every detail. Who should be on stage, and whether there should be a stage at all. When the lights should drop to create the goosebump moment. How the story continues after everyone goes home. That care is the product. Ask those people to make too many experiences, in too many shapes and sizes, in too little time, and care is the first thing to go. Then they go.
Your experiences will get worse, just when your audiences — both B2B and B2C — expect more from them. And you will lose the multi-talented magic makers who were the reason any of it worked.
You are building your 2027 budget right now. My plea: fund the team the work deserves. Four distinct disciplines. And a fifth to build the models that support and commercialize them, and help pay for them.
Some teams have already done this. You can tell which ones, because their work doesn’t look like everybody else’s.
Keep asking one team to do all five and you won’t lose them in a blowup. They’ll give notice on a Tuesday, finish the project beautifully and leave on good terms. Then you’ll spend a year teaching someone new which partners actually deliver, where the bodies are buried and how to make a room full of strangers feel something.
