The Experience Economy Strikes Back

There was a time when the job of a marketer was beautifully straightforward. Make the best ad campaign you could, buy the biggest audience you could afford, and let reach do the rest. But as consumers become increasingly selective with their attention, and AI accelerates the explosion of content competing for it, brands are rediscovering the power of real-world experiences.

Together, Diageo’s chief innovation officer Mark Sandys and Verve’s global client and development director Michael Pring explore why the next marketing battleground is not simply share of voice, but share of people’s time.

Maximising reach

Few stories illustrate that shift better than one from the early days of Sandys' career. He has watched that shift unfold over the course of his career, and one memory neatly captures how dramatically marketing has changed. As the most junior member of the Guinness team in 1999, Sandys wasn't involved in creating the brand's iconic Surfer commercial. His role was to carry the VHS tape back to the office so colleagues could watch it before its debut on St Patrick's Day during what was expected to be the year's biggest television audience. "The strategy was simply to maximise reach," he says.

It's a story from another age. Not because great advertising no longer matters, but because the rules governing how brands earn attention have changed almost beyond recognition. Consumers are being bombarded with more content than any previous generation, while AI is making its creation cheaper, faster, and more prolific still. And while reach remains possible, attention has become infinitely harder to earn.

So, the big question remains — as media fragments and attention declines and reach alone is losing effectiveness, how is the experience economy reasserting itself? And and how are brands and marketers creating spaces where consumers actively live the brand?

The answer for both Sandys and Pring is not that great advertising has become less important, but that the environment in which brands compete has fundamentally changed. The pair argue that the marketing battle has shifted and that brands are no longer competing only against competitors in their category. They are competing against every other choice people can make with their time.

"Today, the challenge for marketers isn’t just getting attention. It’s getting participation. How do you get proactively chosen when there are so many alternatives competing for people’s time? And now our competition isn’t just another beer, it’s whether someone goes to the pub at all, or chooses another activity entirely," says Sandys.

From reach to participation

For Sandys, the biggest change is that engagement now comes before scale. “If you compare that to how we work now, mass reach is almost the afterthought. Now the engagement we build with consumers comes first, and the broader reach follows from that. In many ways, the model has completely flipped.”

For drinks brands, experience has always mattered because consumption itself is tied to moments, places and social rituals. A pub, a festival, a sporting event or a celebration is not just an environment in which a brand appears. It is where people actively make choices.

That distinction matters.

“I learned early on that experiences are a critical way of recruiting people,” says Sandys. “If someone walks into a bar and asks for a lager, there might be 20 lagers they’d happily accept. The bartender says, ‘We’ve got this one, is that okay?’ and usually the answer is 'yes'.

“Choosing Guinness is much more active. You’re choosing to be different. So we’ve always needed to create immersive experiences that make choosing Guinness feel like the right thing to do.”

That movement from passive exposure to active participation is reflected across marketing, says Pring, who believes brands are increasingly moving beyond a purely social-first mindset.

“We are seeing a shift from ‘social-first’ to ‘experience-first’ in the way brands are building connections with consumers,” he says.

For him, the fundamentals of brand building remain remarkably consistent, but it's the way brands create emotional connection that is changing. Pring is, of course, very well placed to know. Before joining the events and experiential agency Verve, he spent more than a decade at AMV BBDO where he rose to deputy chairman and chief operating officer, overseeing major global brands including Guinness.

“A lot of the received wisdom around brand building still holds true. Emotion drives memory, memory influences decision-making, and most decisions are emotional rather than rational. But emotional connection doesn’t only come through a TV ad or a beautiful piece of content. Participation can create very intense emotional connections too.

"That’s why live experiences are having such a moment. They create powerful emotional connections that drive loyalty, attention and engagement all at once."

Creating tribes, not audiences

In the experience economy, exclusivity can be powerful but only if it creates desire rather than distance.

“The challenge is making sure it doesn’t become too exclusive,” says Sandys.

One of the misconceptions around experiential marketing is that a small audience automatically means limited impact. A live event might only involve thousands of people directly, but the cultural signals it creates can travel far beyond those who attended. “People sometimes get hung up on the economics of experiences,” says Sandys. “They think: 'If I’m spending all this money and only 300 people are there, is it really worth it when I could simply buy media reach instead?' But that underestimates the value of creating behavioural codes and cultural signals that spread more broadly.”

“Experiences are amplified. People see them, talk about them, and adopt the rituals connected to them.”

That idea of ritual is central to how brands build belonging. Consumers increasingly choose brands as expressions of identity — signals of who they are, what they value, and which communities they want to be part of.

Pring explains. "Culture is often discussed through the lens of social media, but culture actually happens in real life. It happens in rituals, festivals, sporting events, communities and shared experiences. Experiences are where many cultural behaviours begin."

Sandys points to Don Julio 1942 as an example of a brand built through experience rather than simply supported by media. As the premium tequila brand expanded internationally, Diageo focused on identifying the moments that genuinely represented what the brand stood for.

“We became very disciplined about identifying the experiences that embodied what the brand stood for. For Don Julio 1942, that was celebration.” The brand used major cultural moments including the Oscars, the BAFTAs and the FIFA World Cup to create associations with celebration and achievement.

“The key was being really focused early on,” says Sandys. “We wanted to build what the brand stood for through experiences first, then amplify those experiences as much as possible. At that premium price point, I think that creates much stronger foundations than simply buying media reach.”

Designing memories, not moments

The challenge for marketers, they say, is not simply creating an event. It is creating an experience that stays with people.

Pring argues that experiences work because human memory is selective. People do not remember every interaction equally, but that they remember the moments that stand out. “Experiences are remembered almost like a highlights reel,” he says. “So all the mediocre stuff gets forgotten over time, but the really good moments and also how you left people tends to be remembered.”

That does not necessarily mean creating emotional moments in the traditional sense. “When we say emotion, people often think it has to be all teary-eyed and moving, but it could be making people laugh or feel uplifted or joyful.” Participation is equally important because shared experiences become collective memories.

Pring points to the recent Oasis reunion concerts as an example of how rituals can transform an audience into a community. “There’s a lot we could learn from that around how to design experiences. It’s a shared moment. Everyone participates. It’s memorable. It will be on the highlights reel in people’s minds when they look back. And it’s hugely powerful.”

Pring also highlights Buchanan’s Second Chance work around Colombia’s return to the FIFA World Cup. The campaign revisits the tragic story of Andrés Escobar, the Colombian footballer murdered after scoring an own goal during the 1994 World Cup, and reframes Colombia’s return to the tournament as a moment of progress and redemption. The experience culminates with fans and Escobar’s family creating a shared stadium ritual around the idea of a second chance.

“It’s a brand, not a rock ‘n’ roll band,” says Pring. “But it’s still a shared moment of participation. And everyone in that stadium will remember that. It’ll be on their highlights reel and everyone watching that game at home saw that moment too and will have been touched by it.”

Proving the value of experience

So how do brands demonstrate that experiential marketing is delivering real value? Pring argues that framing the experience economy as reach-and-scale versus experience is a "trap." He says, "What we’re really advocating is that experience can also build reach and scale. The ecosystem around an experience isn’t just about amplifying it afterwards; it’s about designing the experience from the outset so that people want to talk about it, share it, say they were there, and pass it on — what it was like, what they filmed, what they said, who else was there who might extend the brand’s own reach. You build the potential for scale into how you design the experience, rather than just doing it and pushing it out on social afterwards."

Traditionally, brands have attendance numbers or demographics, which are useful but clearly don’t help with boardroom investment conversations. Verve’s Triple Impact Model looks at three different layers of value.

The first focuses on commercial outcomes: the measurable business effects connected to an experience, such as sales generated, samples distributed, data captured, leads created or customer relationships developed.

The second looks at experience impact: how people actually responded to the moment and how it made them feel, and how far the experience travelled beyond those physically present through conversation, content and wider amplification.

The third examines brand impact: whether the experience changed how people perceive the brand, increased affinity or influenced future consideration.

The point is that the value of experience is not simply determined by attendance. It is determined by what people remember, what they share and what they do afterwards.

The future is not media versus experience

As AI makes content increasingly abundant, both Pring and Sandys believe live experiences will become even more important.

“I really do think so,” says Sandys. “Experiences are real, live and shared. That’s partly why more luxury brands are moving into sport — because live moments are increasingly valuable in a world overwhelmed by content.”

Pring agrees, arguing that the industry needs to be careful not to confuse efficiency with effectiveness. “We’ve reached a point where content and reach are effectively infinite but consumers are finite,” he says.

“The risk is that we get so obsessed with reach, scale and efficiency that we end up pushing content at people who are increasingly running away from it, even when that content is good.

“Whereas in the experiential world, they’re running towards us. Leandro Barreto, the Unilever CMO, made a similar point recently in Cannes: he said marketers are becoming incredibly efficient at making things people ignore.”

That creates a responsibility for brands, they add. Experiences cannot simply become another channel for delivering messages. They need to reward people for choosing to take part.

Neither Sandys nor Pring believe experiences replace advertising. The future is about understanding how different channels work together.

“I wouldn’t advocate 100 per cent media reach or 100 per cent experience; it’s about building the balance between the two,” says Sandys.

The opportunity, for Pring, is to stop thinking about experience as a supporting tactic and recognise it as a powerful way of building memory, meaning and cultural relevance.

In a world where consumers can scroll past almost anything, the brands that succeed will ultimately be those that create something people actively want to join.