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As consumers continue to crave immersive in-person experiences, many companies are ramping up their investment in experiential marketing. We talked to BJ Mazmanian, our Senior Director of Client Services for Live Events here at Bluewater to learn more about what experiential marketing trends are driving the industry and attracting people to events IRL.

Customized Experiences

We are seeing a trend towards extreme personalization with the goal of providing a more customized and engaging experience. This makes sense because event attendees, and consumers in general, crave personalization. There are lots of interesting ways to customize experiences for event attendees including personalized digital content, wearable technology and more. BJ explains:

“One of the ways we are helping to create new experiences isn’t by producing new interactives, but by being able to provide a different point of view, or different level of information for guests to share. Instead of a photo or gif shareable what if it was personalized from your point of view or with your own statistics, your heart rate, your launch angle etc.. Being able to use technology to show the next level of interaction is going to be a game changer, and the fact that we have our own development team to work through client request really sets us apart.”

Immersive Experiences

Event attendees, and humans in general, are more distracted than ever. Keeping their attention, and providing a memorable event experience can be a difficult thing to navigate. What event attendees really want is to feel like they are part of the event and not just an observer. To create a truly immersive event, it’s important to first set your event up for success by asking yourself the following questions – What story are you trying to tell? How can you make people feel something? For your attendees to be immersed in your event, they need to be completely engaged. You want them to feel emotionally connected and 100% present in the moment. From creative scenic designs and lighting to immersive audio, there are lots of ways to make your next event a memorable experience:

  • VR and Augmented Reality Technology
  • Interactive Projection mapping
  • Immersive LED Lighting
  • Creative Scenic Design
  • Direct Participation
  • Bespoke Activations
  • Immersive audio

BJ explains how audio is one of the most overlooked, yet extremely effective ways to engage attendees:

“Using audio in a controlled environment is something that is really overlooked, but hearing is a really powerful sense. Being able to make you think something just flew behind your back, or over your head is really fun trick you can play with audio to help enhance the overall experience.”

Learn more about How to Create an Immersive Event Experience

Hybrid Experiences

With the emergence of the Metaverse and other immersive digital environments, some might wonder if brands will take a hybrid approach to experiential in the future. The answer is most definitely, yes! It’s no secret that the popularity of virtual and hybrid events has soared following the pandemic.  Nonetheless, virtual events will probably never replace in-person events when it comes to providing an immersive, engaging and memorable experience. Hosting a hybrid event, is a great way for event planners to get the best of both worlds. BJ explains how the live events team at Bluewater can offer a hybrid event solution:

“The conversations we are having with clients seem to focus on the excitement to be back at in person events and have that face to face interaction. What we are also seeing (and realizing) is that people adapted to not being at shows, so it’s a miss to not include those people. Being able to offer a bolt on solution like our Parallel platform at a relatively low cost provides the opportunity to amplify the reach & provides a location for guests or consumers to come back to repeatedly.”

hybrid event

Virtual Carhartt Global Sales Meeting on Parallel

The idea behind hybrid events and platforms like Parallel, isn’t to replace real world events – it is meant to extend them. Most event planning professionals agree that hybrid events will not only stay but will continue to grow even larger.

Connect with our Experiential Event Experts

Are you ready to create an experience worth talking about? We’re uniquely positioned to design, develop, and deploy interactive brand experiences, entirely in-house. Our experiential marketing team is staffed with engineers, designers, and developers who are focused on the creation of bespoke customer-facing activations.  Contact us today to get started