Experiential technology has never been more advanced. It has also never been more forgettable. Brands are investing more than ever in LED walls, immersive displays and interactive installations – and sometimes walking away with very little to show for it. Not because the technology failed. But because the brief did. This is what it looks like when the industry confuses impressive with effective, and what it takes to get it right.
Walk into any exhibition hall or downtown brand event, and you will see it immediately. Towering LED walls, screens wrapped around every surface, content looping on a dozen displays at once. It looks incredible, but stand there for a moment and ask yourself what you actually learned about the brand in front of you. More often than not, the answer is very little. The technology is impressive, but the story is nowhere to be found. And given that technology is one of the most expensive line items in any event or exhibition budget, we should be using it to truly enhance the consumer journey.
Before joining the agency world, I spent three years on the supplier side, working as an account manager partnering with agencies to recommend the right technologies for their briefs. Across hundreds of projects and some of the biggest brands in the region, I kept seeing the same pattern. Brands and agencies were reaching for technology to wow, to impress and fill space. Very rarely were they asking how it could actually inform the person standing in front of it. That gap between wow and inform is where I found my focus, and it is something I have carried with me ever since.
Working with one of the world’s biggest sports brands, I used touch screens across store activation zones, not to display product catalogs, but to quiz, engage and excite customers about what made each item worth owning. Every interaction was designed to end in a try-on moment, because once the product was on the consumer, the chance of purchase went up dramatically. The technology was the path to a physical moment, not a replacement for it. At a leading luxury women’s shoe brand, I used movement sensors and body tracking so that every time someone walked past the store window, a pair of shoes would follow them. People stopped, they laughed, and ultimately they looked inside. For Dubai’s metro system, I built a city-wide easter egg hunt using geolocation and an AR web app. Users received clues directing them to stations, and when they arrived, they collected an AR coin. It got people on the metro, exploring parts of the city they had never thought to visit. In every case, the technology had a specific job, and it did it.
But getting there requires the right conversation from the start. Too often, brands arrive with generic references, things they have seen online, or activations from other industries that looked cool in a video. They treat technology as an enhancement rather than asking what job it needs to do within the consumer journey. This is where briefs break down. Before a single piece of technology is selected, I always go back to the core objective. Are we trying to sell a product? Raise awareness of a brand? Simplify a business that is genuinely complex and hard to understand? The answer to that question should determine every technology decision that follows. Get that right and everything else becomes much clearer.
The approach I like to use is working backward. If the objective is to simplify a complex topic, I start by asking the brand to give me the information first. From there, we work out how best to communicate it, what form that takes, whether it is text, visuals, video, or a combination. Only once that is clear do we look at the technology that best serves that media. And the most important part of that process is making sure the audience feels that they are leading the experience, not being lectured to. The difference between a generic screen and a genuinely effective technology activation is whether the person in front of it feels in control of their own journey. In my experience, the best use of technology at any event or exhibition is when no explanation is needed. No brand ambassador walking you through it, no instructions on a wall. Just a person exploring something and understanding it entirely on their own terms. When that happens, the technology has done its job.
When you sit down to write your next brief, resist the urge to call out AR or VR because it sounds impressive. Instead, tell us what you want people to feel, understand, or do by the end of the experience. Give us the problem and let the agency solve it. New technology is emerging every single day, and the possibilities for what can be created at a live event have never been greater. The brands that will be remembered are not the ones with the biggest screens. They are the ones who trusted the process, started with the objective, and used technology to create something their audience genuinely could not forget