How to bring your experiential event to life online

Capturing emotion is one of advertising’s great challenges. It gets even harder when trying to distil and represent the wow factor of an experiential campaign, especially when it has to sit within the frenetic scrolling of social or tight confines of a mobile phone screen.

How do you convey the sensations, interactions and excitement of a live event? How can you create content that will sit with and complement the experience without diluting or losing any of that zing and spark? Xavier Sheriff is co-founder of StudioXAG, an agency that works primarily with luxury brands, creating experiences and installations for Liberty, Coach, Karl Lagerfeld, Montblanc and others. He stresses the importance of getting your story straight from the very beginning.

“If the content output isn’t thought about from day one, that can be really challenging. That can be anything from size of room to lighting, to audio, even to customer journey and experience, all that sort of stuff. You really do need to think about it without letting it stifle the creative too much.”

And don’t think that just staging the actual event itself will be enough to justify a torrent of social content. “In all honesty, if the content feels a little bit like it’s just there to prove your worth, like ‘we did a thing, here’s a really cool film of people having a drink in the thing’, how are you going to really amplify that across different platforms?” Sheriff asks.