In this exclusive op-ed, group brand experience director at HAVAS Red Australia, Michael Ozard, argues that experience isn’t just another channel to manage, but rather the engine that feeds them all. He explains why live, participatory moments are the secret to driving content, PR, social and media performance.
There’s a shift happening in marketing right now, but I don’t think most people are looking in the right place.
The conversation tends to orbit around channels: AI, search, creators, retail media, platform changes, the next algorithm tweak.
But underneath all of that, something more important is happening. Marketing is developing a substance problem.
We’ve become incredibly efficient at distribution. We can target more precisely, optimise faster, personalise at scale and push content into every available surface area of someone’s life.
But most brands are now confronting the same uncomfortable reality – we’re producing more marketing than ever, while giving people fewer reasons to care.
You can feel it in the work.
Campaigns launch and disappear in days.
Social feeds are endless.
Paid media gets more expensive while attention becomes less durable.
Teams are under constant pressure to feed the machine, but increasingly the machine is running on fumes. And I think that’s exactly why brand experience is becoming so important.
Not because consumers suddenly want more “activations”. And not because experiential is replacing advertising. It isn’t. It’s because experience is becoming the thing that gives the rest of marketing something meaningful to orbit around.
That’s the shift I think a lot of the industry is still underestimating: for years, brand experience was treated as the finishing touch, the thing added at the end once the campaign was built, the media locked and the content planned, assuming there was still budget left for an event or activation.
What I’m seeing now is the reverse, the strongest brands are starting with something real – a moment, interaction, community or experience people might genuinely want to participate in, and letting that generate the content, conversation, PR and social behaviour that follows.
Because audiences are no longer responding to manufactured relevance. They can feel when something exists purely to fill a media plan. The work that cuts through now tends to have gravity to it and creates participation. It gives people stories to tell each other. It produces content people choose to engage with rather than content designed to interrupt.
Tourism Tasmania’s Winternships campaign is a great example of this done properly. On paper, it was absurd in the best possible way: recruiting Australians for fictional winter “jobs” like Sauna Skipper or Devil Sitter.
But what made it smart wasn’t the gimmick. It was the fact that it completely reframed the emotional lens around winter.
Instead of trying to convince people Tasmania was worth visiting through another predictable tourism campaign, it created something people wanted to talk about, media had a story, creators had material and audiences had an invitation to play along. The experience itself became the engine for everything else.
Nike’s After Dark Tour in Sydney tapped into something similar.
It wasn’t framed like a product launch, but it felt more like culture. A nocturnal running movement people wanted to be part of, where the actual runs were almost secondary to the social momentum around them, which generated the flood of user generated content that extended far beyond the event itself.
The real value of these experiences isn’t limited to the people physically in the room. It’s the multiplier effect that comes afterwards. One meaningful moment can generate weeks of earned attention, creative assets with actual emotional weight, social content that doesn’t feel forced, PR with cultural relevance, and paid media that performs harder because it’s attached to something people already care about.
Audiences have never been harder to reach, which makes real attention one of the most valuable things a brand can earn.
Interestingly, Australians haven’t stopped spending, despite what some marketers seem to believe. They’ve just become more selective about what deserves their time, money and attention. The ABS continues to point to a clear trend: people may be pulling back in some areas, but they’re still willing to spend on travel, hospitality and live experiences even amid broader economic pressure. People are still investing in experiences that feel memorable, communal or emotionally worthwhile.
That behavioural shift matters more than most media discussions right now. Because it tells us something important: people are becoming far more selective about what deserves their time and attention. That’s why I believe experiential marketing is outperforming expectations commercially.
Not because it’s trendy, but because it gives brands a way to create genuine relevance and participation, rather than simply interrupting people and demanding attention.
HubSpot recently found that more than 77 per cent of marketers rank experiential among their most effective disciplines for driving business outcomes. That statistic doesn’t surprise me at all. If anything, I suspect the gap will continue to grow.
Because when you create something real at the centre of your marketing ecosystem, every other channel can benefit from it.
Content becomes more authentic because it’s documenting something that happened.
PR becomes easier because there’s an actual story to tell.
Paid media performs better because it’s amplifying something with social proof attached to it.
Even CRM works harder because audiences feel like they’re being invited into something rather than sold to.
That’s a different model to the one most brands have been operating under for the past decade. And, I think a lot of organisations still haven’t caught up to how significant this change is.
Too many teams are still treating experience as a downstream executional layer instead of recognising it as strategic infrastructure. They’re asking experiential teams to “support” campaigns when, increasingly, experience is the thing generating the most valuable parts of the campaign in the first place.
In many ways, consumers recognised this shift before much of the industry did. People don’t build emotional relationships with media plans. They build them through moments – things they attended, participated in, discovered, shared or felt connected to. That’s what travels, and gets remembered, and what helps create cultural impact.
And in a market where attention has become difficult to earn, I think the brands creating those moments will continue pulling away from the ones still relying on amplification alone.
Not because they’re louder, but because they have something worth amplifying in the first place.
