Originally published on The Drum on March 21, 2025
Author:
Katie Streten, Head of Creative Strategy
Right now, it might be tempting to jump into the space with something, anything! However, the businesses that make the most of the experiential AI opportunity will be those that take a strategic, brand-led approach to their marketing. Meanwhile, brands and agencies can work to establish AI principles to create impactful, seamless experiences that set them up for the future.
When designing experiences, we tend to avoid attention-grabbing, flash-in-the-pan interactive elements with no real tie to business objectives. Instead, our focus is on delighting audiences, persuading purchasers, and creating ‘spaces’ for things to unfold in ways that reflect the brand’s values and products. For example, you wouldn’t hold a luxury event at a purpose-built conference center.
Using AI to design and deliver experiences should draw on the same principles. Sure, there are functional benefits we can use and probably already are using – note taking, diary organization, document summary, and material prep for a cascade of internal meetings – but these are foundational and not tied to the mission and purpose of our clients.
As experiential marketers, we need to explore how AI execution ties into our own mission, vision, and brand values or our clients. From here, we can work to ensure the experiences we create together using AI, deliver meaningful excitement that goes beyond the ‘jazz hands.’
One of my favorite AI tools is Suno.ai. It allows you to create songs quickly from a one-sentence prompt, in whatever style you can imagine, complete with lyrics and a bridge section. It’s fun and funny. But it’s involved in multiple legal wrangles with major record labels and musicians.
Let’s say you’re a brand that values the individual. Would you be comfortable using such a tool to create event soundtracks? Or, using this tool for team building in a break-out, when its aim is to deliver assets that are, by their very nature, generic? Not to mention the fact that this might prove disempowering for individual creators.
Perhaps a better solution would be a tool combining audience creativity with AI more overtly, for example – an evolving-world display incorporating text or images directly from audience members and with the generative capabilities of AI, live at an event.
On the other hand, if your brand puts speed-to-market and delivery at the heart of its identity, wouldn’t it be only right to deliver on what you believe? For instance, you might want to proactively use AI to produce personalized assets that are shareable in a matter of seconds. Or cascade meeting summaries with social assets, ready to go as soon as your town hall ends.
Essentially, your mission is crucial for deciding how your brand will work with AI. It’s wise to workshop and map out what is and isn’t acceptable according to your values, if you want to deliver something distinctive, yet ownable.
Experiential marketers are on the cutting edge of customer interaction. Our work exists to personally and practically engage, persuade, and convert people – internally and externally. So, our use of AI should be driven by our audience – who they are, what they need, and what they need to understand.
Audience needs might be easier to map against AI objectives. For instance, according to Sam Altman, the new ChatGPT 4.5 is a far more persuasive model than its predecessors. The differences will be subtle and there are already guard rails to a certain extent, but its higher ‘EQ’ could prove valuable for communicating with a diverse audience in more personalized ways.
Persuasion is fundamentally about understanding who you’re talking to and providing the information that person needs to make an informed decision. It should be at the heart of an experiential content strategy, so your experience delivers on all the points your audience needs to pick up, however they choose to engage.
AI can be used to define the most persuasive elements of your story and act as a thinking partner to help you incorporate them into interactives and environments. In the future, it could respond persuasively in real time to audience moods, or answer questions that help you create the lighting, sound, and story that lands your messages. But to have value it should always start with audience need.
For both brands and agencies, using AI strategically to create experiences means avoiding irrelevance and driving success from investments. Your brand will benefit by experiencing some truly exciting applications which are 100% aligned with your mission values and audience.
