The refrigerator doors open onto something unexpected: a room. At PepsiCo’s 2025 International Bottler Conference in Barcelona, the drinks cooler became an entrance to another part of the experience. It is a useful place to begin understanding INVNT. An everyday object acquires a second job. People have something to discover, and then something to describe to somebody else.
- INVNT turns launches, conferences and brand campaigns into experiences people can participate in.
- Its buyers include Samsung, PepsiCo and universities; its audiences include customers, employees and partners.
- An April 2026 deal brought INVNT into Nth Degree, adding operational depth to its creative work.
That second audience matters. The people in the room may be bottlers, journalists or invited fans. Beyond them sit colleagues, followers and potential customers. INVNT’s proposition is that an event should be designed for both groups from the beginning. The stage, the camera, the product demonstration and the social clip belong to the same assignment.
A door worth talking about
For PepsiCo, INVNT led production of a gathering for more than 700 bottlers. Six breakout zones combined sampling, screens, virtual reality and surprises. A Formula 1 partnership reveal included a race car arriving onstage. The business problem underneath the spectacle was coordination: bring an international network together around a shared direction after restructuring.
The published case study reports a 4.8-out-of-five attendee score. That measures how people rated the gathering. It does not establish how many extra drinks they subsequently sold. Keeping those two things separate makes the work easier to evaluate. An event can succeed at alignment without proving a direct sales effect.
The phone leaves the plinth
Samsung offers a different version of the same idea. Working with Cheil Worldwide, INVNT produced three-week Galaxy experiences in New York and London around the Z Flip4 and Fold4. Visitors could handle devices, take K-pop dance classes and explore sets associated with BTS. Times Square and Piccadilly Circus supplied screens; the phones supplied something visitors could actually try.
INVNT reports 51,000 New York attendees and 60,000 in London, alongside 60 million YouTube views. These are different units, with different meanings. A visitor can test a hinge. A viewer can watch the story. Neither is automatically a buyer. The interesting design decision is giving each audience a useful way into the product.
Reported separately from attendance
The relationship continued. For Galaxy Unpacked in Brooklyn in 2025, INVNT supported staging, venue production, operations and talent movement, with space for demonstrations and creator content. It also produced an afterparty that converted the main hall into a concert venue. The launch was an assignment in choreography as much as communication.
The first mismatch was upstairs
Scott Cullather and Kristina McCoobery founded INVNT in 2008. McCoobery’s background was theater, an instructive apprenticeship for a business where the cue must arrive on time. Their founding complaint, as she later described it, was that the events industry had become uninventive. They wanted room to challenge the brief.
Time Inc. acquired the agency in 2015 while looking beyond print. Two years later, the founders bought it back. In a retrospective interview, McCoobery explained that leadership changes had removed important supporters of the original deal. Their successors did not share the same confidence in live events. The founders proposed a buyback in early 2017.
The lesson is narrower, and more useful, than a fable about independence. A partnership can lose its purpose when the people who believed in it leave. Reacquiring INVNT also meant running the agency while negotiating its future. McCoobery described the transaction as a second job layered onto the first.
“Good stories get retold”
Kristina McCoobery, on the narrative people carry out of an event
Why sell again?
In April 2026, INVNT joined Nth Degree, backed by Shamrock Capital. Nth Degree Events combined with the agency under the INVNT name. McCoobery became Global President. The rationale was concrete: combine creative and strategy with capabilities including sponsorship sales, speaker management and event operations.
McCoobery said the businesses brought complementary strengths and little client overlap. Buyers wanted fewer seams between vendors. This helps explain INVNT’s position in a market that includes experiential agencies such as Jack Morton and Impact XM: it competes for responsibility across the assignment, from the narrative to the machinery that delivers it.
What the spectacle is buying
INVNT sells commissioned agency work: strategy, design, content and production assembled around a client brief. Its services extend to virtual experiences, immersive technology and higher-education campaigns. A marketing director buys delivery expertise; a university advancement team buys help making an institutional ambition tangible to supporters.
Consider the 2022 Lamborghini project. The wider INVNT Group and its collaborators paired the last Aventador Ultimae coupé with a one-of-one NFT, working with Krista Kim and Steve Aoki. Lamborghini confirmed a $1.6 million auction result. That number is the buyer’s price for the package, rather than an agency fee or a campaign budget.
For a prospective client, the useful cost question is what the proposed budget includes: creative development, venue, fabrication, crew, broadcast and reuse. Those choices change the economics. A stage designed for one night has a different useful life from a production planned to yield demonstrations, films and reusable content.
The part another team can copy is the sequence. Decide what people should understand. Give them something to do that demonstrates it. Plan how that moment reaches people elsewhere. Then choose a measure that matches the objective. A complicated experience needs a reason to exist; a simple product demonstration may already do the job.
This approach depends on having an audience worth assembling and a product or proposition worth exploring. Spectacle cannot settle a weak offer. What INVNT makes visible is the practical craft between an idea and its retelling: the doorway, the demonstration, the camera position, the cue. Somebody has to make all of them work together.