experiential-marketing
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Jennifer Ilecki Makes Big Brands Feel Personal
From hotel-lobby dance parties to personalized cardholder journeys and pickleball courts, Humana's CMO has built a career around one deceptively hard idea: make the institution meet the person.
Kyle Watson Turned a Fitness Niche Into a Brand Built for Everywhere
She learned marketing in stores, stadiums and scrappy beverage teams. Now Kyle Watson is protecting three distinct brand identities while turning community attention into durable growth.
Alisa Barber Is Turning Payments Into Something People Can Feel
After two decades in payments, Paysafe’s CMO is making a fragmented global brand coherent - and betting that curiosity, community and human judgment will matter even more in an AI-shaped market.
The Agency That Bet Brands Should Chase Culture, Not the Other Way Around
Steve Stoute left the record business convinced Madison Avenue was reading culture with an old playbook. Two decades later, Translation is the agency that turns cultural currency into brand campaigns - and it built a music platform to keep the supply coming.
The AV Company That Moved Into the Hotel
Pinnacle Live’s wager is that the best event crew is already in the building - fluent in the ballroom, aligned with the hotel and accountable for more than the gear. Four years, one merger and one acquisition turned that operating idea into a network of more than 200 venue partnerships.
The Ad Agency That Put Architects, Coders and Culture Nerds at the Same Table
Sid Lee spent three decades stretching the definition of an ad agency. Its wager is simple: when a brand problem crosses screens, streets, stores and stadiums, the team solving it should cross disciplines too.
Octagon
Octagon works in the control room of modern fandom - negotiating the talent, rights, campaigns, data and live experiences that turn attention into a business.
Lee Sterling
She bet a 3,600-person retail empire on a simple idea: the mall never actually died. It just needed a better story - and a Simple Minds song.
Elizabeth Rutledge
Elizabeth Rutledge spent two years learning how to hold a classroom’s attention. At American Express, she turned the same instinct - know your audience, earn their trust, make the lesson useful - into more than 35 years of building a modern relationship brand.
Buoyant Aero
Buoyant Aero builds zero-emissions, self-flying advertising blimps and rents them out as a turnkey service. Founded in 2020 by MIT hardware engineers Benjamin Claman and Joe Figura, the company (Y Combinator S21) started out designing unmanned cargo airships for middle-mile delivery, then turned the same self-flying blimp technology into 'Blimps-as-a-Service' - electric, camera-equipped ad blimps up to 35 feet long that fly pre-planned routes over events, retail launches and conferences for brands like Amazon Prime Video.
Sarah Sylvester
Sarah Sylvester is the Chief Marketing Officer of Lands' End, the first person to hold that title at the heritage American apparel and home brand in nearly a decade. She joined in April 2026 after almost 20 years at Victoria's Secret, where she rose from intern to Executive Vice President of Marketing and led high-profile brand reinvention work across the Victoria's Secret and PINK labels. A customer-first marketer known for balancing heritage with modern, data-informed storytelling, she now leads Lands' End's brand-building push as part of its turnaround and joint venture with WHP Global.
Momentum Worldwide
Momentum Worldwide is a global experiential marketing agency headquartered in New York that designs and produces brand experiences - live events, sponsorships, activations, retail moments and immersive campaigns - for some of the world's largest brands, including American Express, Coca-Cola, Microsoft and AT&T. Founded in 1987 and long part of the Interpublic Group network (now under Omnicom following IPG's 2025 acquisition), it employs roughly 1,300-2,000 people across offices worldwide and has been named a US experiential agency of the year multiple times.
Donnalyn Smith
Donnalyn Smith is the Global CEO of Momentum Worldwide, the experiential and brand-experience agency within the Interpublic Group. She joined Momentum in 1995 and rose through account leadership, managing director and regional roles to President of North America before being named Global CEO in November 2022. Under her leadership Momentum has been named Experiential Agency of the Year by Adweek and Campaign US and Employer of the Year by Digiday. A founding member of the #TimesUpAdvertising movement and a She Runs It Trailblazer Mom of the Year, she is a vocal advocate for diversity, fairness and support systems for working parents in the industry.
Maryellis Bunn
Maryellis Bunn is the co-founder and co-CEO of Figure8, the New York-based experience company behind the Museum of Ice Cream. She coined the term 'experium' to describe the physical spaces her company designs - multi-sensory, photo-friendly environments that have hosted more than a million visitors a year and pulled in a $40 million Series A in 2019.
DISTINCT Technologies, Inc
DISTINCT Technologies is a Fairfield, Connecticut startup building live data intelligence infrastructure that turns real-time consumer interactions at live events into measurable ROI. Its white-label SaaS platform captures what it calls Actionable Consumer Touchpoints (ACTs) from stadiums, activations, and experiences, then routes that data into brands' existing CRM and MarTech systems for unified measurement, predictive insight, and personalized follow-up. Founded in 2022 by former Major League Baseball and Audacy executive Jimmy McCloud, the SOC 2-certified company has raised $3.5M in seed funding.
Jimmy McCloud
Jimmy McCloud is the Founder & CEO of DISTINCT Technologies, a live data intelligence platform that helps global brands capture and act on consumer data at live events - concerts, sports activations, fan zones, and brand experiences. With a career spanning MLB Advanced Media (where the team built what became Disney+), Entercom/Audacy (as EVP of National Business Development), and Division I baseball at Holy Cross, McCloud brings a rare combination of sports media pedigree and enterprise sales acumen to solving one of marketing's oldest problems: making live brand moments measurable. DISTINCT raised a $3.5M seed round in June 2024 led by York IE.
Museum of Ice Cream
Museum of Ice Cream is an immersive, multi-sensory entertainment brand that turns the simple pleasure of ice cream into a walk-through playground of color, nostalgia, and unlimited treats. Born as a 2016 New York pop-up built around a now-iconic sprinkle pool, it grew into a chain of permanent 'experiums' across the U.S. and Singapore under parent company Figure8, blending hospitality, retail, and shareable social moments into one ticketed experience.
PINATA
PINATA (Go Pinata Inc.) is a New York-based enterprise SaaS company building the operating system for front-line brand execution. Its platform unifies budgeting, scheduling, task execution, reporting, and payments so brands, distributors, agencies, and field teams can plan, run, and measure real-world activations in stores, warehouses, trade shows, and the field. Originally focused on experiential marketing, PINATA now serves the beverage-alcohol, CPG, and cannabis industries, replacing clipboards and spreadsheets with data-driven TaskFlows used across thousands of organizations.
Ian Ferguson
Ian Ferguson is the CEO of PINATA, a New York SaaS company that builds an operating system for front-line and distributed workforces - the people setting up trade-show booths, stocking retail shelves and running brand activations far from headquarters. A Yale and Stanford GSB graduate and former Bain consultant, he co-founded the at-home private-chef marketplace Kitchit, helped start the progressive volunteer group Tech for Campaigns, and joined PINATA as COO in 2018 before taking the top job in 2022, the same year the company closed a $10M Series A led by M13 and Bullpen Capital.
Malcolm McRoberts
Malcolm McRoberts is the Chief Executive Officer of Mood Media, the world's leading in-store media solutions company, which reaches over 150 million consumers daily across 500,000 business locations in 140+ countries. With more than 30 years of executive-level management experience spanning Fortune 500 companies like Deluxe Corporation and NCR, McRoberts joined Mood Media in January 2021 following Vector Capital's acquisition of the company. Under his leadership, Mood Media acquired Vibenomics in 2023 - the leading in-store ad network technology provider - and subsequently partnered with Stingray Advertising to create the largest U.S. in-store retail media network, reaching over 800 million monthly shoppers.
Van Le-Gray
Van Le-Gray is a Partner in Event Marketing at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm. With roots in B2B event marketing at BrightTALK and Radius, she joined a16z in 2017 and has since become one of the key architects behind the firm's legendary experiential marketing machine — including Tech Week, the decentralized tech conference that turns entire cities into a16z venues. Her career spans virtual conferences, field marketing strategy, ABM, and sponsorship acquisition, all channeled into building the connective tissue of the tech ecosystem.