experiential-marketing
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.