Agency Forum at EMS: Leaders Talk Shifts, Chaos, Connection -

The experiential marketing industry is constantly evolving, but the past five years have been transformative. Despite the new challenges that come with the new territory, agency leaders who joined the annual Agency Forum Panel at the 2025 Experiential Marketing Summit, held in April in Las Vegas, said they are embracing new opportunities—and new capabilities—to meet not only the changing needs of the industry, but those within their clients’ organizations, too.

Here are three hot topics discussed by the panel, moderated by Anup Daji, svp-experience at Wasserman.

From left: Anup Daji, SVP-Experience at Wasserman; Brian Wright, CEO and Founder at Six Degrees; Brook Jay, CEO and Founder at All Terrain; Scott Connolly, EVP at Cramer

Seismic Shifts in the Industry

The panel reflected on the “chaos” in the marketplace that’s putting additional pressures on event marketers to over-deliver on the live event experience.

“Part of that is it’s the hybrid workforce that we’re all dealing with; we’re speaking with audiences that aren’t speaking with each other in person all the time,” says Scott Connolly, evp at Cramer. “When we get the opportunity to deliver to them, it’s what are we making of that opportunity? And the way we look at it, we’ve always talked trends within the marketplace and what we’re doing, and we’ve sort of changed that and we’re really now talking to our clients about patterns because patterns change consistently.”

Full-service Thinking

For Brook Jay, ceo and founder of All Terrain, clients today are more integrated in their organizations, and it’s requiring agencies to be more full-service than ever before.

“We used to be event producers and touring agents and field workers, so to speak, and now we are full stack: data capturers, influencer managers, creative leaders,” Jay said. “And I think that it’s given agencies an opportunity to evolve, not only at the table [with clients], to get to the table sooner with our clients, but also to evolve as an industry. We’ve had to move at the pace of the consumer, which is obviously very fast, and the pace of technology, so it’s given us this great opportunity to become more of an impact player than we may have been perceived earlier on in experiential.”

Brian Wright, ceo and founder of Six Degrees, agreed that services beyond experiential are gaining importance with clients: “We were really heavy 2018-19 when we first started on experiential, but we’ve since flexed our creative muscles with other services around social and creative.”

Micro-moments

And with a more integrated approach to experiential, some agency leaders are finding more value in micro-moments and investments, rather than big, splashy, one-off event campaigns.

“I’m always pro micro-moments, because I think that when you consistently show up and people keep on seeing it, they’ll gravitate a little bit more to it, and the conversation will last a little bit longer,” Wright says. “We talk about a steady drum beat. It’s not this big one-and-done. It’s show up in the community, but keep showing up. And keep showing up and listening and leaning in and bringing value to things.”

Added Daji: “There’s this old adage of do fewer, bigger, better, but the notion of micro-moments is going down this path of smaller, louder, just be consistent in the way you show up.”

For Connolly, extended engagement is critical in b-to-b today: “In the b-to-b space, everyone focuses on the event that’s at hand, but what are you doing to pull that content and that message through, whether it be with video, through different learnings; how are you looking at [the event experienced] with a much more macro lens?”

Year of Disruptions

Clients are more willing than ever to buck tradition—e.l.f.’s IndyCar sponsorship to reach a female race fan demographic or Ferrari’s first-ever virtual launch of a car being two examples, according to Wright.

“I think that brands are going to start doing things that are unexpected, and they’re going to take some risks. Being disruptive can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different industries, but the most important thing is that they are doing it for the right reasons,” he said.

And therein lies an opportunity for agencies to embrace the chaos and lead clients through it. “It’s the ability to be nimble, right?” said Connolly. “I think you have to expect the unexpected. I think in the live event space, chaos reigns, and you have to be able to manage that chaos and then deliver on that chaos. I think a lot of brands out there want to try to push the envelope.”