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Five Things to Know This Week This week’s hot takes on hot topics in experiential marketing cover custom Cat-lectibles, nostalgic food courts and Kitchen Witch trends. Etsy Plants a Creative Village at the Daisy Chain Fields Festival Oliva Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields music festival has been (flower) crowned a blooming success. And that paints a rosy picture for the sponsors that attached themselves to the inaugural nonprofit show, hosted Aug. 29 in Irvine, CA, which benefited women’s and girls’...

Stan culture in music is thriving, with social media continuing to boost superfans’ ability to connect and create content, while rallying behind and defending their favorite artists. Most recently, online fandoms have transformed concert experiences into highly coordinated events, from matching apparel to handcrafted accessories to fan chants. To amp up the collective effervescence, brands are partnering with touring musicians on activations at concert venues, music festivals and beyond. Taco Bell...

Networking can be hard, especially for introverts, so Liz Lathan and Nicole Osibodu co-founded Club Ichi to welcome event professionals from all backgrounds to connect. Their social club and membership community is built around casual, conversation-based gatherings, peer-to-peer exchanges, local meetups and retreats. In this episode, Lathan and Osibodu delve into their friendship origin story and how Club Ichi has grown and evolved to support their community of more than 700 members. One of this...

Tracking activations on-site, and around New York City A record 22-day US Open tournament is underway in Queens, NY, featuring the most comprehensive event schedule and most competition days in the event’s nearly 150-year history. And that spells out ample room for brand engagement. Sponsors have flooded the 2026 tournament, Aug. 23 to Sept. 13, with events and experiences around the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center grounds, including as part of the USTA’s free Fan Week programming. Meanwhile,...

Doing laundry isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time, but it’s a relatable task that has the attention of marketers aiming to deliver experiences that feel both familiar and unexpected. Enter: the laundromat as an event venue. Brands are taking over the intimate and instantly recognizable environments to host surprise-and-delight-fueled activations that offer a fresh spin (cycle) on how, and more importantly where, event profs can carve out opportunities for connection. The concept is open to interpretation,...

Aveeno, Coach, Kia and more get in on the rising WNBA hype With the WNBA continuing to hit record viewership and attendance numbers, the league’s 30th season celebration couldn’t have come at a better time, and All-Star Weekend in Chicago continued to build on that momentum. The game on July 25 at the United Center was the second most-viewed WNBA All-Star ever, and it brought in the largest crowd in the event’s history. But the real kicker was that for the first time, the WNBA All-Star Game drew...

Jessica Sibila, Executive Director, The Exhibitor Advocate Many exhibitor service manuals contain an EAC fee. Most exhibit and event marketers have never been told what it is, what it covers, or why it keeps showing up. Open the exhibitor services manual for your next show and scroll past the carpet and the electrical order forms. Somewhere in the labor section sits a line item called the EAC fee. It is sometimes listed at upwards of $350. At some shows it is charged more than once for the same contractor....

Fans encounter training facilities, auction houses, quests and carnivals As far as pop culture events go, San Diego Comic-Con is Mecca. In the beginning, fans flocked to the annual convention to explore their favorite media through exclusive panel content at the convention center. These days, they attend for the first-rate brand experiences that take place around the Gaslamp Quarter, too. From the badge-holders, to the superfans who can’t get their hands on a ticket, activations at SDCC tend to welcome...

Since childhood, Dr. Ilana Gilovich-Stossel has been drawn to magic of storytelling and the world-building and imagination that go into it, especially in the theatrical medium. Through her English literature studies and Ph.D. earned at Columbia University, she homed in on the academic side of theatrical performance, which has influenced her career as a creative director and experience designer. Gilovich-Stossel spent 13 years working with “Sleep No More” and Emursive Productions, stepping into various...

FIVE THINGS TO KNOW THIS WEEK This week’s hot takes on hot topics in experiential marketing cover the Febreze Boot Room Tour, folding pubs and Peroni Portals. SPORTS PLAYERS SMELL BAD. FEBREZE HAS A TOUR FOR THAT. As the Official Odor Fighter of Major League Soccer, Febreze clearly has no problem being real about the fact that sweaty sports players stink up all kinds of surfaces and materials, including those that can’t be thrown in the washer, from couches to gear to car upholstery. So to give its...