The results are in! Four of our experiential projects have been shortlisted for the Campaign Experience Awards 2021. The Uncensored Library, the Air Jordan XXXV unveil, Super Saturday Night and BRIC’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival.

While these four experiences span six award categories—capturing a breadth of digital experiences and what they can accomplish—they perhaps more interestingly trace the evolution of experiential throughout 2020, from before the pandemic touched down in the Western world to today’s lived reality. But despite these changes, one through line has remained clear in our approach to experiential: leveraging digital technology to enable brand new experiences that were never possible before, which bring people together in unexpected ways. Here’s how that core aim has translated throughout a year of ingenuity.

A Digital-First Mindset Made the Pivot Easier

While in-person events that draw large crowds still aren’t possible in the present moment, experiences like Super Saturday Night, a Lady Gaga concert on the eve of last year’s Super Bowl, can offer a peek into what experiential might look like in coming years by reimagining and modernizing the concert-going experience for a digital age. Through a series of activations, the experience used cutting-edge 5G connectivity to power to connect with fans—for example, transforming the standard “step and repeat” into a screen that reflected attendees’ every action through a monster-themed digital double. These moments not only encouraged social sharing, but helped Gaga fans get into the “little monster” mindset before the show.

And while challenges in the past year have largely migrated experiences online around the world, our Experiential team has long advocated for activations that combine broadcasting and in-person events to meet faraway audiences, an approach we call live experiential. “For us, experiential has always been focused on online amplification, regardless of whether the experience is physical or virtual,” says Ciaran Woods, Executive Producer of Experiential and Virtual Events. Woods notes that this digital-first mentality primed the team well for its quick pivot to virtualization. “The transition, albeit at lightspeed, has felt very natural and evolutionary,” he says.

Online or Off, Interactivity Remained Key

Virtual events exist to connect people—and a big part of that means giving the audience just as strong of a voice as the performers. In setting out to redefine live events for a new, digital-first era, the north star of the Virtual Solutions team has been to enable true, two-way interaction between both sides of the screen.

Think about the buzz a musician gets by seeing and hearing the crowd in front of a stage. A desire to capture that same sense of energy gave way to the development and release of LiveXP, our internal live storytelling tool enabling visually rich elements shaped in real time by the interaction of the crowd. “We realized virtual events needed a deeper level of interaction where users can experience live, personalized experiences and one-on-one interactions,” says Travis Craw, Executive Producer of Experiential.

Among the first major events that LiveXP brought to life was BRIC’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, a long-running outdoor music festival enjoyed by New Yorkers every summer. With people unable to gather in large crowds because of the pandemic, we brought music fans together through a two-day livestreamed event on YouTube. Performances were augmented by trivia, live Q&As, Spotify integration (allowing fans to save songs to a playlist with a snap of their mobile camera) and more. Each of these elements showcased how drawing together myriad digital interactions feed into a memorable moment and opened the hyper-local festival to a global stage.

Virtualization Brought New Experiences to New Audiences

Last year, brands didn’t have much time to thoughtfully pivot from experiential to digital. Some missed the mark by trying to translate in-person experiences to digital ones—an impossible task that sets oneself up for failure. The brands that truly delivered, meanwhile, aimed to build experiences that weren’t ever possible before, leveraging digital tools like immersive virtual venues.

The Uncensored Library that MediaMonks built in collaboration with Reporters Without Borders is an excellent example of how virtual venues may be used to overcome traditional experiential constraints. We transformed a library of forbidden knowledge—news articles written by journalists who are censored or were killed in their home countries—into a literal library that could be accessed by readers everywhere via Minecraft.

Nick Fuller, SVP of Growth, notes that digital environments also have the potential to deliver more relevant experiences to audiences. “Personalized experiences are easier to deliver at scale through digital platforms, in a way that is trackable and measurable, not only for engagement purposes but for tracking ROI and lead generation.”

But there’s another key benefit to overcoming physical constraints through digital platforms: accessibility. By eliminating a need for travel, doing away with physical constraints (like seats available in a theater) and lowering the cost to access, virtualization opens up experiential activations to entire populations of people who would never have been able to take part in them before.

 Digital’s Influence will Remain

While virtual experiential is a must-have for brands to continue showing up for online audiences today, what might they look like when the pandemic subsides and in-person experiences become commonplace again? One possibility is that they will feature a more persistent digital layer. “Extended reality will play a stronger role, with experiences like the use of Oculus Venues during Facebook Connect,” says Woods.

But extended reality can enhance in-person experiences, too. When Jordan Brand unveiled its new Air Jordan XXXV shoe via livestream to industry insiders, the Monks showed up with a digital drop using AR that gave viewers the chance to check out the shoe up-close—a “had to be there” moment that was a foot above a standard reveal. One could easily see how such a feature could build on showrooms by giving all attendees a chance to inspect a product—or extend that experience to audiences from afar.

On that note, we may also see hybrid experiences that are spread across several locations. “I believe a hybrid approach will become a standard offering for live events like trade shows and conferences, mostly to survive,” says Marcel van Overveld, Business Director of Virtual Events. “Brands will have to develop other income streams, looking at data gathering and adding a digital layer on live physical events to benefit from that opportunity and maintain or extend their reach, thus staying relevant for their target audience.” For example, his team is looking for ways to use data to virtually emulate the serendipity of bumping into someone with a shared interest.

No matter the form digital takes in the near or distant future, one thing is clear: it will enable experiences that can’t be found anywhere else. For those reasons, digital’s key role in experiential will remain well into the future. “We’ve seen the benefits first-hand,” says Woods. “Bigger reach, better ROI, more accessibility, more user-centric and more sustainable—virtual events are here to stay.”

Some cities and countries around the world may have reopened, but large-scale events will be the last to return–and in the meantime, brands have taken their events and experiences online.

But despite operating in a time of immense experimentation and rethinking the way we use online tools that bring people together, many brands seek to translate their existing experiences to a digital format, when they should rebuild them from the ground up to take advantage of the features that make livestreaming a unique medium–and build a sense of presence and placemaking in the process.

Unfortunately, popular livestreaming technologies lack that creative potential. Forced to rapidly pivot their event strategies, brands have latched onto platforms and tools that are familiar to them, designed for conference calls—but a video conference platform isn’t a livestream strategy. Meanwhile, setups like those used to capture live events for TV are clunky, complicated, and difficult to coordinate for production teams that remain remote.

Building on years of developing live experiential events that take place online and off, our experiential team has taken our learnings about what truly brings a live experience to life, and has developed a proprietary livestreaming suite that enables brands to take control and build dynamic experiences through a fun, lightweight and intuitive interface: LiveXP. You may have seen some of the experiences that LiveXP has enabled before, like our virtualization of BRIC’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival.

“The strength of the suite is that it’s so open and customizable that anything can be done,” says Rafael Fittipaldi, Partner & Creative Tech Director at MediaMonks Sao Paulo. LiveXP takes the baton from several of our previous live experiences–like Old Spice’s Foam Zone–and enables an even greater level of interactivity and versatility that’s missing from so many virtual events today. “Built for creatives, by creatives, the tool offers unprecedented freedom to power live, digital interactive.” Through this versatility, brands have an opportunity to develop more meaningful experiences for their at-home audiences.

Make the Live Experience Unique to an On-Demand One

Placemaking and presence might seem at odds with one of the primary benefits of a virtual event (or even a livestreamed version of an in-person one). After all, you can always catch a recording later, rather than be part of the live experience. But there’s still fun in anticipating the “big moment” and enjoying it with friends, especially when you add digital venues and game platforms into the mix. This need to partake in a collective human experience offers creative opportunities to build a sense of excitement and anticipation–and even a bit of FOMO.

“If you’re going to SXSW for example, you’re going to be going with friends and attending a lot of parties,” says Ciaran Woods, Executive Producer Experiential & Virtual Solutions at MediaMonks. “Can you expect the same for people attending something virtually—that they’ll block out their day and set things up for an optimal viewing experience?” The same goes for professional events; the value is not often on stage as much as it is in the handshakes and conversation that happens in the hallways between sessions.

Brands can try to capture this magic by building in a sense of exclusivity—that cachet of saying “I was there”—by offering digital “swag” rewarding engagement, or by including direct opportunities to participate in what’s happening on the screen. The virtual Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival used LiveXP to play to this advantage by highlighting chat comments, offering trivia questions and giving the community a chance to engage directly with performers through Q&A’s–whether they were watching on YouTube or Facebook. These indelible moments are critical to modernizing the livestreaming experience and delivering on the true potential of the medium.

Two-Way Interaction Redefines Virtual Presence

We’ve long called for digital interactivity to be baked into a live experience, though we often find that brands aren’t leaning into it enough. Consider all the webinars you’ve watched on a video conference platform whose interactive element is limited to a chat in the sidebar (or if you’re lucky, you might be given a Twitter hashtag to network or backchannel there). These tools are useful, but they fail to really capture what makes being at a live event exciting: building memories through engaging with others in the moment.

Livestreams should go further than being treated as just a one-way broadcast. This doesn’t benefit the audience alone; an event’s performer—whether they’re a musician, a conference speaker or athlete—thrives on seeing the energy of the audience at physical events. This has prompted the MediaMonks team to flip the focus not just on what’s happening on a digital stage, but what’s happening in the audience, too.

“We want to visualize a sense of presence,” says Woods. “That’s always something we’ve been pushing for in a livestream. What we’re seeing now is that it’s not just a remote in the hands of the audience, but also giving the speaker a sense of presence and the ability to listen and react.”

There are many ways this can play out, depending on the event itself: webinars can track real time interactions to topics throughout a talk, a live viewer count can translate into visual effects in a virtual conference, and cheering from the sidelines in the chat can trigger audio cues as athletes play over a livestream. Spectatorship is an important part of such events, and modern livestreams must reflect that.

By connecting seamlessly with livestream platforms and their communities, our proprietary LiveXP suite allows us to enable these interactions and more, powered by dynamic 3D assets and interactive overlays that can be switched up on the fly. Built for creative storytelling in mind, these streams elevate audiences from mere viewers to the role of true collaborators.

Of course, equally important to what happens during a live event is what happens before and after. When planning a digital live event, consider the total end-to-end experience. “What we’re focusing on is covering the entire journey—not only registration and communicating in the lead-up, but also thinking about teaser content and how to make even those interactive as well,” says Woods.

No matter what platform you’re hosting an event on, LiveXP’s versatility enables bespoke experiences to achieve your brand’s specific needs. “This isn’t about licensing a webinar tool and adapting your content to its limitations,” says Fittipaldi. “In collaboration with our clients on live experiential projects, we can customize the tool internally to fit unique brand and creative needs.”

From content that builds excitement to analytics-driven takeaways that can aid in lead nurturing or recommending further content down the line, there’s great potential for brands to upgrade their livestream strategies and connect more directly with audiences online. Building a space that enables digital presence may seem challenging, but new tools and ways of defining digital events offer opportunities to drive impact. With LiveXP powering the live digital experiences we build for audiences today, MediaMonks is able to enable these projects faster and with greater impact.

See for yourself what LiveXP can do.