In real life is back — and now it's finally measurable

For fifteen years, experiential marketing lost budget battles to digital. Doug Bird, who spent five years as head of sports marketing at Red Bull and twenty in experiential, thinks the pendulum has swung back, and that the old reason for losing those battles has been solved.

His history of the shift explains the present. Digital arrived as experiential's amplifier ("thank goodness, now we could scale what we did on the ground on our own terms"), then swallowed the budgets on the promise of cheap, measurable reach. That ship has sailed: costs are up, polish is distrusted, and audiences scroll past advertorial content. He points to a global sponsorship economy of roughly $250–280 billion a year, forecast toward $320 billion by 2030.

The brands winning aren't the giants

Doug's favourite example is Saucony, who had no budget to fight Nike and so went where their customers already were. They showed up at run clubs with a trailer, 25 pairs of shoes to try on, music and cameras. The result was 50 leads per activation plus real reaction content that feeds digital, "and the whole flywheel starts to turn." Red Bull's enduring lesson, in his telling, is that they never lost sight of the ground. Everything layered up from real life, and digital amplified it rather than replacing it.

The measurement layer that changes everything

The reason experiential lost the budget fights was never effectiveness. It was systems. Doug's Red Bull years prove the counterpoint: trial counted (cans into hands), interactions tracked across activation points, leads captured through on-site value exchanges, sell-through measured on site. And if digital counts passive viewership, every spectator at the event counts too.

His discipline for building campaigns runs opposite to most marketers' instincts:

"The ideas are almost the things you work on last. Start with systems and what you need the outcome to be, then reverse-engineer the ideas against that."

Two more warnings are worth heeding. Go where your customers already are, rather than building your own park and wondering why nobody leaves theirs: "If you're showing up and adding value in environments people care about, they notice you're paying attention." And know that in-real-life has an operational layer digital never taught you (permissions, indemnities, logistics), which is exactly why "easy wins" only exist for teams whose baseline digital is already automated and running. Free up the hands first, and then you can be a first mover when a real-world moment appears.

The wider point

This isn't digital versus experiential. It's the flywheel: experiences create the stories people tell, the stories become the brand, and digital scales them. The marketers reopening their eyes to the whole picture, rather than treating performance marketing as the whole of marketing, are the ones building something that compounds.

Try this week: pick one existing community where your customers already gather, and design a value-first show-up, something to try, learn or enjoy rather than a banner. Write the measurement plan before the idea: what will you count, and how? And budget the content capture in from day one, because the flywheel is the ROI multiplier.

If in-person is measurable again, the conference question deserves a fresh answer: are marketing conferences still worth it in 2026?

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.

First published on the SA Marketers' Circle.