Stop Briefing the Experience Last
There's a planning order that most brands follow without ever questioning it. The TVC gets briefed first. Then the media buy. Then social. Then, with whatever budget and timeline is left, someone writes a brief for "an activation."
I've watched this sequence play out dozens of times, and I think it's one of the most expensive mistakes in modern marketing. None of the individual steps are wrong, but the order limits what the experience can be.
The problem with building from the top down
When the experience comes last in the planning hierarchy, it inherits everything. The creative that was designed for a 30-second spot, not a physical space. The timeline that's already been consumed by production and media negotiations. The budget that's been shaved down to whatever didn't get allocated upstream.
The result is something I see constantly. The activation ends up illustrating the campaign rather than driving it. It becomes a physical echo of something that was designed to live on a screen. And the content that comes out of it looks exactly like what it is: an afterthought, documented after the fact by a crew that wasn't part of the original thinking.
What happens when the experience comes first
Now flip it. Start with the live moment. Design it with the intention to be used by the entire marketing ecosystem, with capture built in from day one. Creator crews are on site as part of the production plan rather than as an add-on. Edit pods running in real time so content is being cut, reviewed, and distributed while the experience is still happening.
I've seen this approach change everything downstream. The TVC gets shot at the experience, not in a studio six weeks later with actors recreating something that already happened with real people. The footage is genuine because the reactions are genuine. The energy is real because it was captured in a room that was designed to create it.
Social content is native because it was made in the moment, in the format it's going to live in, rather than cut down from a longer edit or reframed from broadcast to vertical. It carries the texture and immediacy that audiences have learned to recognise and reward.
In effect, the experience becomes the source of the content and the other channels distribute it.
Why this produces better work across every channel
What I find most interesting is that when you start with the experience, the authenticity problem solves itself. Brands spend enormous amounts of energy trying to make their content feel "real" and "unscripted" and "authentic." They hire directors who specialise in making produced content look unproduced. They cast real people and then art-direct them into performing naturalness.
All of that effort becomes unnecessary when your source material is a real experience with real people reacting to it. The content doesn't need to be made to feel authentic because it already is. The camera captured something that happened in a space designed to make people feel something.
The downstream channels benefit too. Media buying becomes more efficient when the creative performs better. Social engagement increases when the content carries real energy. Creator partnerships are more credible when the creators were there, taking part and reacting to something they experienced first hand.
The planning shift
This isn't about spending more on experiential. It's about changing where it sits in the sequence. Move the experience from the last thing that gets briefed to the first thing that gets designed. Build the content capture into the experience architecture. Treat the live moment as the origin point for every piece of content that will follow.
The TVC, the social campaign, the creator programme, the CRM content and the sales enablement footage can all come from one well designed experience that was built to be captured as much as attended.
Every channel then carries the same feeling, because every piece of content came from the same room.
The opportunity
I think most brands already know their best content comes from real moments. The challenge is that the planning process wasn't set up to prioritise those moments. It was set up to prioritise the channels, with the moment squeezed in at the end.
The brands that are getting this right are the ones rethinking the sequence. They're briefing the experience first, designing the content capture into the architecture, and letting every other channel draw from it. The work is better, the content is more genuine, and the economics improve because you're not running five separate productions when one will do.