In many ways, consumers mindlessly scrolling through social media has become one of the biggest challenges in modern marketing.
“I’m a little numb to the content, and I think a lot of us probably are,” Neda Whitney, president and managing partner at Matte Projects, said while speaking at the 2026 Advertising Week conference. “Everything is a little bit of a sea of sameness.”
According to Digitally Applied, a boutique digital marketing consultancy, global advertising spend reached $740 billion this year, with 73% going to digital advertising, up 11.4% year over year. This equates to more competition among marketers and more fatigue among consumers.
This data point, as well as a mountain of anecdotal evidence, has fueled marketers like Whitney to lean deeper into IRL eventing and OOH campaigns for clients like Oura, Estée Lauder and Moose Knuckles Canada.
“When you think of IRL, you are really thinking about a moment where someone is investing time to travel there. … You’re telling them about the brand [with] every touchpoint in that room,” she said. “The community you build in two and a half hours is much stronger than the community you build in three seconds [online].”
For example, to stand out during the U.S. Open this summer in New York City, Whitney and her team executed a pop-up for Oura’s model 5 Ring with one primary goal: Make sure everyone who visited was sized for a ring. “That is the No. 1 barrier to entry [for Oura],” she said. “It was not about teaching them about heart rate variation or the hidden work [Oura provides its users], but getting people to try on the ring and get comfortable with that, so that there was more conversion of purchase [later].”
Of course, there still needs to be cohesion between IRL and social, Reese Pozgay, SVP of brand and marketing at Moose Knuckles Canada, said at the conference. “I’m big on surround sound marketing,” he said. “You only remember [an] ad after you see it seven times, right? [But] everything’s the ad now. The event is the ad. The social is the ad. The ad is the ad. The website is the ad.”
That means every piece of content must be aligned with the overall goal while still being geared toward the channel. For his team, the best events are “smaller, niche moments where you really have the cool opportunity, and then making sure you create that bridge to digital,” he said. “If you’re doing a DJ event, stream it on social, right? If you’re doing the things, how do we kind of make sure that there is a digital amplification — not as a business tactic, but just as another channel.”
His rules for successful events, some of which have been produced by Whitney and Matte Projects, have dramatically evolved over the past few years.
“We made a big point of removing influencer-only, closed-door events. That’s over,” he said. “We want our audience to be able to attend. There’s nothing worse than just a sea of step-and-repeats from the people paid to be there who just happen to be wearing the full look. So we’re trying to eliminate that.”
However, this tactic requires loosening the reins on user-generated content. “The brands that are trying to strangle their brand DNA to keep it super polished are losing,” Pozgay said. “The community defines your brand now, and so you need to lean into that a bit. Let them talk for you. Use creators [and] events not to shove your thoughts [about your] ideal consumer, that you probably don’t actually have, down their throat, but instead let them communicate on behalf of the brand on who the audience actually is.”
Innovation is also crucial when creating a dynamic event that commands a queue. “The innovation we’re seeing is events where there are no phones,” Whitney said. “It’s scary as a marketer because you’re like, ‘Oh my God, my event is not being captured from every single angle?!’ But people want to actually live in the moment.”
While digital ads are getting 73% of marketing budgets today, there’s still room for IRL.
‘There is a second tier to events that we’re really trying to tap into that I think people lost sight of,” Pozgay said. “So, more block parties, hit more cities. … How do we get into those communities that are really cool, but small?” Think: bike clubs, run clubs and cultural events. “This helps create the actual two-way relationship, not using them for their posts, which I think has become a bit of a trend.”
