Brand activations

people stop for

and experiential builds they walk into.

What an experiential brief actually asks for

The idea is the easy part. An activation has to survive a real street, a real crowd and a real permit office, and what decides it is whether anyone has built at that scale before. The right partner tells you on day one which version of the idea is legal, insurable and buildable in the weeks you actually have.

We connect brands and agencies with the partners who do that work. Street-scale stunts, takeovers, immersive builds, festival architecture, and the technology underneath all of it. Free to brands and agencies.

What it
looks like

Six activations our partners have built, and what each one actually took.

Johnnie Walker × Netflix

Squid Game took over the TKTS steps in Times Square. The Recruiter played Ddakji with passers-by, Pink Soldiers worked the crowd, and at 4:56pm exactly, a nod to the show’s 456 players, Red Light Green Light ran for real in a sand pit with Lil Dicky in it. The doll watched from the billboards overhead.

Coca-Cola × Marshmello

The agency needed a choose-your-own-adventure livestream that could not fail: the audience voting in real time on where Marshmello went next, streamed live from a beach in Mexico with Loserfruit. Thousands of feet of cable run across sand, where one grain in the wrong connector ends the broadcast. We put two partners together on it, because neither was the whole answer alone.

Netflix in Mexico City

For the last season of Sex Education, live viewing figures drove a billboard. Every play was turned into sound and colour through spectral analysis, thousands of them layering through the night into one synchronised audio and visual finale. Nobody had built a billboard off live platform data before.

Kodak at SXSW

The Memory Observatory turned people’s own social media memories into a 360-degree light installation they stood inside.

Camp McDonald’s

Twenty-seven days of summer camp run inside the app. Daily drops, menu hacks, merch, and live in-app performances from Kid Cudi, Omar Apollo and BIBI, all unlocked on a $1 minimum. Directed by Emil Nava.

Out-of-home you cannot buy

Five-story drone billboards, FAA-permitted, flown over concerts and over competitors’ stadiums. There is no rate card for this.

Four benches, and they are not interchangeable

Which one you want depends on whether the brief needs a crowd, a build, a piece of technology, or a format nobody is selling yet. We work that out on the call and tell you who, and why.

Street-scale stunts

The bench that takes over a public space and makes strangers part of it. Crowd work, choreography, permits, and the timing that decides whether it lands on everyone’s phone or just happens. Twenty years of doing this in New York before brands called it experiential.

Builds you walk into

Immersive rooms, installations and festival architecture, plus the creative technology underneath. Ten years with us, and the bench we reach for when the idea only works if you are standing in it.

Immersive and AR

Interactive and AR activations, plus gaming. Based in Uruguay, which is usually a surprise and usually an advantage on budget and build time.

Out-of-home innovation

Media formats that do not exist on a rate card yet, including permitted drone work at building scale. The answer when the brief says cultural moment and the media plan has nothing in it.

What it
costs

Experiential is the category where the same brief comes back furthest apart, because a stunt, a build and a media format are three different businesses quoting on the same paragraph. Permits, insurance, fabrication and crew all move independently, and none of them are visible in a treatment.

Working out which shape the brief actually is, before anyone quotes, is the part we do. It costs you nothing, and on a build it is usually worth more than the negotiation that follows.

The four people ask first

When should we call you?

Before the treatment, not after. Most of what kills an activation is decided in the first week: whether the site can be permitted, whether the build fits the load-in, whether the timeline survives fabrication. That is the cheapest week to find out.

Do you work outside New York?

Yes. The bench works US-wide and internationally, and several of these partners are based outside the US, which is often what makes an ambitious build affordable.

Who actually does the work?

The partner we match you to, directly. We are not in the middle of the production and we do not mark anything up. We tell you who fits, make the introduction, and stay useful for as long as you want us there.

What does Momentum charge?

Nothing. We are funded by the partners we represent, which is why brands and agencies pay us nothing for the introduction or for the work of finding the right fit.

Send us the activation brief

Tell us what you want people to do, where you want it to happen, and what you have to spend. Fifteen minutes on Zoom is usually enough to know whether we have the answer.