Six Ways Artificial Intelligence is Impacting Events—Plus Three Real-world Examples

Event profs discuss how they’re leveraging GenAI, risks and responsibilities, and the tech’s current limitations

When we polled the experiential marketing community in March on how artificial intelligence is impacting the industry, 75 percent of respondents said they believed AI will change the course of events. Several months, and ChatGPT updates, later, that prediction has started to become a reality. Across creative, logistics, ops and the spaces in between, generative AI is emerging as an experiential marketing power tool that presents incredible opportunities—and risks.

When you’re dealing with a game-changing technology that’s still in its infancy, but progressing at the speed of light, it’s hard to say exactly how its impact will shake out down the road. In the meantime, we asked a panel of experts about how artificial intelligence is impacting their work now, and gathered three recent examples of how brands have used GenAI to enhance their live event campaigns.

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SIX INSIGHTS ON THE CURRENT STATE OF AI IN EVENTS

Marketers are becoming GenAI prompt experts.

The key to using AI platforms like ChatGPT, DALL-E and MidJourney is understanding how to feed them the right prompts to get your desired results. Accordingly, event departments and organizations are hiring more creative technologists, as well as training current employees to be “prompt engineers” to get the quickest and most accurate outcomes from their generative AI efforts.

“We’re taking outside training from a firm on prompt engineering and just getting better and better at how to pose questions, what you ask and how you prompt ChatGPT and other tools,” says Geoff Renaud, cmo and co-founder at Invisible North. “And the results are wildly varying. So if you go in and ask it a straight question, you get kind of a straight answer. But there are all of these iterations of how you prompt the engine… I think it’ll affect us in ways that we don’t see coming, and that’s where investing in a strategy and adding creative technologists or solutions architects to your team is going to be the name of the game going forward.”

AI isn’t coming for event marketers’ jobs.

While some big corporations have acted on the knee-jerk reaction to replace human jobs with AI programs over the last year, the experts we spoke to say that’s not the sentiment in the event industry. Rather, they say, leveraging AI for specific efficiencies will open up team members for more ideating and strategizing.

“I think what AI’s doing is accelerating our ability to create [client] comps, which is allowing for a lot more high-level thinking,” says James Robinson, chief creative officer at Momentum Worldwide. “So it’s actually giving room for more conceptual thought, which makes the ideas more interesting… That time can be used to think about how the project can get better, how the experience can get more engaging.”

It’s a similar mentality at Red Paper Heart. “When we’re conceptualizing creative projects, rather than looking at ways to use AI to cut the amount of people that would work on it, the flip side of that is expanding whatever efficiencies that AI offers to add them to what you could leverage on a project, rather than looking at it to deliver the same experience with fewer people,” says Zander Brimijoin, the agency’s founder and creative director.

Copyright risks present clear and present danger.

One of the major concerns that AI has conjured is around copyright. The line between imitating and stealing another person’s work is incredibly thin, and one that brands and agencies should be keeping a keen eye on, from visuals to written copy.

“AI presents these opportunities for some to use other artists’ work without their permission, like using something that they’ve developed for their entire career, and then having AI that can reproduce that artwork,” Brimijoin says. “So part of that is certainly a responsibility on creators to use it for the forces of good and to avoid copying other people’s work or using their developed skills without hiring them.”

And it works both ways, according to Renaud. “Data’s the currency,” he says. “And that’s why they say ‘be careful what you put into ChatGPT.’ You’re basically feeding the beast. So I keep it pretty abstract when we do our creative iterations in ChatGPT—we abstract any IP out of it.”

The tech is improving event data and measurement.

Where budget and time allows, some brands are already leveraging AI-powered facial and gesture recognition technology to track attendee sentiment, behavior and demographics at events, then using the data to inform future experiences.

“It’s already being utilized in sporting arenas, where they’re using cameras and getting demographics of who’s walking through the door, and automatically manipulating that and using AI to be like, ‘OK, cool, let’s target this ad in this area because we know that this age happens to be sitting in this section more than other sections,’” says Kenny Samsel, senior producer at edgefactory. “I can imagine being able to formulate data for next year’s event and know that, hey, we noticed that salespeople are a majority of who attends this conference, and not just salespeople, salespeople in the North America region who are the ages of 45 to 55—and then using that so next year’s show is more catered to them.”

It enables instant gratification.

AI’s ability to enable faster event deliverables can mean instant gratification for attendees in a day and age when patience is a true virtue. The end product may not be perfect (yet), but it will be quick.

“From an attendee’s perspective, in terms of the visuals, I think it’s going to be a lot of instant gratification,” says Samsel. “I almost equate it to fast food vs fine dining, where it’s like, OK, the fast food burger’s probably not going to be your craft burger that’s going to be five-star reviewed and put on blog sites, but you wanted the cheeseburger and you got one within 30 seconds and it might have hit the spot right then and there. That’s what AI currently is, and I think that’s going to be the option for the creative and live event world.”

Context and culture are limitations.

One day in the near future, it’s possible that AI will “think” similarly to humans. At the moment, however, companies shouldn’t rely on the tech to deliver accurate context and cultural meaning. GenAI’s distinctly unhuman characteristics are currently its biggest limitations.

“AI’s really good at almost teaching to the test. It can’t really understand context. It can’t understand culture,” says Robinson. “So it can help you craft the idea, but it can’t think about the stimulus that created that idea. Not yet, anyway. We try to do things that react to culture, that are bouncing off of what’s happening in the news. AI doesn’t have that breadth of knowledge; it can’t really react to what you’re asking.”

THREE WAYS AI HAS GIVEN RECENT EVENT PROGRAMS AN UPGRADE

Eliminating manual labor.

AI was used to design all props and labels in “Grandma’s kitchen” at the Metacore event, along with other artifacts found throughout the house.

At an experiential screening and afterparty for the second season of Freeform’s “Cruel Summer,” six photo moments and a roaming videographer capturing footage left the brand with reams of content. But thanks to AI facial recognition technology, the network was able to instantly compile and send all photos and video footage each individual attendee appeared in throughout the course of the night.

Another example: At an activation that brought Metacore’s Merge Mansion mobile game to life, agency partner Jack Morton leveraged AI tools to help create the universe. This included labels on artifacts throughout the space, like on food items in the kitchen, or on bulletin boards, and personal documents on surfaces that the attendees could rifle through to find clues. For example, using MidJourney, the team created postcards from the fictional town of Hopewell Bay. It was also used to design all the props and labels in Grandma’s kitchen. The team leveraged ChatGPT-generated copy for scripts, brochures and documents throughout the house and in the invitation. And AI was leveraged to manipulate a voicemail recording of an old man that attendees listened to prior to arriving on-site for the IRL event. —R.B.

Celebrity impersonations and artwork.

For a client’s meeting in Nashville, edgefactory was tasked with bringing the “country” aspect of the southern city to life—not necessarily exactly the way it is, but how others might perceive it. So the agency leveraged DALL-E to have the AI-generated voices of music icons Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash “host” the event. The team spent time prompting the engine and inputting guardrails for an output that sounded like stereotypes or “digital caricatures” of how the general public believes the two would sound.

“We were able to find a program that was able to manipulate an already cultivated voice and adjust it for what words we needed,” says Samsel. “So it did need a lot of user input to understand it. Then it was able to manipulate it and use artificial intelligence to be like, ‘Well, in this sentence, this is how Dolly Parton would inflect these words and get excited about these things.’ So when it came to this specific show, we had to try to almost play into the stereotype for each of them.”

The agency also utilized AI to produce event artwork. Since there were plenty of photos of Parton already available, edgefactory simply tasked the tool with zhuzhing the imagery up, which yielded AI-generated work that, for instance, served as a spin on Andy Warhol’s style, showcasing multiple images of the singer in different tones.

Coke’s AI Studio experience is giving festivalgoers an opportunity to create their own pop star identity.

Personalized music experiences.

Armed with its new generative AI-powered Coke Studio festival experience, Coca-Cola stopped at fests like Lollapalooza and its proprietary Sips & Sounds event over the summer to turn fans into pop stars using artificial intelligence. As individuals or groups, attendees could answer questions to inspire the AI’s creation of their unique “Real Stars” identity, which included their name, song and album art, as well as music and video elements. When it was time to hit the spotlight, the group was notified on their phones to move into the booth to make their shareable music video (Momentum Worldwide handled).

“It’s [about] finding really authentic ways and experiences that AI can enable,” says Ryan Keen, senior marketing manager at Coca-Cola. “Using AI for the sake of AI creates more of a buzzword, and for the consumer that may not provide value. So the program we’re doing with Coke Studio and the AI content creation that people can do with their own album artwork and their own music videos, I think, is where people will really be engaged and pleased by the technology.”

Featured photo credit: uzenzen

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