The IRL Advantage - and What Brands Need to Know for 2027

Here’s a sobering stat: the average U.S. adult now spends over 8 hours per a day with digital media, aka a majority of our waking hours.

As more of our time and attention move onto screens - scrolling feeds, streaming content, sitting on Zoom and Teams calls, shopping online and increasingly interacting with the Chats and Claudes of the world - I’ve been thinking a lot about something that may become increasingly scarce and, as a result, increasingly valuable. And that's the human experience.

I mean real humans … real spaces … real connections.

Places where we can see, touch, taste, smell and hear. Where we can read someone’s body language, feel the energy of a room, discover something unexpectedly and experience something with all five senses. And this creates a massive opportunity for brands.

For the last decade, we’ve obsessed over the digital customer experience. Maybe it’s time we became equally obsessed with the human one. Because as digital becomes ubiquitous, physical experience becomes a differentiator.

The question for brands is no longer simply, How do we get people to show up? It’s, How do we create something worth showing up for?

Rethinking Trade Shows

Brands spend enormous amounts of money shipping booths across the country, flying teams in, buying sponsorships and filling tables with branded giveaways. And yet, walk most trade show floors and what do you see? We see logos, monitors, swag, a maybe a robot or two if you’re at CES.

If we’re asking someone to leave home, get on a plane and walk 15,000 steps through a convention center, a branded water bottle isn’t an experience. We have to start thinking less about the booth and more about the moment.

What could someone do, feel, taste, learn or experience with your brand that they can’t get from your website or LinkedIn? Could your space create conversation instead of delivering another sales pitch? Could people make something? Test something? Personalize something? Meet someone unexpected? Participate in a live demonstration? Could they walk away with a story instead of another tote bag?

Trade shows may not have an attendance problem. But there is a huge experience-design opportunity sitting right in front of us.

Hey, Retail - Give People a Real Reason to Come to You

Retail might be the most fascinating opportunity of all. I recently walked out of a store I've loved for years because it was too cluttered, too unmotivating ... too uninspiring as compared to the experience I've had with some Insta-retailers.

Take my personal experience aside, there's the data. For years, we’ve talked about e-commerce replacing physical retail. Yet majority of shopping still happens in physical stores, and four in 10 retail executives say they plan to reinvest in store experiences to attract traffic.

At the same time, consumers are asking for more. Research shows that many shoppers want retailers to make the in-store experience more interesting. In other words: give me a reason to go out of my way when I could have the same product delivered to my doorstep. Because if I can buy the exact same thing from my couch in 30 seconds, why should I drive somewhere to get it? Convenience isn't going to answer that question for much longer but experience might.

Stores, shopping centers, movie theaters all have an opportunity to become places of discovery, education, entertainment and community.

Think product testing that actually teaches you something. Maybe it’s personalization you can watch happen … or classes and demonstrations. Of course, there’s always unexpected collaborations and limited experiences available only in-store. Then there’s hospitality, music, food, art, community gatherings.

Anyone remember Nordstrom’s big differentiator of your bag brought from behind the counter? That’s not going to cut it any more but there is something to be said for elevating hospitality and the experience.

Physical retail doesn’t need to compete with e-commerce at being e-commerce. It can - and must - offer everything e-commerce can’t.

Brand Events are Not Parties … although They Can Feel Like One!

Then there are brand-created experiences: pop-ups, dinners, classes, workshops, concert activations and everything in between.

Research from the OOH Advertising Association of America shows that 89% of consumers say they would attend a live marketing event or promotional experience. And among those who have attended, nearly half have purchased something and more than one-third have posted about the experience on social media.

That’s where experiential gets particularly powerful. A great physical experience doesn’t stay physical. The upside of today’s digital world is that all off line events can become digital currency. People photograph it. Film it. Talk about it. Search for it. Share it. Tell someone else about it.

One remarkable IRL moment can create hundreds (or thousands! of digital moments afterward. But brands have to move beyond putting their logo on a cocktail napkin and calling it experiential marketing.

The better question isn’t, What kind of event should we throw? It’s, What do we want someone to feel and what experience would create that feeling?

The Opportunity: Design for All Five Senses

Marketing has spent the last decade becoming incredibly sophisticated at optimizing clicks, impressions, conversions and algorithms. And those things certainly continue to matter, especially in the world of AI.

But what if the next competitive advantage is something much more human? For instance, what does your brand sound like? Feel like? Touch, taste, smell, etc. What happens when customers interact with your employees - or with one another? And most importantly, IMO: what memory do they leave with?

Because as AI creates more content, commerce becomes more frictionless and more of our lives move onto screens, I think we’re going to crave experiences that remind us we’re human.

And the brands that understand that won’t simply ask people for their attention. They’ll create something worth experiencing. Digital may be where brands reach people. Human experience may be where people actually remember them.