Meet the Sponsors of the LBB & Friends Beach 2023: Momentum Worldwide
For our company snapshot piece, we want to create a profile that pinpoints exactly what makes your company unique right now in 2023. We want to know about the culture and the competitive edge that you bring as well as finding out how the company has evolved over the past couple of years as new tech and changes in the market have disrupted the industry.
Q> When and why was your company founded?
1987.
Q> Give us an elevator pitch for your company!
Momentum Worldwide is a global experience company. We like to say that we help brands STOP TALKING at consumers and START DOING things with consumers. In a world that is increasingly overrun by artificially generated content, we create moments of real human interaction that provide real escape and wonder for real people in real life. Which is another way of saying that if we do it right, the work we make actually creates memories that consumers will take with them forever. We blend strategy, creativity, flawless production and cutting-edge technology to create ideas that have won accolades from the Cannes Lions, Effies and Clios, and earned us Adweek’s experiential Agency of the Year. Our culture of Making It Matter has made us the industry leader in sustainable experiential practices and diversity in the workplace, and has seen us named best place to work multiple times.
Q> What sets your company apart from others in the industry?
We like to refer to Momentum as the “back of the deck” agency. Those crazy ideas in the back of every pitch deck that agencies include as a proof of concept but never get to make? That’s all we do.
We are truly borderless and silo-less. We believe in flowing talent and resources to the problem rather than leaving the team to fix problems on their own. We have 27 offices around the world that all operate as connected whole, sharing resources and expertise. Teams can be made up of a creative lead in Spain directing a team in Toronto with a producer in London, and it all works.
We have a philosophy of Making It Matter. Rather than getting overwhelmed by the problems of the world, every one of our employees is encouraged to look at the small decisions that they make every day through the lens of sustainability, inclusion, accessibility and wellness. Those small choices add up to big changes and have led to Momentum earning two coveted ISO Certifications—the only agency our size in the industry to do so.
Q> How big is your team and where are your key locations?
We have 1,000+ individuals in 27 offices across 21 countries. Although we are in almost all major markets, we don't like to think of locations as “key” or not. Instead, we want every location to be a talent hub that can work on any project around the world.
Q> How would you describe your company culture?
Here at Momentum, we understand that a truly inclusive ethos starts from the “99%” instead of coming from the top down. So much so, that the principle lives in one of our core everyday values: “Be One.”
The strength of this value is that it’s as simple as it sounds. We come together as individuals, without losing our individuality. We move in the same direction, without everyone thinking the same way. On an everyday level, that means:
- Letting everyone speak up
- Embracing our differences instead of downplaying them
- Listening more than we talk
- Learning as much as we teach
- Being honest with ourselves
And whether it’s at home, in the office or at one of our Inspiration Work Sites, everyone has the freedom to work where they’ll produce their best efforts.
Q> Who are some of the key members of your team that our readers should know?
- Donnalyn Smith, global CEO
- Kevin McNulty, president & CMO
- James Robinson, chief creative officer, NA
- Jason Alan Snyder, global chief technology officer
- Christine Shoaf, EVP, global business lead
- Elena Klau, global chief strategy & analytics officer
- David Chamberlain, chief experience design officer, NA
- Sampson Yimer, SVP, sponsorship consulting & director, diversity & strategic development, NA
- Patrick Bennett, executive creative director, New York
Q> How do you foster creativity within your team?
We believe that creativity comes from a beautiful collision of different viewpoints and skill sets, yielding ideas that have never been thought of before. To ensure those collisions happen, we take pains to hire creative thinkers with wildly different backgrounds and experiences. We foster creativity as a collective endeavour that the entire agency is responsible for and build teams that mix technologists, strategists, creatives, artists and designers in an environment where everyone is encouraged to bring ideas to the table. Unexpected ideas only come from unexpected places, so we make the unexpected part of our process.
Q> How does your company address sustainability, diversity and inclusion internally?
We have a philosophy called Make it Matter that is infused in every aspect of what we do. Rather than getting overwhelmed by the problems of the world, every one of our employees is encouraged to look at every small decision that they make every day, from ideation and production to hiring and how we treat each other, through the lens of sustainability, DEIBA, accessibility and wellness.
Those millions of choices made by thousands of our employees add up to create change, not just in our activations and ideas, but in the culture and composition of our agency. We have built one of the most diverse and inclusive creative cultures in the industry, generating ideas from a wide spectrum of lived experience in an environment where everyone is safe to speak in their authentic voice.
When it comes to sustainability, we are constantly asking ourselves what we can reuse and recycle, how our experiences are constructed, powered, and how their impact can be offset. We work with experts to create new sustainable materials with clients and vendors to create strategies that minimise shipping and travel.
Those small choices add up to big changes and have led to Momentum earning two coveted ISO Certifications globally. We are the only agency our size in the industry to do so.
Q> What are some of the most interesting projects that your company has worked on in the past year?
COKE STUDIO: We have just launched our AI-powered Coke Studio experience at music festivals. We use five different AI programmes to turn fans into rock stars with their own unique band name, first single, album art and music video.
TOP OF THE ROCK IN FORTNITE: We worked with NBC’s Jimmy Fallon, Tonight Show and Fortnite to create the first playable late-night episode, an experience that drew 50,000 new viewers to the programme.
SPRITE/WAKANDA FOREVER: We partnered with Sprite and Marvel’s Wakanda Forever to create an at-shelf AR experience that helped Black youth discover a path to a career in movie production.
AMEX NBA 2K23 LAB: We created the first experience designed to make NBA 2K fans better gamers. We created the world’s first video game coaching experience where fans could get real-time coaching from some of the best NBA 2K players in the world. The hybrid experience allowed hundreds in the space and millions on Twitch to get tips and tricks from pro gamers and a digital reactive court helped them take their in-game skills into the real world to drive the lesson home.
Q> What are some of the biggest challenges that your company has faced?
Obviously, the pandemic. Until 2020, “Experiential” was largely synonymous with “Live.” The pandemic forced us to redefine the idea of experiential, both for ourselves and our clients. In some ways, COVID was the best brief Momentum ever received, allowing us to develop new capabilities and strategies that we have carried forward to this day. But it wasn’t fun.
Today the biggest challenge is maintaining a cohesive culture in a world of work from home. Our borderless agency philosophy means we give our employees the choice of where they want to work, but that means we have to take extra care to make sure that every employee gets the career mentorship and attention that they need to succeed.
Q> How do you ensure that your company stays competitive in 2023?
Momentum was built to be entrepreneurial, and we try to hire people who fit that mode. We try not to just hire people from other experiential shops, and instead look for new employees from a variety of disciplines inside and outside of advertising. We don’t try to mould them to fit us, we invite them to bring their ideas and ways of working to change how we approach projects. It keeps us fresh and nimble, and we can constantly bring new, diverse thinking.
Q> How has your company adapted to changes in the industry over the past couple of years?
Momentum has always lived at the cutting edge of technology. It’s what has allowed us to create our most ground-breaking experiences. That desire to learn and adapt to whatever is next is built into our DNA.
The virtual and remote capabilities we built during the pandemic redefined what an experiential idea can be. Even as the world has come back to life, and live events have become more important than ever, we have still brought the idea of remote participation and amplification with us. 10,000 people at an activation is no longer enough when we can use virtual environments, MR, XR, AR and virtual seat technology to extend to millions.
Like many in the industry, we are using AI to get to ideas faster, comp quicker and free our creatives from painstaking tasks to allow for bigger thinking. More than that, we are using AI to generate custom experiences for people in real life, in real time.
We are currently dipping our collective toe into quantum computing and other technologies that will further transform experiences in the decades to come.
Q> What are some of the most exciting new developments that have taken place at your company recently?
We launched the first Sustainability Consultancy for the experiential field. We are advising clients around the world on how they can reduce their environmental impact while still delivering the virtual and physical experiences their consumers crave.
We have invested in award-winning fan experience technology company The Famous Group, an innovator in the creation of mixed- and augmented-reality experiences for live events and their Virtual Seat technology has redefined experience by letting fans attend from anywhere.
In January we launched The Talent Collective, an interdisciplinary team devoted to delivering brands access to the biggest celebrities, the biggest gamers and the biggest creative ideas.
With the appointments of Alex Hoban and Rodrigo Gonzales, we have brought in exciting new creative leaders in our UK and Madrid offices, expanding our borderless creative community.
We are piloting programmes now that will allow us to track consumers from virtual events into the physical world and measure attribution and process, helping us assess a true Return on Experience (ROX) measurement.
In terms of projects, we’ve never been busier. We’ve seen a flooding back to live events, having just completed our most successful Coachella activation for AMEX ever. We’ve also launched the first of our AI-driven experiences for Coca-Cola.
Q> What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the advertising industry in 2023?
Our job is to remind clients that creativity is not a luxury, it is essential.
The biggest challenge in 2023 is uncertainty. There are a ton of economic headwinds reported every day, but consumer spend and the desire for experiences is not dropping. So our challenge is to help our client meet the consumer demand for bigger and better experiences while being smarter with budgets.
As always, whenever there are headwinds, clients begin to retreat toward functional rather than creative ideas. The challenge is to keep proving day after day that the most creative ideas are often the most effective ones.
Q> Looking forward, what are your key goals and ambitions for the year ahead?
In the months ahead, the line between what is “real” and what is “artificial” is going to blur, especially when it comes to what is on our screens. In this moment, the value of true, tactile human experiences in the real world are going to become more and more valuable. From A channel, it will become THE channel, and brands that lead with experiences will win. We want to position Momentum as the key driver in this new world of experientially led brands.
And, of course, we are going to continue our push to Make It Matter. Our goal is to become the most sustainable, inclusive, accessible and wellness-driven experience agency on the planet.
