The next wave of brand experience

‘Make it Instagrammable’ has been the brief shaping brand experience for over a decade. And it made sense. If brands were investing in live moments, they wanted them to visibly travel beyond the moment and onto feeds. Every photo shared and every story uploaded became the safety net. Proof that it worked.

The challenge came when the ‘content capture’ started to compete with the experience itself.

Not because social sharing is inherently a bad thing. Far from it. Some of the most talked-about activations of the last decade have spread because people genuinely wanted to share them. But too often, designing for the audience online began to take priority over designing for the audience already in the room.

I often think back to Glastonbury in the mid-2000s. We all had phones, but getting signal was virtually impossible. If you lost your friends at 8 pm in the queue to the portaloos, that was it - you just had to hope you’d bump into them again. And when you did, at 3 am in some corner of the dance village, it felt euphoric. And you could dance like nobody was watching, because they probably weren’t.

Looking back, it wasn’t the lack of signal that made those times memorable. It was what the lack of signal allowed. Chance encounters. Conversations that weren’t interrupted. Entire evenings shaped by spontaneity rather than navigating meeting times via WhatsApp groups. You had little choice but to be completely immersed in what happened next. And as a bonus, you could actually see the artist on stage without a sea of phones in the way.

Of course, I'm not suggesting we all pine for a world without smartphones. They make our lives easier in countless ways. But it does highlight something interesting: the technology we carry with us doesn't just document our experiences, it subtly shapes them.

That might sound like nostalgia talking. But the desire for more present, physical connection isn’t only coming from people old enough to remember Myspace.

Younger audiences in particular are becoming more intentional about how and when they engage with technology. A 2025/26 Harris Poll found that 79% of US Gen Z aspire to spend more time interacting in the physical world. Deloitte reported that almost a third deleted at least one social media app last year.

You can see it playing out everywhere. Book clubs are booming. Vinyl listening bars, coffee day raves and craft workshops continue to grow. ‘Go touch grass’ has become a viral phrase. Even festivals and gigs are starting to experiment with phone-free spaces. In a world of infinite digital content, finite human moments are making a fierce comeback.

Our feeds are filled with images, videos and voices that are increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality. Add in algorithm fatigue and declining trust in what we see online and it's clear we're entering a new chapter in our relationship with digital media.

As the digital world becomes easier to manufacture, the physical world becomes harder to fake. And that's starting to impact the value we place on ‘real’ experiences. The things we know happened because we were actually there.

For brands, this creates an interesting challenge. If audiences increasingly value experiences because they're real, should we still be designing them primarily to be viewed through a screen?

This isn't a call for phone bans or digital detoxes. Technology isn't the enemy. In fact, the best experiences increasingly use it brilliantly. The question is simply whether it's helping people engage more deeply with the moment - or distracting them from it. Fred Again's collaboration with Dropbox is a brilliant example.

The artist wanted fans to put their phones away during his shows, but rather than asking them to sacrifice memories altogether, he promised something better: professionally captured photos, videos and behind-the-scenes content shared afterwards through Dropbox.

Fans could immerse themselves in the performance, knowing they would still have something meaningful to look back on afterwards. What's clever is that technology wasn't removed from the experience. It was redesigned. Instead of asking fans to choose between presence and memory, the idea gave them both.

As marketers and creatives, we've spent years asking: ‘How do we get people to post about this?’ Increasingly, perhaps we should also be asking, ‘How do we surprise them? How do we make them lose track of time? What story do we want them to retell?’

Because the experiences that stay with us aren't always the ones we documented most thoroughly. They're the ones we were too busy living to capture.

And as AI continues to blur the line between what's real and what's generated, that feeling of having genuinely been there may become one of the most valuable things a brand can create.

Those Glastonbury weekends didn’t become memorable because they were perfectly documented. They became memorable because, for once, nothing was competing with living them. Perhaps that's the next creative challenge. Not designing moments people want to capture, but designing moments they can be fully present for – and don’t want to end.