Every Other Channel Runs All Year, This One Should Too
Written by Michael Fullman, Chief Creative Officer
Michael Fullman is a creative executive and design-first leader. As Chief Creative Officer of ACRONYM, he shapes immersive brand experiences across physical and digital worlds, from live shows to large-scale events and environments.
A brand's social presence doesn't go dark from September to June. Neither does the site, the email program, the retail footprint, or the way the packaging sits on a shelf. Each of those gets understood as something continuous, running, maintained, adjusted, and checked. Then there's experience, which most brands still plan as one or two bursts a year and call a strategy.
Follow the dollars, and the pattern is consistent. Summer takes the bulk of the budget because summer makes sense: festivals, outdoor moments, and the kind of energy that lends itself to physical presence.
Fall picks up the conference circuit because that's where the industry already gathers. Both are defensible on their own. What's harder to defend is stopping there, because the rest of the year still has an audience, and most brands leave that audience unattended for months at a time.
Part of why this happens is that experience still gets filed as a campaign moment rather than a channel. What it actually represents is the brand behaving, the one place a person can stand next to a company and find out what it's genuinely like instead of being told. That's a channel by any working definition. It's just the most demanding one a brand has, and the only one that asks someone to give up their afternoon.
A moment doesn't give you a pattern. You learn something real every time you put people in front of a brand experience, where they slow down and what they come back to a second time. But you don't know whether what you learned is true about your customer until you've tested it again, at a different time of year, with a different crowd in the room.
That's the part that compounds. Three years into one of our partnerships, we pushed hard for a community installation built around the product's own features and design, something the client didn't particularly want and didn't think mattered much.
It worked. Year two, we built a bigger one. Year three, it isn't a question anymore, it's a fixture, and the conversation has moved on to how much further we can take it. You need the first one to earn the second, and the second to prove the first wasn't luck.
Audiences read the cadence too. A brand that shows up big in July and disappears reads as opportunistic. A brand that keeps showing up reads as committed, and people have more to compare a brand against than they ever have, which raises the bar for what earns their attention at all.
Consistency doesn't require a bigger budget than a seasonal plan. It requires a different one: experience built into the year the way a content calendar is, rather than bolted onto it twice. The brief used to be “build the activation.” It's closer now to “design the system the brand lives inside,” and a system that only runs in July isn't one.
A brand showing up four times a year with real intent knows things about its customers that a brand with one summer moment can only estimate, and that knowledge only accrues to whoever keeps showing up.
The brands that understand experience as a continuous channel will be the ones that build stronger relationships over time. A single event can create attention, but repeated moments create recognition, trust, and a deeper understanding of what audiences value.
The goal is not to create more activations simply for the sake of being present. It is about creating meaningful opportunities for people to interact with a brand in ways that feel consistent, intentional, and connected to the larger story.
Just like social media, content, and customer service, experience works best when it is treated as something that evolves throughout the year. The brands that keep listening, learning, and showing up are the ones that give audiences a reason to remember them beyond a single moment.
Read more from Michael Fullman
Michael Fullman, Chief Creative Officer
Michael Fullman is a creative executive and design-first leader working at the intersection of experience, culture, and emerging technology. As Chief Creative Officer of ACRONYM, he shapes immersive brand experiences across physical and digital worlds, from live shows to large-scale events and environments. Michael believes technology should serve craft and deepen human connection through work that feels tangible, emotional, and unforgettable.
