Get your kicks in 2026…by channelling IRL in the AI age

Over the past 12 months, several social, political and technological shifts have been gathering momentum. Individually they’re interesting, but taken together they point to a broader shift  in how people behave and what customers are expecting from brands, and, therefore, how marketers need to show up as we enter the new year.

A renewed tilt toward more liberal, values-driven culture
There’s a noticeable move among the younger generation towards more progressive cultural norms. For example, the Green Party’s recent surge reflects a growing environmental consciousness but also a wider rejection of traditional binaries and a desire for more imaginative, authentic leadership.

For brands, this doesn’t mean adopting political stances. Instead, it means recognising that audiences are gravitating toward companies that feel transparent, constructive, and grounded in real human values.

This is where experiential marketing becomes especially powerful. By creating these transparent and human-centred interactions, consumers can feel the values of a brand firsthand, and experience them rather than simply hear them stated.

The rise of the influencer and new authenticity norms
Influencer voices and community leaders are increasingly using low-fi, candid storytelling formats to engage with audiences. These aren’t polished campaign videos; they’re direct, emotional, and intentionally imperfect.

This format is quickly reshaping cultural expectations around authenticity, and brands are responding. Highly produced advertising often feels distant, whereas unfiltered, real-time stories resonate more strongly. The definition of “authentic” has shifted.

So, how can experiential marketers adopt these tactics? By inviting more creators and influencers to live experiences, these moments increasingly become content engines in their own right. As a result, brands will be pushed to design activations that feel truly participatory and unscripted.

For consumers, this trend means more moments for genuine storytelling from influencers. If brands want to thrive they need to deliver interactions that are both authentic and share worthy – a great brand will ensure consumers who can’t attend a live experience can feel involved while sat at home.

Agentic commerce, agentic AI, and a new kind of customer
Generative AI has dominated the cultural and business agenda, but we’re now entering a phase where the conversation moves from tools to autonomy. Agentic AI– systems that can act, decide, and execute without constant human prompting – is set to transform not only productivity but commerce itself.

This evolution introduces agentic commerce: a world where AI agents shop, compare, recommend, and purchase on behalf of consumers. As this becomes mainstream, advertisers won’t just be selling to people – they’ll be selling to LLMs acting as decision-makers and intermediaries.

The recent Shopify x OpenAI partnership is an early signal of this shift. Product discovery will be shaped less by search bars and more by how well brands communicate with large language models. This means marketers will need new strategies: optimising for AI comprehension, structuring product data for machine interpretation, and ensuring their brand narrative is legible to both humans and algorithms.

During this time, experiential marketing will become an even more critical counterweight. As more decisions are delegated to autonomous agents, real-world brand experiences offer one of the few remaining moments where consumers can form direct, emotional connections with products.

The sweet spot will see brands executing both strategies in tandem, influencing both human sentiment and the agentic systems advising them.

New organisational models in the age of autonomous AI
As AI becomes a creative actor rather than a passive assistant, organisations will need to rethink how teams function. We’re moving toward hybrid workflows where human instinct, taste, and emotional intelligence sit alongside AI-driven precision and automation.

For experiential teams in particular, this means AI will take on much of the operational and optimisation; freeing humans to focus on crafting the sensory, interpersonal and culturally attuned moments that define powerful real-world experiences, that AI can not replicate.
This won’t eliminate creativity – it will redefine it, shifting human focus toward strategic leaps while AI handles iterative execution.

The growing importance of experiential marketing
As digital discovery becomes more algorithmically mediated, physical experiences gain new cultural value. Live events, installations, and immersive pop-ups offer something people crave: emotional immediacy and genuine connection.

Experiential work will increasingly be the counterbalance to digital flattening – the place where brands can create moments that feel alive, textured, and memorable.

Taken together, these shifts point to a marketing landscape that’s becoming more fluid, more expressive and, paradoxically, more human as technology accelerates.

Brands will need to navigate cultural nuance, political awareness and new layers of technological mediation, all while staying grounded in what people actually care about. The next few years won’t be about chasing every new tool or trend, but about building the sort of clarity, integrity and emotional resonance that can cut through whatever platform, algorithm or agent sits between brands and their audiences.

Margaux Bang is creative strategist at Sparks EMEA