Why immersion, emotion and personalisation matter more than ever
By David Granite, Director of Creative Technology at Dorier, part of mci group
Technologies such as VR, XR, AI and Web3 have made creative technology more visible in conversations with clients, especially as brands look for ways to show innovation. But for me, the real value of creative technology is not in the technology itself. It is in what it helps people feel, remember and connect with.
That matters because audiences are no longer comparing brand moments only with other events. Their expectations are shaped by entertainment, immersive content and the fast rewards of everyday digital platforms. Netflix, TikTok, gaming, VR and immersive cinema all influence what people now expect from an experience.
Creative technology is invisible. That is still the best way I know to describe its role in experiences and events. When it works well, it helps people live the moment, not just receive a message. It helps them feel it, interact with it and become part of it.
For me, that is where the value begins. Creative technology is not the story. It should not dominate the room. It is a means to create storytelling and emotion. It helps us build emotional triggers that reinforce the memory of a message and make an experience stay with people.
Audience expectations have changed
People now benchmark experiences against the entertainment and content they consume every day. We are living in what I sometimes call a dopamine age, where stimulation comes quickly and attention is harder to hold. Clients are asking for immersion because they want longer attention spans, stronger engagement and better retention.
At the same time, audiences have become less responsive to passive communication. We have all been exposed to publicity, commercials, billboards and one-way messaging for years. Over time, people develop filters against that noise.
If a brand wants dialogue, it has to create the right context for that dialogue. Much of that now happens online, which means physical experiences and events have to work harder. They need to bring real added value. They need to feel compelling, relevant and worth remembering.
That has real consequences for brands and for events. And this is where creative technology becomes especially important. But the technology still needs to serve the message. It should not be the wow factor by itself. The real value comes from the emotion and meaning it helps convey.
Why personalisation matters more now
One of the biggest shifts is the personalisation of experience. Brands are no longer limited to broadcasting a single message. They can create a more direct dialogue and a more personalised form of communication with their audiences.
The key value of creative technology is that it helps create experiences that make people live the brand. When people live the brand, their identification with it becomes easier, faster and broader. The connection becomes more instinctive, and often more unconscious.
AI is part of that shift. It is already there behind the scenes, helping teams create content, structure information, encode systems and gamify experiences. On the audience-facing side, it becomes even more interesting, but also more complex. There is still risk involved, and there are limits to the control we have. That makes some AI-led experiences tricky today, but it also shows where things are heading.
If you combine CRM knowledge with a large language model that understands a brand’s tone of voice, positioning and guidelines, you can create a much more direct relationship between brand and audience.
That can be functional, like an energy company using AI and augmented reality to help someone find the correct fuse. Or it can be emotional and narrative-led, like allowing someone to explore the history of a brand through a dynamic conversation.
Imagine entering a brand experience where the story does not follow a fixed script. Instead, the experience adapts to who you are, what you ask, what you know and what you care about. AI can hold the conversation, while immersive media turns that conversation into space, sound, image and movement.
That ability to create content through conversation is a major shift in communication.
What this means for experiences and events
This is where AI and immersive technology come together most clearly. One allows for dynamic, responsive content. The other creates the environment in which people can feel it and experience it.
Event formats have often remained stable because they felt proven and safe. But the industry is being forced to change because audience expectations are growing. People expect more than passive brand messaging. They expect interaction, relevance and emotion.
That is why I keep coming back to the same idea: creative technology works best when it becomes invisible. Its power is not in showing the tool. Its power is in helping experiences become more immersive, more personal and more meaningful for the people inside them.
The future of creative technology in experiences and events is not about making technology louder. It is about using it with more intelligence, more restraint and more purpose.
How are you rethinking experiences and events as audience expectations continue to rise? Let’s talk.