This week’s Friday Forum featured alums Zak Vono (Experience Design, 2019) and Melissa Poe (Experience Design, 2020) who work for On Board Experiential (OBE)—an experience-led agency with offices in London, LA, San Francisco, and NYC.
OBE specializes in creating immersive brand experiences across a range of industries. Vono and Poe shared case studies showcasing the agency’s breadth of work, including Infatuation’s multi-city food festival, Sephora’s annual global beauty event (designed in both physical and virtual formats by OBE), and the J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge, the world’s largest corporate running event.
Poe joked that early in her career she regarded experiential marketing as falling into one of two categories: Instagram bait or big, public stunts. However, in her time at OBE she has learned that the industry is much broader with specialized and hybrid career paths that value creative thinking, problem solving and collaborative skills.
Vono and Poe gave an inside look at OBE’s workplace culture, praising the agency’s employee longevity and strong work-life balance. They also gave students a peek into OBE’s approach to client work with an overview of the strategic, creative, and production processes. As Brandcenter alumni, they highlighted how different concentrations align with careers in the experiential marketing landscape. They also emphasized how skills honed at Brandcenter—such as creative problem-solving, cross-disciplinary collaboration, adaptability, and storytelling—are invaluable in their industry.
A key takeaway from Vono was the importance of structuring KPIs into a project’s goals and using data to tell compelling stories. When presenting results of a campaign to clients, his goal is to have the client picturing and planning the next year’s event, making them an engaged partner (and securing future business.)
The duo shared other nuggets of advice on topics in workplace culture like networking and burnout. Vono stressed the need to give your colleagues public gratitude and acknowledgement— “Give shine to each other.” And burnout? “Don’t work for an agency that does that,” Vono stated. He advised asking the right questions in interviews to find out about workplace culture, setting boundaries to protect your work-life balance, and knowing your own signs of pre-burnout so you can advocate for your needs.
Vono and Poe also touched on how a passion for creativity can meet the production process. When discussing the challenge of bridging imagination and execution, Vono acknowledged the challenge as an “enduring friction point” across industries, including advertising. Big ideas inevitably meet real-world constraints—budgets, client opinions, and engineering limitations—but that shouldn’t deter creativity. A creative’s role is always to bring amazing ideas to the table. “Don’t make something mediocre just because you know it’s possible,” he advised. Poe reinforced this mindset and love for creative thinking, stressing the importance of strong relationships with production teams and always asking, “How can we make it cool, still matter, and still work?” when facing roadblocks.
Brandcenter thanks Vono, Poe, and OBE for the insightful presentation and Q+A!