Activations in traditional marketing speak have always gone over my head.
This past week I got an immersive one, twice. Thank you to Citi and Mastercard for New York Fashion Week at The Shed, and to Equifax at the US Open. Christian Siriano opened his ateliers and staged a show. Michael and Bryan Voltaggio cooked. At the US Open, the grounds were full of lounges, bars, games, and giveaways from banks, hotels, car companies, and wellness brands, and people queued for all of them.
I had an incredible time at both. So I got curious about 2 things.
The second one is easy to answer. Look at the money. Companies spent $138.94 billion on brand experiences worldwide last year, up 8.3%. American companies spent $64.43 billion of that, close to half the world’s money in a country with about 4% of the world’s population. PQ Media expects another 10.3% this year.
The first question took me longer, and I got the answer from something I noticed at dinner. Andrew and I were there as guests. Everyone else had bought a ticket, starting at $100.
Your customer now buys admission to your marketing.
Then they outspend everyone who stayed home.
Customers who use the dining program spend 3.7x what everyone else spends.
The same deck carries the rest of the story. Strata new accounts grew 38% in 2025. Spend per account grew about 14% against 2022. The lifetime value Citi books on each new account grew about 20%. And 98% of customers keep the account.
| Dining | 95% | |
| Shopping | 70% | |
| Travel | 32% | |
| Rewards | 6% |
The newest program of the four grew the fastest, and it is the one built around a table.
Cardmembers buy Curated Table tickets from $100, on top of the $595 they already pay each year for the card.
Look at who is buying. Citi grew its share of new accounts from Millennials and Gen Z by 4%, and its share of new accounts earning over $150,000 by 6%. That is the aspirational customer, and aspirational customers spend on going out. Bank of America sees the same thing in its own card data. Gen Z spent nearly 7% more at restaurants this July than last, about double what Millennials did, and they were the only generation spending more at every kind of restaurant.
Higher-income households outspend lower-income households by about 14 points on airlines and about 8 on hotels, the two widest gaps Bank of America measured. People with money spend it on going places.
| Get me into events and experiences | 77% | |
| One bank for everything | 77% | |
| Premium benefits over a low fee | 41% | |
| Rewards spent on travel | 35% |
Our customers buy tickets to concerts, dinners, and trips all year. What would they buy a ticket to from us?
My Tuesday came courtesy of Equifax at the US Open, and that is the other half of this market. It is the half growing faster.
| Built for business customers | $41.74B | |
| Built for consumers | $97.24B |
A day like that buys time. A senior buyer gives the host most of a day by choice, in a good mood. Sales teams learn more in those hours than in a year of email, and the next conversation starts warm.
Plenty of brands reached the same conclusion. 31 sponsored the tournament this year. Last year, 21 did.
Our best client relationships took years to build. Which of next year’s relationships could start with a single day together?
| Brand and setting | What they built | The result | What a bank can build |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spotify Wrapped | A customer’s own year turned into something worth posting, extended into around 50 installations and pop-ups across more than 30 markets | 200 million engaged users in the first 24 hours, over 500 million shares | Give the customer their year back in a form they want to show people |
| Gap, Coachella | Hoodie House, where guests customized a $100 hoodie with patches, beads and charms | Over 1 million content views, about 35% above target, search interest up around 5,000% | Let guests make the thing they take home, then let them wear it |
| Grey Goose, US Open | A single signature cocktail, served the same way each year since 2007, inside a 20 year partnership | 738,459 servings at $23, close to $17 million, up 32% | Own a ritual guests come back for, and let it earn revenue on the day |
| IHG, US Open | A free premium coach home after late matches, with pizza, charging and match replays on board | Free rides to 2 central Manhattan hotels through the first rounds | Fix the moment in the customer’s day that actually hurts |
| Always and Secret, Coachella | Clean, well staffed facilities on the festival grounds, built from the brands’ own research | Answered the need 57% of women named a top priority | Start from your own customer research, then build the fix people feel |
Our customers already trust us with their money. What would we hand them back at the end of the year that they would actually want to post?
I intend to put this block in every edition. Intellectual honesty means I argue the other side of my own case as hard as I can, so you can make a fair assessment of what works best for your own products.
1. The reach is tiny. A dinner seats a few hundred. A campaign reaches millions. Judge an activation on depth per guest, then compare that to what the same money buys you in media.
2. The best number in this edition is a correlation. Citi’s 3.7x compares people who enrolled against everybody else, and high spenders enroll in things. A matched test would tell you how much of that 3.7x the program itself created.
3. Your product has to suit the format. An evening works when the product is discretionary, emotional, and social. A checking account bought on rate gets very little from a runway show, and the money does more in a rate table.
My honest answer. A paid experience works for customers who already have money and already go out. That is the upper slope of the K-shaped economy. Applying it to the lower slope would take real changes. Aspiration exists down there too, and the constraints are much heavier.
Citi sells Curated Table tickets from $100. A Manhattan hotel started ballroom tennis at $1,500 this summer. Grey Goose sold 738,459 cocktails at $23. Each of those does two jobs at once: it funds production and fills seats with people who chose to be there and stay loyal afterward. I keep thinking about how Bezos would look at this cost and work out how to turn it into revenue.
Watch for the first issuer to describe event revenue in an earnings call as income rather than expense.
Citi published 3.7x. Nobody yet knows how much of that the dining program created and how much came from the kind of customer who joins a dining program. One test settles it. Take the people who came, take a similar group who stayed home, and compare what each group spends over the next 12 months. Banks already own both sides of that data.
Watch for the first bank to publish that comparison. Whoever goes first sets the number everybody else gets measured against.
Issuers spent 5 years buying the places people book a table.
Watch for the first issuer to sell tickets to its own event on a platform it already owns.
Put on your own event, charge for the seat, then count what those guests spend with you over the next year.
Companies put $138.94 billion into brand experiences last year, chasing customers who already moved on. Citi built an evening, sold tickets from $100, and filled it. 77% of Gen Z want their bank to do exactly that. The audience bought the ad, and that changes what marketing is for.
