The business will operate under the Jack Morton name and will span 20 offices with locations in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. Experiential services will include major conferences, digital engagement, sponsorship, brand activations, trade shows, corporate events and health care conventions, among offerings.

The move comes shortly after Omnicom’s sale of Jack Morton and allows the new joint agency to operate independently.

In a press release, Jared Pollacco, ceo of Impact XM, stated that “this union accelerates that vision for both our clients and our teams. The merger brings together Impact XM’s unified experiential approach and Jack Morton’s global scale and creative strength.”

Jack Morton ceo Craig Millon noted: “Together, we’re building an agency ready for a marketing landscape reshaped by AI—one that keeps real, human experience at the center.”

Read more about the acquisition here.

Image credit: iStock/NISIT RAWO

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Founded in London in 1983, with locations in Los Angeles and Montreal, 2Heads’ portfolio reaches across aerospace, technology, financial services and consumer brands. Spiro is a part of GES, founded in 1926, a leading global provider of experiential marketing services and exhibitions to brand marketers and event organizers.

In a press release, Pepe Parra, founder of 2Heads, thanked “all the 2Heads staff for their commitment and loyalty over the company’s long history in the experiential industry. Joining Spiro as part of the GES family of businesses will open up even more opportunities for the team to grow and expand their horizons, and I wish them all the very best on their future journey.”

Read more about the acquisition here.

Image credit: iStock/aelitta

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From planning to partnership to adaptability, we sat down with LEO Events who produced the globally broadcasted sporting event’s opening and closing ceremonies and first-tee experience, for best practices around executing large-scale event productions for the main stage in high-stakes environments.

A Big Show Requires Big Feels.

The Ryder Cup ceremonies had 5,000 fans in attendance in the stands with 25 cameras available to capture and broadcast the action. “It’s interesting to design for an in-person audience and a broadcast audience. There’s a huge gap between the stands and our stage. You’re trying to entertain a crowd two football fields away,” says Kent Underwood, principal at LEO Events.

The team designed a stage that attached to a large LED wall overlooking the 18^th green and first tee, which meant great views and action, but also meant working within physical, spatial, and aesthetic constraints. There’s pomp and circumstance, as the team puts it, and also a pattern of speeches that have to happen, and people that need to be heard from.

Among the week’s most powerful moments was a private team event featuring a 9/11 story, a firefighter performing the national anthem for President Trump (which was organized by LEO), and a deeply personal reflection shared with Team USA on the stage.

Instead of Contingencies, Create Parallel Plans.

Producing a show “inside the ropes” meant the team couldn’t physically access much of the area around them. In addition, noise schedules changed by the minute depending on who was teeing off nearby, so technical rehearsals had to be conducted using in-ear devices and off-site screens to avoid disrupting practice play. It was a completely different production experience than one that takes place in a conference ballroom. The team leaned on constant communication, flexible rehearsal plans, and creating parallel systems.

Make Your Team the Source of Truth.

A major rain threat forced the PGA to consider a radical option: moving the opening ceremony up an entire day. Cue the communications and planning among more than 20 vendors. “We had three rain plans, and not one of them was move it up a day early,” says Sara Orzech, senior producer at LEO Events.

During the 24-hour pivot, the main stage team became the command post, coordinating vendors and partners across LED, audio, staging, talent, military flyovers, paratroopers, PGA leadership—even presidential protocol—all while run-of-shows were changing by the minute. “We became that hub of information, they entrusted us to be the go-to and make certain decisions on their behalf because things were moving so fast,” she says.

Which brings us to the final insight: Events are golf—plan your shot, trust your team, and be ready when the wind changes. (We had to do it.)

Photos: Courtesy of LEO Events

Related:

• The Brief: Farmer’s Barkets and Hair Monsters
• Inside the ‘Once-in-a-lifetime’ Mercedes-Benz Masters Experience

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Promotions & Hires

George P. Johnson experience marketing agency announced the promotion of Fiona Bruder to global chief executive officer. Bruder takes the helm from Chris Meyer who after 12 years of leading GPJ, was recently appointed ceo of Project, GPJ’s parent company. Meyer will continue to support Bruder during the transition and will assume the role of GPJ’s strategic executive advisor.

ADVOC8, a leading agency known for its expertise in experiential marketing and strategic brand engagement, announced the hiring of industry veteran Stacey Thorp as its new head of production. Thorp’s prior experience includes leading strategic events for a major show organizer and overseeing the Conferences & Events team at Freeman.

Inspira has promoted Brooke Stein to chief client officer and Ralph Failla to vp of experiential and production. Stein, previously vp of client leadership, will focus on deepening client relationships, enhancing strategic operations and positioning the agency for sustained success in its next chapter. Failla, formerly senior account director, will oversee the agency’s experiential and production division.

DesignScene has appointed Adam Proto as its new production director. In his most recent position as global events and marketing lead at HP Industrial, Proto managed multimillion-dollar trade show budgets and led large-scale global events. Prish Bigger is the agency’s new senior producer. Previously at AVANTGARDE, Bigger played a key role in shaping high-profile brand partnerships.

Sparks has appointed Caroline Sparkes as director of international marketing. Her career includes leadership roles at ustwo, George P. Johnson, Critical Mass and Momentum, and most recently as consultant and co-founder of Outskirt Collective.

Acquisitions & Mergers

Stagwell (STGW) announced the acquisition of JetFuel, an experiential marketing services agency. JetFuel will become a subsidiary of Stagwell’s integrated experiential agency TEAM.

Opus Agency has acquired The Company We Keep (The CWK), an Asia-Pacific-based experiential marketing agency. With offices in Australia, Singapore and New Zealand, The CWK is enhancing Opus Agency’s ability to provide comprehensive solutions on a global scale.

Awards

LEO Events was recognized at the Rocky Top Business Awards in Knoxville, TN. The awards recognized the fastest growing University of Tennessee alumni-owned businesses based on compound annual growth rate for gross revenue in the years 2021-2023.

The post Q2: Event Industry People News, Moves and Deals appeared first on Event Marketer.

Here are three hot topics discussed by the panel, moderated by Anup Daji, svp-experience at Wasserman.

From left: Anup Daji, SVP-Experience at Wasserman; Brian Wright, CEO and Founder at Six Degrees; Brook Jay, CEO and Founder at All Terrain; Scott Connolly, EVP at Cramer

Seismic Shifts in the Industry

The panel reflected on the “chaos” in the marketplace that’s putting additional pressures on event marketers to over-deliver on the live event experience.

“Part of that is it’s the hybrid workforce that we’re all dealing with; we’re speaking with audiences that aren’t speaking with each other in person all the time,” says Scott Connolly, evp at Cramer. “When we get the opportunity to deliver to them, it’s what are we making of that opportunity? And the way we look at it, we’ve always talked trends within the marketplace and what we’re doing, and we’ve sort of changed that and we’re really now talking to our clients about patterns because patterns change consistently.”

Full-service Thinking

For Brook Jay, ceo and founder of All Terrain, clients today are more integrated in their organizations, and it’s requiring agencies to be more full-service than ever before.

“We used to be event producers and touring agents and field workers, so to speak, and now we are full stack: data capturers, influencer managers, creative leaders,” Jay said. “And I think that it’s given agencies an opportunity to evolve, not only at the table [with clients], to get to the table sooner with our clients, but also to evolve as an industry. We’ve had to move at the pace of the consumer, which is obviously very fast, and the pace of technology, so it’s given us this great opportunity to become more of an impact player than we may have been perceived earlier on in experiential.”

Brian Wright, ceo and founder of Six Degrees, agreed that services beyond experiential are gaining importance with clients: “We were really heavy 2018-19 when we first started on experiential, but we’ve since flexed our creative muscles with other services around social and creative.”

Micro-moments

And with a more integrated approach to experiential, some agency leaders are finding more value in micro-moments and investments, rather than big, splashy, one-off event campaigns.

“I’m always pro micro-moments, because I think that when you consistently show up and people keep on seeing it, they’ll gravitate a little bit more to it, and the conversation will last a little bit longer,” Wright says. “We talk about a steady drum beat. It’s not this big one-and-done. It’s show up in the community, but keep showing up. And keep showing up and listening and leaning in and bringing value to things.”

Added Daji: “There’s this old adage of do fewer, bigger, better, but the notion of micro-moments is going down this path of smaller, louder, just be consistent in the way you show up.”

For Connolly, extended engagement is critical in b-to-b today: “In the b-to-b space, everyone focuses on the event that’s at hand, but what are you doing to pull that content and that message through, whether it be with video, through different learnings; how are you looking at [the event experienced] with a much more macro lens?”

Year of Disruptions

Clients are more willing than ever to buck tradition—e.l.f.’s IndyCar sponsorship to reach a female race fan demographic or Ferrari’s first-ever virtual launch of a car being two examples, according to Wright.

“I think that brands are going to start doing things that are unexpected, and they’re going to take some risks. Being disruptive can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different industries, but the most important thing is that they are doing it for the right reasons,” he said.

And therein lies an opportunity for agencies to embrace the chaos and lead clients through it. “It’s the ability to be nimble, right?” said Connolly. “I think you have to expect the unexpected. I think in the live event space, chaos reigns, and you have to be able to manage that chaos and then deliver on that chaos. I think a lot of brands out there want to try to push the envelope.”

More: Coverage from the Experiential Marketing Summit 2025

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