Your guide to the biggest experiential marketing agencies in the world
EXPERIENTIAL AGENCIES
2026
The agencies behind the world’s biggest brand experiences
Who are the Biggest Experiential Marketing
& Brand Activation Agencies in the World?
Planning a brand activation and wondering who the big players are? Benchmarking your own agency? Or hunting for a job in experiential marketing? Here is my guide to the biggest experiential marketing and activation agencies in the world — who owns them, how big they really are, and the work they are known for.
And what a year to write it. The industry has been reshaped since late 2025: the Omnicom–IPG merger closed in November 2025 and immediately rearranged who owns whom.
Jack Morton — an experiential name since 1939 — exited Omnicom in January 2026 and merged with Impact XM under private-equity backing. INVNT was acquired by Nth Degree in April 2026. Private equity is consolidating the sector fast, so any list written in 2024 is already wrong.
The scale at the top is remarkable: the biggest player runs 90+ locations and produces thousands of expositions a year, while Seoul’s Cheil Worldwide puts 8,000-plus people behind experiential and retail work across 46 countries.
Where do I fit in this picture? Oddtoe is an experiential design and generative-AI animation studio based in Melbourne, creating projection, installation, and animated work for events, venues, and galleries. Agencies of the size below don’t need a rival — they need specialist studios for experiential content: projection, installation, and AI animation. That is the vantage point this list is written from.
So here are my picks for the biggest experiential marketing & activation agencies in the world. »
My Top 4
Who are the Biggest Experiential Agencies in the World?
Biggest Overall
Dallas, U.S.A.
Biggest Pure Specialist
New York, U.S.A.
Best for Tech Launches
Auburn Hills, U.S.A.
Best Culture-Led
London, England
Freeman has 7,000+ people across 90+ locations.
If “biggest” is the question, Freeman is the answer. Advertising Age has recognised it as the world’s largest brand experience company: more than 7,000 people across 90+ locations, producing over 4,300 expositions a year plus thousands of other events. It has stayed family-owned since 1927, which in a year of private-equity consolidation makes it the industry’s stable centre of gravity. Freeman is the infrastructure under America’s biggest trade shows — think HIMSS, the giant global health conference — and in 2023 it bought award-magnet agency Sparks (below), adding a creative edge to all that muscle. If your brand experience needs a small city built by Tuesday, this is who builds it.
Jack Morton fields 1,000+ people across 20 offices.
The biggest pure experiential specialist on this list — and the biggest story of 2026. Jack Morton has been making brand experiences since 1939 (it produced the Athens 2004 Olympic opening ceremony, the first outside producer in Olympic history). After the Omnicom–IPG merger closed, Omnicom let it go; in early 2026 it merged with Impact XM under The Riverside Company, creating a 20-office, 1,000-plus-person network that is once again independent of the holding companies. Recent work includes Amazon at CES 2026. And a note for Australian readers: the office list includes Sydney and Melbourne — the biggest specialist in the world has people in my home town.
George P. Johnson runs 30 offices on six continents.
GPJ started in 1914 as a Detroit flag maker and grew into the definitive tech-launch and B2B flagship-event agency: AMD’s CES keynote, and long-standing programmes for IBM, Cisco, Salesforce and Mercedes-Benz. It runs 30 offices on six continents — Sydney included — and sits inside Project Worldwide, an employee-owned agency network, so the century-old shop dodged the 2025–26 holding-company shake-up entirely. If you are launching enterprise technology and the room has to be full of the right ten thousand people, GPJ has probably already built that room somewhere on Earth this month.
Momentum Worldwide is Experiential Agency of the Year three years running.
The strongest awards case in the business: Campaign US named Momentum Experiential Agency of the Year in 2024, 2025 and 2026 — a three-peat, the third confirmed in March 2026. Formerly IPG’s experiential flagship, it now carries that flag inside Omnicom after the merger. The work runs from big consumer culture plays like the Sprite x Wakanda activation to a dedicated B2B practice it calls “Business2Human”, out of offices from New York and London to Tokyo and Sydney. If you want holding-company reach with the trophy shelf to match, this is the pick.
Sparks (est. 1919) is Adweek’s 2024 Experiential Agency of the Year.
Sparks is what happens when a century-old Philadelphia shop (est. 1919) becomes the creative tip of the world’s largest brand experience company — Freeman acquired it in August 2023, and the client roster barely blinked. Adweek named it 2024 Experiential Agency of the Year, and the 2026 slate shows why: Salesforce Beach at Cannes Lions, Google Cloud Next, and work on Netflix House. Around 750 people joined Freeman with the acquisition. For premium tech-brand environments — the kind where the espresso bar is on-message — Sparks is the name that keeps coming up.
Imagination runs 13 studios worldwide.
London’s grand independent. Imagination has been designing experiences since 1968 — before “experiential marketing” had a name — and still answers to nobody but itself, with 13 studios worldwide including Los Angeles. It is known for decades of global experience programmes for Ford, plus work for Major League Baseball and Jaguar Land Rover. In a sector now dominated by holding companies and private equity, a 57-year-old independent with this footprint is a genuine rarity — and for brands that want experience design with a capital-D design culture, it remains the benchmark European choice.
Amplify is Campaign’s Brand Experience Agency of the Decade.
Campaign didn’t just give Amplify agency of the year — it named it Brand Experience Agency of the Decade. Founded in London in 2008 by Jonathan Emmins, it now runs offices in Paris, Los Angeles, New York and Sydney, and in April 2025 sold a majority stake to Anthony Freedman’s Common Interest group. The work is culture-first: Nike Air Max Day, Netflix’s La Casa de Papel campaign, Samsung’s “Space to Dream”. It is also B Corp certified. If the brief says “make us matter in popular culture” rather than “fill a convention centre”, this is my pick.
Cheil Worldwide has 8,000+ people in 55 offices across 46 countries.
The giant of the East. Seoul-based Cheil puts 8,000-plus people in 55 offices across 46 countries, and much of that machine exists to build Samsung’s retail, launch and experiential presence around the planet — every flagship store and product-launch experience feeding one of the most demanding brand programmes anywhere. Cheil is publicly listed, ranks among the world’s largest agency networks, and its retail and experiential practice has been one of its growth engines through 2024–25. On raw experiential headcount and geographic reach, only Freeman keeps it company on this list.
Opus Agency fields 450+ people from hubs on three continents.
If you have been to a big cloud-software event, you have probably walked through Opus’s work: the Salesforce World Tour multi-city series, the AWS Summit ASEAN events in Singapore, Bangkok and Jakarta, and NetApp INSIGHT in Las Vegas. Founded in 1993 and headquartered near Portland, Oregon, the agency runs 450-plus people with hubs in EMEA and APAC, inside The Opus Group under private-equity owner Growth Catalyst Partners. It has been buying its way across the Pacific too, acquiring APAC event shop The Company We Keep. The specialty: repeatable, global, tech-flagship event programmes at serious scale.
NVE produces 150+ events a year with 200+ people.
The Hollywood one. Brett Hyman founded NVE in 2005, took no outside investment, and built a 200-plus-person agency producing more than 150 events a year from Los Angeles, New York and London. Its roots are entertainment-industry premieres and culturally-tuned launches, and the client work spans Amazon, Apple, PlayStation and Hennessy. Event Marketer put it on the 2025 It List of the top event agencies. Among giants owned by holding companies and private equity, NVE is proof a founder-owned independent can still sit at the big table — the trade-off is focus: cultural moments, not convention centres.
INVNT has 11 offices across four continents.
The live-brand-storytelling agency — and 2026’s other big consolidation story. In April 2026 INVNT was acquired by Nth Degree, the Shamrock Capital-backed events group, with co-founder Kristina McCoobery leading the combined events agency and the INVNT name staying on the corporate-events work. It brings 11 offices across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, and — relevant from where I sit — one of the stronger Australian and APAC footprints of any agency on this list. Watch this one: the private-equity consolidation it is part of is redrawing the sector’s whole map.
DRPG has 300+ people and has been founder-led since 1980.
The quiet achiever. Dale Parmenter started DRPG as a one-man operation in 1980 and still runs it today — now 300-plus people across the UK plus offices in the U.S. and Germany, delivering integrated events, film and communications for Tesco, BT, GSK and Nationwide. It is B Corp certified and has a particular strength the flashier shops overlook: large-scale employee experiences — the town halls, launches and internal events where big organisations actually talk to their own people. Forty-six years founder-led, no holding company, no private equity. There’s something to respect in that.
What Other Experiential Agencies Are Worth Mentioning?
This sector is consolidating so fast that some famous names now live inside other companies — Impact XM is part of Jack Morton, Giant Spoon sits inside Wpromote, and sports-experiential powerhouse Octagon works within Omnicom. Am I missing an agency you rate? Contact me and make the case — I’ll keep this list current through 2026 and 2027.
And if you are planning an activation of your own — whatever its size — start with my guide to brand activation ideas, or see how experiential marketing works when a specialist studio builds the projection, installation and animated content. Animators looking for representation should head to my list of the best animation agents.
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