Somebody had to decide when to slow the robots down.
That call came up many times a day at the Tostitos Fiesta Zone, the multi-day activation PepsiCo ran on Pier 39 when San Francisco hosted Super Bowl LX. A roaming chip-cooler robot is a delight to a six-year-old and an obstacle to a camera operator, and on a busy afternoon both of them are standing a few feet from it. Which families to wave forward, and when to let the robots roam free: by the end of the week I was convinced those calls were what PepsiCo actually bought. The branded structure was the part you could photograph.
The guides that rank for planning a brand activation agree with each other almost line for line. Set a measurable goal. Know your audience. Pick a high-traffic location, design a space people want to photograph, make it interactive, push it on social, and measure what happened. I’d sign every one of those steps! Not one of them plans for the person in the branded jacket at 2 p.m. on a Saturday, holding a radio, deciding who gets the next ten seconds. That person is where an activation works or quietly doesn’t, so I plan for them as hard as I plan the build.
Write One Goal per Audience
Every guide says to pick a goal. I pick one per audience, and a public site always has more audiences than the brief admits.
The Fiesta Zone had tourists, NFL ticketholders walking between events, San Francisco locals on their own pier, press crews, and executives who had flown in to walk the brand experiences. On show days we boiled that down to a ten-second impression for each group we were designing for. Families got a photo moment with a robot. Locals got a clean branded space that didn’t feel like a corporate intrusion on their pier. The executives needed to see a disciplined operation with measurable engagement, photogenic crowds and zero visible friction, and the press crews mostly needed a clean shot and somebody to walk them in.
Write those down before anybody opens a design file. A space built for one audience tends to annoy the others, and the locals are the ones who will still be there after you leave.
Read the Site Like a Sidewalk
I learned foot traffic behind the counter of two sunglasses shops in San Francisco, where people walk in or walk past and you know which by lunch. The question I carried from the storefront into every booth since is simple. What does a stranger see in their first three steps, and does any of it give them a reason to stop?
At RSA Conference, with Arxan’s booth wedged between Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike, we had about 0.6 seconds, so the booth had to read clean from 30 feet. A pier is kinder. Nobody is pointing a badge scanner at anyone, people are strolling with nowhere to be, and your real competition is the bay. The location guides tell you to choose high traffic. On a pier you don’t get to choose much, so the work is finding where people already slow down and putting the moment there.
Walk the Dock Before the Concept Deck
My first walkthrough of any site starts at the loading dock, and an activation is no different. Build week at Pier 39 turned up a dock constraint nobody had flagged in the site survey, plus a damaged panel whose replacement was in a truck somewhere on I-80. Then the permit office wanted a revision before it would sign off on the Saturday programming.
None of those were creative problems, and any one of them could have killed a creative idea. I’d put the dock dimensions and the permit calendar in front of the concept team on day one, because a gorgeous structure that can’t get through the gate is a rendering. Each of those build-week problems got solved by one specific person in about 90 minutes, and I’ve written about who those people were in how I manage event vendors.
Agree on the Floor Calls Before Doors Open
This is the section I’d fight for in a kickoff meeting, and it’s the one I’ve never seen in a brand activation guide.
Before show days, I want the floor team holding a short list of judgment calls with the answers already agreed. Who is allowed to pause a robot. Who walks a press crew in, and from which gate. What happens when the photo line gets long enough to block the walkway the locals use. Whether an executive’s tour can cut that line, and how it does that without a single family noticing. Every call gets a first name next to it, the same way every piece of equipment does in my run of show.
When I brief a booth team for a trade show, I spend my time on the twenty seconds after the badge scan, because that is where the follow-up lives or dies. A consumer activation has its own version of that moment, and it comes earlier, before anything is scanned or posted: a staffer notices a family hanging back at the edge of the crowd and either waves them in or doesn’t. You can’t script that wave. You can hire people who will make it, tell them plainly that it’s their job, and then trust them, since by the time the question reaches you over the radio the kid has already wandered off toward the railing.
Calm helps here more than cleverness. My whole philosophy on that fits in one story, The Target Run, and it applies on a pier exactly as it did in a breakout room.
Log the Calls, Then Measure
The measurement steps in the guides are fine. Count foot traffic, and survey people if you can catch them on the way out. I’d add one page none of them mention, which is a running log of the floor calls themselves: which ones came up, how often, and which answers we would change. That page goes straight into the post-mortem, next to the near misses, and it’s the most useful thing I can hand whoever runs the next activation on that site.
The Hand-Back
The activation is over six hours after the last family leaves, when the pier has been photographed clean for hand-back and belongs to the people who actually use it again.
The Takeaway
Do everything the brand activation guides tell you, starting with the goal. Then write one goal per audience, walk the dock before anyone sketches, and give the floor team its judgment calls in writing, with a name next to each. The structure gets the photo. The people in the jackets decide what the photo is of.
If your team has an activation coming up in somebody else’s public space, let’s talk! I’ll want to know who’s allowed to pause the robot before I ask what color the structure is.