Building communal connection and shared emotion is one of the most powerful things a marketer can deliver – and it’s what Uno Loco does best, says Uno Loco Group CEO Blair Glubb.
Most of my career has been spent working inside corporates as a chief marketing officer, so I know more than I care to remember about measurement.
I know that getting your next role means hitting targets and proving marketing’s value to a CEO and Board. Which is why we spend so much time focussed on performance metrics. But often that comes at the expense of long term brand building. And in today’s digital and AI-driven world, it also means that marketers miss one of the things that’s hardest to put in a dashboard: how people feel about their brand.
Why does this matter? AI has made content production fast and cheap. It churns out copy, creative, emails and social posts, personalised, and at scale. But the consequence is that everyone’s doing it. This work has become commoditised and ubiquitous, its cut-through is dropping, along with ROI.
One thing AI will never replicate is a room full of people having an emotional reaction to something at the same time. Feeling happy. Sad. Proud. Intrigued. Excited. Engaged. Building communal connection and shared emotion is one of the most powerful things a marketer can deliver. This is something we see every week in our work at Uno Loco.
The question you should ask: why do feelings matter for you as a marketer?
- Events build trust. Digital increasingly struggles to do this. A recent global Cvent study found 96% of event marketers are confident their current activity is building trust with their audience, and 81% said trust in their brand measurably increased after someone attended an in-person event.
- Live experience can’t be automated. Value moves up a ladder: commodities, goods, services, then experiences. Experience is where your business can still create real, differentiated value. Better still, you can measure it and feel it.
- People need to connect (and have fewer places to do it). There are fewer places than ever for humans to connect in real life. Roughly one in six people worldwide report real loneliness. That’s why a well run event or experience delivers strong ROI – especially as AI erodes trust elsewhere. That’s why 91% of marketers expect events to become even more central to strategy as a result.
- Real-life connections grow your sales. The personal element is critical to sales success, particularly in a B2B context where trust and relationship are key.
Two examples from our own work show what this looks like in practice.
Bayleys Annual Conference and Awards
We’ve spent over 10 years running Bayleys’ National Conference and Awards.
The challenge every year is to deliver something genuinely impactful for a demanding audience with a relentless focus on performance and delivery.
Bayleys are also famous for knowing how to recognise and celebrate success. The brief for 2025’s “Accelerate” was momentum: 1200 guests, 155 metres of LED, an opening built entirely around sound and light. The feeling landed. Bayleys’ chairman called the experience “inspiring,” which is why we’ve worked with them for a decade.
NZTE International Business Awards
NZTE’s Business Awards have one job: make exporters seen on the world stage.
For this project we built the whole event around a single line, “a win for you is a win for us all”, something that resonated with over 500 guests in the room and many more watching live around the globe. We delivered a feeling of recognition, celebration, and community – for a global business audience.
There are so many examples we can share of how businesses are getting real commercial value from events – by treating emotional impact – feelings – as a specific deliverable, not a by-product.
So the practical question for your business: what specific feeling is your next campaign or event designed to produce, and how will you know if it landed?
