Chapter #1

Everywhere, all at once

The most ambitious work in this year’s Eventex Awards does not stay in one place. Winning teams are designing experiences that live in many cities at once. They are also extending anniversaries into year-long platforms. The result is a new shape for live experience — one where the event meets the audience wherever they already are.

Per-tier prevalence of work that spans multiple cities or extended calendars

The numbers show how strongly this idea is shaping the top of the field:

41.2% of Platinum events built work that lives across multiple places or extends across the calendar.

Only 8.0% of non-winners did.

Platinum events were 5× more likely to feature this approach.

The trend holds across every tier, dropping cleanly through Gold (22.3%), Silver (14.2%), and Bronze (8.9%). At Platinum, this approach is no longer the exception — it is close to the rule.

Lessons from Eventex Awards 2026

A single live moment can carry more weight when it is designed as several connected moments in different places.

Anniversaries reward brands that treat them as platforms, not parties.

Geographic scale only works when one clear, creative idea holds every location together.

Real-world participation in many cities builds reach that paid media alone cannot match.

Eventex Awards case studies

Some of the most memorable work this year was built on a simple creative decision: instead of asking the audience to come to the event, bring the event to the audience — in several places at the same time. Another approach to this theme was to treat milestones as a starting, not a finish line, extending celebrations through both space and time.

Ceremony

Redefining the concept of Olympic ceremonies

The Milano Cortina 2026 Opening Ceremony reshaped what an Olympic opening can be. Instead of one stadium, the ceremony unfolded at the same time in Milano, Cortina, Livigno, and Predazzo, joined into one live story — the first Widespread Ceremony in Olympic history. Four cities, one narrative, one shared moment.

ARMONIA — Olympic Opening Ceremony — Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games by Balich Wonder Studio S.p.a

Grand Prix Event, Platinum in Ceremony, Gold in Celebration Event

The “Up Italy” narrative travelled through Italian culture, art, urban life, and the mountains, with each location adding its own voice to a single score. The dual-cauldron logic — two Olympic cauldrons lit at the same time, one urban and one alpine — gave the audience a clear symbol of that connection.

The ceremony was watched by 2.5 billion viewers worldwide. In a sample of 14 countries studied by the IOC’s Insight and Analytics team, 70% of international respondents called it the most memorable Winter Olympics ceremony ever held, 90% said they thoroughly enjoyed it, and 87% said it directly inspired them to follow the Games that followed.

Armonia means bringing together what is different, and the ceremony used that meaning as its working principle, turning a country into a single connected stage.

Michael Mueller

Head of Brand Activation & Digital Services, Samsung, and an Eventex Awards jury president

The orchestration of five locations in real time demonstrates a new benchmark in complexity and creative leadership

Into space

An interstellar journey

To mark the 2025 Johann Strauss anniversary, WienTourismus, Stargate Group, and Jung von Matt DONAU built a platform around a single surprising fact: The Blue Danube Waltz — long known as the unofficial “anthem of space” — was never actually transmitted into space. The 1977 Voyager Golden Records left it off. So, in cooperation with the European Space Agency, the team set out to correct that omission live.

WALTZ INTO SPACE by Stargate Group Werbeagentur and Jung von Matt DONAU

Grand Prix Campaign, Platinum in Concert. Platinum in Cultural Event, Platinum in Brand Experience – Not-for-profit/Government, Platinum in Event Storytelling, Gold in Live Show + Gold in Brand Experience – Travel & Leisure, Gold in Kick-A Experience, Gold in Local Solution Event, Gold in Integrated Marketing Campaign

The Vienna Symphony Orchestra performed The Blue Danube Waltz live at the MAK museum while ESA’s Deep Space Antenna 2 in Cebreros, Spain, simultaneously transmitted the signal at the speed of light toward Voyager 1. A public microsite let anyone in the world claim one of the 13,743 notes of the original score and send their name into space alongside the music.

The campaign generated 6,500+ media reports worldwide, 13 billion impressions, and a 19.3% engagement rate on Meta. All 13,743 SpaceNotes were claimed within weeks by participants from 92 countries. Over 100,000 people followed the live broadcast, with 4,000 attending public screenings across multiple cities.

A nearly 200-year-old waltz, an interstellar transmission, and 92 countries of participants — proof that an anniversary becomes a platform when the idea is large enough to travel across space and time.

David Bloch

Executive Creative Director & Producer, David Bloch International, and an Eventex Awards jury membe

So... let me start by saying that of all the submissions I had the pleasure and privilege of adjudicating, this one was the only one which actually gave me physical 'goose bumps' [...]. Correcting an historical mistake indeed! I hope I may even be alive to one day see aliens waltz to the Blue Danube ;-)

Iconic birthday

Turning a birthday into a global movement

To mark its 100th anniversary, Corona refused to throw a party and built a platform instead: The Beach 100, a year-long global celebration of the world’s most iconic beaches that ran across continents before culminating on Copacabana.

Corona: Beach 100 by WINK Creative Experiential Agency

Platinum in Use of Outdoor Space, Platinum in Brand Activation, Gold across 10 further categories (including Roadshow, Public Event, Outdoor Event, Latin American Event, Integrated Marketing Campaign, Cross-channel Storytelling, Celebration Event, Sponsorship Experience, Brand Experience – Alcoholic Beverages, and Website — plus Silver and Bronze recognitions)

An expert-curated guide to the 100 best beaches — chosen by surfers, oceanographers, and environmental advocates — anchored the platform, while a monumental sand artwork listing all 100, engraved on a remote shoreline and left for the tide to erase, gave it a single haunting image. The platform even extended into sport, through the World Surf League Finals in Fiji, itself a Beach 100 destination.

The Copacabana finale drew more than two million people for a shared sunset ritual and live performances — one of the largest beach celebrations ever staged. Across the platform: 527.9 million social impressions, 105.2 million PR impressions, 73.3 million video views, and $2.8 million in earned social value, with the Beach 100 Grant Initiative funding beach conservation alongside Oceanic Global.

An anniversary becomes a platform when the idea is bigger than the brand — Corona spent its centenary pointing at the beach, not at itself.

Trish Rexroth

Chief Creative Officer, OBE, and an Eventex Awards jury member

Corona did not organize a brand anniversary event; it launched a global outdoor movement, and the distinction matters. A platform that makes culture rather than chases it.

Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit 2025: Making Edge AI Real

Silver in Tech Event, Silver in Summit, Silver in Brand Experience – Technology

Qualcomm built a year-long experiential strategy across SXSW, COMPUTEX Taipei, and Snapdragon Summit, with each stop progressively raising the stakes for on-device AI. At Summit, an AI agent planned and executed Qualcomm's 40th anniversary party live on stage — polling audience preferences, coordinating vendors, generating personalized labels — in front of 850 attendees, with no safety net.

Coca-Cola Reborn Zone

Bronze in Sampling Experience

Coca-Cola turned Poland's new Deposit Return System rollout into a touring sustainability platform built around a real recycling machine, a sampling moment, and a printed receipt that connected to the Coke App for tokens and rewards. The Reborn Zone travelled to 20+ events across 2025 — reaching 150,000 consumers and processing more than 10,000 returned bottles and cans on-site.

PWM w Ruchu – A Music Filled Train

Gold in Public Event, Gold in Integrated Marketing Campaign, Gold in Cultural Event, Gold in Entertainment Event, Gold in Art Event

Instead of an anniversary gala in a concert hall, Poland's PWM Edition turned a long-distance train into the country's first mobile music festival. For nine hours along the Kraków–Warsaw–Gdańsk line, six carriages named after composers hosted concerts, a live Polish Radio broadcast, workshops, and a chef's tasting menu — and at five station stops, open-air platform concerts turned places of haste into moments of pause. The campaign reached over 16.5 million contacts across 332 publications, with zero negative coverage.

VIKINGS: The Immersive Experience

Gold in Use of Audiovisual, Gold in Set Design, Silver in Immersive Experience

Where the rest of this chapter travels across cities, VIKINGS travels across time — one continuous story following a young woman's rise to Viking queen through a 700 m² walk-through Norse forest, a six-meter Yggdrasil tree, 360° projection mapping, and VR. Bone-conduction headphones carry an intimate narration while wind, fire, and chant fill the room, collapsing a thousand-year-old legend into a present-tense journey. The Hamburg opening reached nearly 2 million, with a global tour through London and Vienna to follow.

Beyond the event

Other standout work

Four more brands built distributed experiences that deserve a special mention.

Spotlight

Out of This World Excellence

Three of the year’s winners that reached — literally or imaginatively — for the stars.

Different brands, different scales, one shared instinct: in this industry, ambition has no ceiling.

A waltz, into actual space.
WALTZ INTO SPACE — the experience profiled in Everywhere, All at Once — didn’t theme a room around the cosmos. With the European Space Agency, it transmitted The Blue Danube toward Voyager 1, correcting a 48-year-old omission from the 1977 Voyager Golden Records.

A boardroom in orbit.
Panattoni Gala&Party 2025 by 10Team – “Space Has No Boundaries” (Gold in B2B Event) staged its 20th-anniversary gala inside a recreation of the ISS Cupola module — spherical LED screens, Poland’s first indoor drone show forming the “20,” and a CEO who took the stage in a full astronaut suit, a metaphor for a startup grown into a global player.

The industry’s own launchpad.
IAC 2025 Sydney by MCI Australia (Gold in Association Meeting) turned the 76th International Astronautical Congress into a national movement: 7,615 delegates from 99 countries — and the largest Public Day in IAC history, with 18,000+ visitors, a four-storey LEGO rocket, and 17 astronauts climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Three very different events, one shared instinct: when the concept is big enough, the universe becomes the venue.