Chapter #5

Play your way through

The most memorable experiences of 2026 share a quiet shift. Instead of asking audiences to watch, winning brands give them something to do. Visits become quests. Performances become shared canvases. Corporate meetings become missions worth completing. The result is a deeper kind of participation — one where the audience helps build the moment they came to enjoy.

Per-tier prevalence of play-as-format across Eventex Awards 2026 entries

This year’s data shows the pattern clearly

35.3% of Platinum events built play-as-format into their structure.

Only 2.5% of non-winners did.

Platinum events were 14× more likely to feature this approach — the steepest jump from non-winners to top-tier in the entire report.

Platinum stands well above Gold (8.5%), Silver (7.1%), and Bronze (5.3%). The higher the tier, the more often the audience helps shape the show.

Lessons from Eventex Awards 2026

Game mechanics work at any scale — from a single building façade to an 18,000-person sales meeting.

Personalization and play go together: the best quests adapt to the player, not the other way around.

Live audience input becomes the show when the interface is simple enough for anyone to use.

Measurable behavior change — not just engagement — is the real proof that play-as-format succeeds.

Eventex Awards case studies

Some events turn the attendee experience into a quest, where every moment carries a small sense of progress. The audience doesn’t just attend — they advance. And some experiences put the audience directly in charge of the show, resulting in a shared canvas.

Unique journey

A sales meeting built as a game

Cisco’s annual global sales meeting brought together 18,000 sellers from across the world. Rather than treating it as a series of keynotes, the team structured the event as a personal learning journey for every attendee. The centerpiece was Quest — a mobile app game that challenged sellers to complete eight role-specific missions, earn AR crowns, and unlock exclusive rewards.

Cisco GSX FY26: Unleash the Power of One Cisco by Cisco, GPJ, Jaguar Design, Sans Serif, Tencue

Gold in Corporate Event

The quest layer sat inside a larger ecosystem: global keynotes were paired with TED-style “Hub Talks” and storytelling workshops, and a Cisco AI Assistant acted as a personal concierge for each attendee — offering tailored content suggestions, schedule support, and wayfinding across the venue. Recognition moments for top sellers moved from on-stage handshakes to celebratory receptions and digital kiosks.

Sales Confidence Index scores rose by 26% year over year for directors and above — the largest annual increase ever recorded for the program. 97% of attendees left with an actionable next step for a customer, 95% learned new strategies to solve customer challenges, and 90% rated the overall event as satisfying or very satisfying.

Play produced real behavior change — at the scale of an 18,000-person sales force.

Ryan Michael Hayes

Associate Director of Strategic Client Events, Winston & Strawn, and an Eventex Awards jury member

There’s a ton of sophistication in how this was designed, especially at this scale. Turning an 18,000-person sales meeting into something that still feels personalized through the AI assistant, while layering in gamification and AR elements, is not easy to pull off.

Upside down

A true farewell for the fans

How do you say goodbye to a world that shaped a generation? CUDO’s answer: let fans live it one more time. For Netflix’s farewell to the series, the team turned a historic five-storey department store in Warsaw into a playable story arc, each floor a distinct narrative chapter — the Upside Down breaching the ground-floor façade through projection mapping, Joyce’s house and the Hawkins Lab on the floors above, a misty forest and the final battle with Vecna as tension peaked, and the neon Starcourt Mall — 80s music, pizza, working arcade machines — at the top.

Stranger Things – One Last Adventure, Warsaw by CUDO for Netflix

Platinum in Experiential Event, Platinum in Kick-A** Experience, Gold in Event Storytelling, Gold in Attendee Journey

The 60-minute journey ran on play, not spectatorship. Across eleven recreated locations built with real soil, woodland scents, and spatial audio, environments physically reacted to fans: walls bulged as a Demogorgon pushed through, sensor-equipped flashlights revealed the decay of the Upside Down, bikes had to be pedalled to “close the rift”, and hand-tracking let guests slice through digital vines in the final battle. A cast of 40+ unscripted actors served as “human guardrails,” pacing the story instead of policing the crowd — while a hidden-card hunt and an app that turned each guest’s selfie into a personalized hero card made every visitor an official “citizen” of Hawkins.

Over three days, 5,000+ guests moved through the experience in waves, after demand sold out in minutes. With no paid support, 1,000+ tagged fan posts drove 13.1 million organic influencer reach, and the 5,000+ hero cards printed on-site kept circulating online for weeks — some resold on auction portals within minutes.

The audience didn’t watch the goodbye — they played it, and kept telling the story weeks after the doors closed.

Steffen Ronft

Event Psychology Lecturer, and an Eventex Awards jury president

From an event‑psychology perspective, the use of easter eggs, collectibles and ”magic” interactions (telekinetic effects, environments responding to guests) is particularly effective: the high level of detail rewards fan knowledge, deepens immersion, and, even in the video, suggests a very convincing sense of “being inside the world.” Well done CUDO!

Coloring book

A building the public could color

Polish winters are long and grey. For seven years, McDonald’s Poland has used the seasonal return of its Drwala burger to bring color and warmth to that mood. In 2024, the brand pushed the idea further: a McDonald’s restaurant in Wrocław was wrapped — façade, surroundings, and interior — in black-and-white illustrations styled like a giant coloring book. Then the public was invited to color it in.

McDonald’s Poland – Winter Takes On Colorsby TBWA Warszawa (ex DDB Warszawa) with Papaya Plus

Platinum in Interactive Outdoor Experience, Platinum in Retail Experience, Platinum in Seasonal Experience, Silver in B2B Event

Visitors used a custom digital interface on site to choose colors and apply them to the building in real time. The mechanic was simple, but its effect was striking: the restaurant changed appearance throughout the day, shaped entirely by the people who walked up to it. Each choice was visible to everyone passing by, turning a familiar piece of outdoor space into a live public artwork.

Nearly 50,000 people visited in person across 8 days. The building was “colored” live almost 3,000 times. Over 17.5 million Drwala burgers were sold during the campaign — a 30% increase versus the previous year, with day one setting a record for the highest sales and traffic in McDonald’s Poland's history.

A live coloring interface collapsed the boundary between OOH, digital interaction, and physical space — and turned customers into co-authors of the city itself.

Casie Nguyen

Field Marketing Lead, HubSpot // Executive Producer CTN Experiences, and an Eventex Awards jury member

The ‘live coloring’ mechanic is simple but powerful — especially in how it collapses the boundary between OOH, digital interaction, and physical space. It’s culturally smart, highly scalable within the brand system, and clearly drove exceptional commercial results.

Galaxy Escape Challenge

Gold in 4 categories — Consumer Show, B2C Event, Customer Engagement Event, and Brand Experience – Technology, Silver in Interactive Outdoor Experience, and Bronze in Community Building & Engagement

Samsung turned its Galaxy device showcase into a travelling escape-room competition powered by Gemini Live. Across 15 universities in 7 cities, students could only solve in-room challenges by using Gemini Live on a Galaxy device — turning AI from a passive feature into the active mechanic of the game. The roadshow culminated in a Madrid grand finale with four simultaneous escape rooms in Callao and over 2,000 attendees. Total reach: 115,000 participants, 120,000 registrations, and 1.5 million students reached directly across the tour.

NISSAN Shanghai Auto Show

Gold in Exhibition Experience

Nissan turned a traditional motor show booth into a guided, visitor-led game built around a bespoke WeChat Mini Programme. A card-collection and stamp-checking mechanic invited visitors to explore the booth as a series of discoveries rather than a sequence of displays. The activation drew 282,000+ booth visitors and 100,000+ simultaneous live-stream views, captured 15,707 first-party registrations, and produced a redemption rate above 99% on 7,654 gift codes — proof that a well-designed quest layer turns exploration into both engagement and a measurable commercial trail.

Silent Hill f and Little Tokyo – A Taste of Ebisugaoka Activation

Gold in Kick-A** Experience

Rather than jump-scare marketing, Liquid infected reality: the game's red spider lily grew across digital ad units, then bloomed physically across Little Tokyo, LA — wrapping the Japanese Village Plaza fire tower and 18 light posts in floral decay, renaming the Metro station with in-world announcements, and earning the first menu change in 50 years at the historic Mitsuru Cafe. The gamified pilgrimage drew 123,000 Metro riders and 7.5 million organic TikTok views, helped push Silent Hill f to the #2 best-selling game in Europe in release week, and led LA Metro to adopt the "station domination" as its template for the World Cup and Olympics.

Play your way through

Other standout work

Four more events made strong cases for handing the audience a controller and deserve a mention.

Play your way through

This shift shows upclearly in the data

This year’s data shows the pattern clearly

Lessons from Eventex Awards 2026

Eventex Awards case studies

Galaxy Escape Challenge

NISSAN Shanghai Auto Show

Silent Hill f and Little Tokyo – A Taste of Ebisugaoka Activation

Other standout work

This shift shows up
clearly in the data