Brands spend millions on events and measure nothing

Justin O’Heir almost fell out of his chair the day a brand turned down measurement on a million-dollar activation.

“I almost fell out of my chair. This was a half a million to a million dollar project, and they said no, we’re good.”

Justin is the founder of Ether, a company that measures how people actually feel and behave during live brand activations, then turns that into ROI a marketer can defend. The big idea: experiential marketing has been flying blind for decades, and the data has been sitting there the whole time, unmeasured.

Presence, behavior, intent

Ether layers measurement in three steps: presence (attendance, dwell time), behavior during the experience, then converting those signals into buyer intent and trust. The toolkit is wild: quick interactive surveys he calls glimmers, a library of more than 150 plug-in games, and Wi-Fi mesh plus facial-expression sensors that read posture and emotional signal.

“When you go into a CFO meeting, you’re not going empty-handed. You have defensible data that says we actually shifted consumer behavior.”

Real campaigns, real numbers

He shared concrete examples: a Pokemon-Go-style augmented reality activation at a music festival, a TurboTax college campus game that turned students into subscribers, and the Budweiser “excuses” billboard work. Each one shows the same move: measurement turns experiential from a cost center into a revenue driver.

The 10-to-13 window, and saying no to VCs

Two things stuck with me. First, brand loyalty often locks in young, with the 10-to-13 age range being the window where lifelong attachments form. Second, Justin is deliberately bootstrapping Ether toward an exit instead of raising venture capital, trading speed for freedom.

What you can steal

• If you cannot measure the behavior it changed, you cannot defend the spend.
• Honest data beats flattering data. Build measurement in before the event, not after.
• You do not need a CFO title to ask the CFO question: what did this actually do?