Max Lenderman
Most brands still treat marketing as broadcast: a message pushed at a customer through paid media. The customer, meanwhile, decides whether to buy on the basis of what the brand actually does to them in the room, in the app, in the stadium, in the store. The gap between what marketing departments produce and what customers experience is where commercial advantage is now lost or won.
Max Lenderman is the marketing strategist who introduced experiential marketing into the advertising lexicon, and now helps brands design the physical, digital, and “phygital” experiences that determine commercial outcomes.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Max Lenderman
- He wrote the founding text of experiential marketing. Experience the Message (2005) put the category on the map. Twenty years on, his thinking is the underlying logic most brand-experience practice still draws from.
- He has run the experiential function at the agencies that shape global brand work: founder of the global experiential practice at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, former CEO of School, current Chief Experience Officer at Omnicom’s GMR Marketing.
- He moves brands from broadcasting purpose to operating on it. His “invertising” approach starts inside the organisation, with employees, and makes brand purpose a commercial driver rather than a campaign line.
- He has been working on web3, NFTs, and the digital-physical convergence since 2021, before most CMOs had a position on any of it. His Adweek “Into the Metaverse” column is one of the longer-running serious treatments of the territory.
- He has built campaigns for Tommy Hilfiger, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Absolut, and DaimlerChrysler. The case material in the room is from inside the work, not observed from outside it.
Biography highlights
- Author of Experience the Message: How Experiential Marketing Is Changing the Brand World and Brand New World: How to Reach Billions, Not Millions
- Chief Experience Officer at Omnicom’s GMR Marketing, the world’s largest experiential marketing agency
- Founder of the global experiential practice at Crispin Porter + Bogusky; former CEO of School (Project Worldwide)
- Founding member of the International Experiential Marketing Association (IXMA)
- Columnist for Adweek and Campaign magazines, including the “Into the Metaverse” column
- Speaker at SXSW, Consensus, Forbes CMO Summit, Advertising Week, and X-Prize
Biography
Experience the Message was published in 2005. It is the book that put the phrase “experiential marketing” into the advertising vocabulary, and the thesis behind it, that the brand is what the customer experiences, not what the brand says about itself, is now treated as common sense by most serious CMOs. The author wrote it from inside the work, not as a theorist looking on.
Max Lenderman has spent the last two decades building the function he named. He launched the global experiential practice at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, served as CEO of School, the purpose-led consultancy inside Project Worldwide, and now holds the first Chief Experience Officer post at Omnicom’s GMR Marketing. The client list, Tommy Hilfiger, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Absolut, DaimlerChrysler, NASCAR Canada, gives him operating ground in categories where brand experience moves revenue.
Two ideas anchor his current work with senior marketers. The first is “invertising,” the argument that brand purpose has to be operationalised through employees before it can be sold to customers, and that the financial return on purpose is measurable when treated this way. The second is the “phygital” frontier, where digital and physical experiences are designed as a single product rather than as a campaign with a digital extension. His Adweek column “Into the Metaverse” has tracked this territory since 2021.
What he gives a senior marketing audience is the founding logic of the category and twenty years of inside work applying it. He cites a PwC finding that 86% of US buyers will pay more for a better brand experience, then shows what that figure actually requires of a brand operating model.
Key speaking topics
- Customer experience and brand operating reality
- Experiential and “phygital” marketing
- Brand purpose as commercial driver
- Web3, NFTs, and the metaverse for marketers
- AI as creative amplifier in marketing
- Sports marketing and live brand experience
- Marketing innovation and emerging consumer behaviour
Ideal for
- CMOs, CBOs, and brand directors rethinking the role of marketing in commercial strategy
- Customer experience and brand experience leads inside large consumer businesses
- Agency leaders and creative directors briefing on web3, AI, and digital-physical integration
- Sports, entertainment, and live-event sponsors building brand experience programmes
Audience outcomes
- A working definition of brand experience that separates it from communications and advertising
- A view of brand purpose as an internal operating commitment, not a campaign theme
- A sharper read on where web3, NFTs, and the metaverse have commercial traction for marketers, and where they do not
- A direct argument for treating AI as a creative amplifier inside marketing teams
- Case material from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, School, and GMR Marketing applied to the audience’s own brand questions
Talks
A direct argument that brand experience now outranks product and price as a buying driver, with the PwC finding that 86% of US buyers pay more for better brand experience as the anchor.
Key takeaways:
- The operating definition of brand experience, separated from advertising and communications
- The internal organisational changes required to deliver it consistently
- Case material from consumer brands where experience moved revenue
An introduction to “invertising,” the approach of building competitive advantage by operationalising brand purpose through employees before customers.
Key takeaways:
- How purpose becomes a measurable commercial driver rather than a marketing line
- The employee-first sequence that makes purpose credible to customers
- Examples of brands that have moved from purpose narrative to purpose substance
A working session on the convergence of physical and digital brand experience, covering DAOs, NFTs, and the marketing applications that have held up since 2021.
Key takeaways:
- A grounded read on where web3 has marketing traction and where it has not
- The “phygital” design principle for unified digital and physical brand experience
- The implications for marketing budgets, agency briefs, and measurement
A workshop for marketing and creative teams on positioning AI as an amplifier of creative work rather than a substitute for it.
Key takeaways:
- Where generative AI improves creative output and where it degrades it
- Team structures that combine AI tooling with creative judgement
- The skills marketing teams need to build now