Active Theory is a creative digital production studio with offices in Los Angeles and Amsterdam. They specialize in developing immersive and interactive digital experiences and work with brands including Google, Spotify, Netflix and NASA.

The intersection of physical and digital events

Based on our experience throughout 2020, we’d anticipate a continued uptick in digital events - with both online-only and hybrid events, as people start gradually transitioning back to traditional physical events. In our industry specifically, many traditional event creatives and marketers with limited digital production experience are being pushed to ideate in the digital space. As they bring their own set of expertise, this could bring about a wealth of new perspectives, some of which may manifest in hybrid experiences as physical and digital events continue to intersect moving forward.

Social connection and networking in 2021

Having worked on a few events in 2020, including digital conferences like INBOUND and music festivals like SECRET SKY, we’ve learnt that there’s quite a lot of nuance in these activations. As the user experience of physical and digital events are completely different, translating layouts and features one-to-one isn’t a recommended approach. Instead, we’ve found that our most popular digital event experiences have been planned carefully, ensuring features are qualified based on a digital user journey. While managing live content across time zones has been key to many events, where things shine is when we can facilitate social connections and networking, as these things have been a bit lost in the past few months. We’ve found playful games with underlying social cooperation like trivia and puzzles have proven particularly popular, as they simultaneously give people something to do and also provide a social connection as part of their activity.