The experiential agency Sparks believes live events are becoming a key promotional channel for gaming companies — and it’s introduced new measurement tools and metrics to back up this assertion.
Last year, Sparks worked with Xbox to measure the performance of the game company’s multi-faceted booth at Gamescom 2025, which included dedicated demo stations for both first- and third-party titles, an indie developer area, and a “big green button” activation that awarded attendees prizes for accomplishing certain tasks. During the five days of the conference, over 100,000 visitors — more than a quarter of Gamescom 2025’s overall attendance of 357,000 — passed through Xbox’s booth, with the booth achieving more than half a billion digital impressions, according to Sparks senior vice president Marc Herron in an interview with GamesBeat.
“In the age of artificial intelligence and maybe misaligned trust with attendees regarding traditional media, there is even more weight put into experiential,” Herron said. “So, all of our projections are, within the next five years, that experiential will continue to grow, and become even more important to any brand’s marketing mix.”
Sparks is approaching Xbox’s successful Gamescom booth as a case study of sorts to showcase the strong return on investment the agency believes brands can achieve through live events and experiential activations. To highlight the impact of the booth, Herron and Sparks vice president of measurement and analytics Lisette Sheehan collaborated to devise two new metrics, Earned Engagement Value (EEV) and Earned Event Impression Value (EEIV), to demonstrate that Xbox had achieved an 11x return on investment on its Gamescom presence. Earned Engagement Value is intended to measure the dollar value of participants’ active, on-site engagement, while the Earned Event Impression Value metric values the exposure and impressions that people get by walking past the booth, seeing it on social media, and engaging with it in other passive ways.
“Everyone knows that experiential delivers what media can’t deliver,” Herron said. “There’s more depth in the experience with your attendee; there’s a qualitative reach that you can’t get out of traditional media.”
The explicit goal of Sparks’ new metrics is to help communicate the performance of experiential events and activations in a way that is easily understandable to digital and media teams. The agency intentionally rolled out both new metrics simultaneously because it believes they combine to tell a “full story,” per Herron.
“Those two numbers matching create a really compelling experiential story for pretty much any brand,” he said.
Although Gamescom is one of the marquee annual gaming industry events, Herron said that the experiential playbook that Sparks applied to Xbox’s booth at the conference — and the agency’s new measurement tools and metrics — can be applied effectively to both large and small industry events, and that smaller events could actually result in higher-quality engagement that could be captured by the EEV and EEIV metrics.
“There’s intrinsically issues with a large conference of any kind, because you can’t spend as much time with attendees,” he said. “So, it would be harder for me to qualify a larger or smaller X [ROI multiplier] on any other conference — but my suspicions would be that, on an event where there is more engagement and time with your attendees, that X could be even stronger.”