Stop Chasing Virality. Start Building Worlds
By Norine Wibowo, CEO of Haluuworld
Somewhere in the last few years, “Instagrammable” stopped being a compliment and became a brief. Almost every activation pitch circulating in Southeast Asia now promises a “photo moment,” a “shareable backdrop,” a “viral spot.” The trouble is that virality, treated as the goal rather than the byproduct, tends to produce exactly what you’d expect: a wall of flowers, a neon sign, a queue for a selfie — and then nothing. The content disappears in a day. The brand recall disappears not long after. Therefore, experiential marketing and the events industry are headed for a clear shift in 2026.
In 2026, experiential marketing is shifting from scale and spectacle toward experiences that are intentional, personal, and built to last. Part of that shift is being pulled forward by AI: as AI-generated content grows harder to tell from the real thing, audiences are growing more fatigued by it — and turning to in-person experiences as one of the few ways left to connect with a brand authentically.
Indonesia offers a clear case study for this shift. Eighty-one percent of Indonesian adults say brands need to connect with people in real life to succeed — a figure that climbs to 82% among people who actually show up to brand events. They’re not casual about it, either: 74% say they’re picky about which events they attend, and 70% would rather build one real connection with a brand than chase a string of short-lived ones.[1]
This isn’t a niche crowd, either.Six in ten people likely to attend a brand event are men, and roughly half are between 18 and 29 — exactly the audience brands spend the most money trying to reach. They’re already showing up; the only question is what they find when they get there. The pattern isn’t unique to Indonesia: across Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand, experiential consumption among Gen Z and millennials is climbing just as fast, as younger, hyper-connected audiences seek real-world alternatives to an AI-saturated feed.
Over the past decade of designing physical worlds, we’ve learned that the ones built not to be photographed, but to be felt, are the ones that generate the kind of earned media and brand equity that actually moves a business.
We call our approach building “glitches on purpose.” A glitch, in our vocabulary, is an intentional break from what a visitor expects — a moment of friction, surprise, or emotional confrontation placed deliberately inside an otherwise smooth experience. It’s the thing that makes someone stop scrolling their own memory of the day and start paying attention. Spectacle gets someone through the door. The glitch is what makes them stay long enough to feel something real.
Take Museum Patah Hati, the world’s first immersive exhibition built entirely around heartbreak. On paper, it sounds like the least “brandable” idea imaginable — nobody wants to sponsor sadness. But by treating heartbreak as a three-act psychological journey — pain, acceptance, moving on — rather than a single photo backdrop, we gave brand partners a role inside an emotional narrative that 19,000 people chose to walk through in two months, generating 80 pieces of earned media and more than 78 million digital impressions. Nobody built that museum to go viral. It went viral because it was built to mean something first.
This is the distinction the industry keeps missing: a pop-up built for the photo has a shelf life of one feed cycle, while a world built around genuine psychological or cultural tension is measured in earned-media cycles and sponsorship renewals. Spatial design isn’t a tactic anymore — it’s a media channel in its own right, increasingly outperforming the broadcast and digital line items it used to sit beside. One FMCG brand we worked with turned a familiar consumer anxiety into confidence with a 30-metre tunnel that walked 96,000 commuters through the transformation the product promised.
I believe the next phase of Southeast Asia’s experiential market belongs to leaders who treat convergence as a given, not a goal. Live, retail, digital, and experiential audiences already overlap — so the infrastructure you build now to serve all of them is the infrastructure that pays off later.
If there’s one thing I’d ask brand and marketing leads across the region to reconsider, it’s this: the next time a brief asks for “something Instagrammable,” push back and ask for something meaningful instead. Build the world first. The photos — and the press, and the impressions, and the sales lift — have a way of following on their own.
We don’t build spaces to be photographed. We build them to be remembered. Everything else is just what remembering looks like on a phone screen.
About the Author
Norine Wibowo is CEO and co-founder of Haluu World, a Southeast Asian experiential and spatial design agency she has led since its founding in 2018. She blends a background in Corporate Finance with a passion for the creative industry to guide brands toward experiences that connect authentically.
[1] Source: YouGov Profiles, September 2024.