Breaking the Marketing Mold: Michael Fullman Of ACRONYM On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before
An Interview With Chad Silverstein
Marketing isn’t just about reaching people anymore. It’s about earning their attention.
Traditional marketing methods are no longer sufficient in today’s dynamic and fast-evolving market. To truly engage and captivate audiences, businesses need to think outside the box and adopt innovative and non-traditional marketing strategies. What are these strategies, and how can they transform audience engagement?
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure to interview Michael Fullman.
Michael Fullman is a creative executive and design-first leader working at the intersection of experience, culture, and emerging technology. As Chief Creative Officer, he helps shape the next generation of brand experiences — immersive, human, and built across physical and digital worlds. His work spans live concert design and production, large-scale brand environments, product experiences, and hybrid activations that blend story, space, and interaction. No matter the medium, Michael’s focus is the same: making experiences that feel tangible, emotional, and unforgettable. Michael believes technology is most powerful when it serves craft — and that innovation should deepen connection, not distract from it. He leads teams with a balance of creative instinct and systems thinking, building the structures that allow ambitious ideas to scale without losing their soul.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! To start, could you share when and how you got started in marketing?
Honestly? I didn’t come up through marketing. None of us did. We came up designing live shows. Concerts, tours, large-scale productions. And that’s where the organization got its shape — a mix of skills and points of view pulled from different corners of craft. Content, lighting, staging, scenic, technology, production. Everyone brought a different lens to how an audience actually experiences a moment. That mix is still what defines how we approach the work today.
Here’s the thing a lot of people miss. A live show is a presentation of a product. The product just happens to be a musician. Everything you’re designing around them — the staging, the lighting, the pacing, the story — is a creative extension of that artist. Their art. Their identity. Their point of view. You’re building a world that makes the thing they made feel bigger.
Marketing, at its core, isn’t that different. You’re still showing a product. You’re still building something that lets people feel what it’s about. So when we started doing work with brands — around 2015 — we didn’t have to reinvent anything. We just applied the thinking we already had. We pointed a show-design instinct at products instead of performers. And it translated directly. Brands were products with stories. Activations were shows with audiences. The language changed. The job didn’t.
Today we do a lot more of this. And we do it in a much more strategic way. But the core of it is the same thing we’ve been doing all along.
What has been the biggest shift in the marketing industry and can you give us an example of how it impacted you?
The biggest shift is that experience has become a real channel. Not a side program. Not a one-off activation. An actual channel that sits alongside everything else a brand is doing.
And that’s changed how the best campaigns get built. The strongest ones now index across every available channel in smart, strategic ways — each touchpoint amplifying the next. Paid, social, content, retail, experience. They’re in conversation with each other. And within that ecosystem, experience has become one of the most important pieces, because it’s where people actually feel something in person. It’s where the rest of the campaign gets reinforced, extended, and in a lot of cases, created.
For us, that’s changed the way we approach everything. We spend less time thinking about format and more time thinking about impact. What does this actually do for the person on the other side? And how does this moment fit into the larger story a brand is telling across everywhere else it shows up?
The other big shift is real-time responsiveness. What used to be a static, pre-planned moment can now flex and adapt in the room — personalizing to audience, context, behavior. That kind of responsiveness wasn’t possible a few years ago. And it changes the relationship someone has with a brand entirely. Experience used to be the nice-to-have. Now it’s the connective tissue.
Can you explain why it’s essential for businesses to break away from traditional marketing and embrace new strategies?
Because the old playbook doesn’t carry the same weight anymore. People are overwhelmed. Ads, content, messaging, noise. If something doesn’t feel relevant, it gets filtered out before anyone consciously notices it. That’s why traditional marketing struggles now. It’s not that it doesn’t work at all. It’s that it doesn’t work enough to justify the effort.
What’s replacing it is experience and participation. When brands meet people in a way that feels personal, meaningful, and worth showing up for, it cuts through in a completely different way. Marketing isn’t just about reaching people anymore. It’s about earning their attention.
Could you share and briefly explain the first major change you made to break the trend of traditional marketing that was not so common?
The real break for us was looking at everything we had built — the production chops, the technical fluency, the craft of our team — and realizing we could apply it in a much bigger way than we had been.
Early on, the work lived mostly in live production. Concerts, tours, large-scale shows. And we were good at it. But I kept noticing that the most interesting briefs weren’t just “build a show.” They were “build a world someone can step into.” So we started applying production thinking to brand experiences more broadly — treating a product launch, a retail activation, a brand installation with the same rigor we’d bring to a stadium show.
At the same time, we stopped calling what we do experiential marketing. That term comes loaded with assumptions — activations, photo ops, booth builds, touch-and-go moments. It didn’t describe what we were actually making. So we started positioning the work as experience design. A discipline, not a tactic.
That reframe did two things. It changed who we talked to and the kinds of problems we got brought in to solve. And it forced us to get serious about measurement. Because once you’re claiming experience as a discipline, you have to prove it pays back. And it does. When you measure in-person experience strategically, the return shows up — in brand perception, in loyalty, in how people talk about the work afterward. That was a real turning point. Not just creatively. Commercially.
What specific results did you see after implementing this change?
The work got bigger, and it got better.
We started getting brought into earlier conversations — strategy meetings instead of production briefs. The kinds of clients we worked with shifted too. We were suddenly in the room with brands like Nike, Meta, Google, and Figma, on projects that weren’t about one-off activations but about long-term creative partnerships. Repeat clients became the norm, not the exception.
We also started seeing something bigger shift across the industry. Brand experience went from being a line item most people didn’t look that closely at to being something that leadership actually paid attention to. Because the evidence kept building — how people experience a brand in person genuinely changes how they feel about it. Perception shifts. Loyalty goes up. Affinity becomes real. Those aren’t soft benefits. They show up in how people talk about the brand, return to it, and choose it the next time.
The other result is harder to measure but more important. The work started doing something to the people inside it. Younger designers were taking bigger swings. Senior folks were solving more interesting problems. When the ambition of the work goes up, the craft of the team goes up with it.
How do you ensure that these new marketing strategies resonate with your target audience?
It starts with accepting that you can’t fake relevance anymore. People know immediately when something wasn’t built with them in mind.
For us, that means spending real time up front understanding not just who the audience is, but how they actually want to engage. What’s worth showing up for? What would make them stay? What would make them talk about it the next day? If you can answer those questions honestly, you’re already ahead of most of the work out there.
From there, it’s about building something with a clear point of view — a reason to exist beyond “brand presence.” The work has to invite participation. Whether that’s interactivity, personalization, or just a moment that feels genuinely different from everything else competing for attention.
We also think a lot about flexibility. The strongest experiences now aren’t static. They leave room to respond in real time — through technology, content, or just how the moment unfolds. That adaptability is what makes something feel current instead of prescribed.
And at the end of the day, if something resonates, you feel it. People stay longer. They share it. They come back to it. If they don’t, it’s usually a sign it got built for the brand, not for the audience.
Great. Now, let’s dive into the heart of our interview. Could you list “5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before”?
Honestly, the biggest shift is that people don’t respond to “marketing” in the traditional sense anymore. They respond to things that feel worth their time. Everything starts there.
1. Build something people actually want to step into
The work has to feel like an invitation, not an ad. If someone has to be convinced to engage, you’ve already lost them. The best experiences give people a reason to show up on their own terms.
2. Make participation part of the idea
It’s not enough for people to just be there. The strongest work gives them a role — something to do, influence, or shape. The more involved they are, the more it stays with them.
3. Use technology in a way that disappears
Tech is everywhere now, but it shouldn’t feel like “look at this tech.” It should quietly make things more personal, responsive, and fun. When it’s working well, people don’t think about the technology. They just feel seen.
4. Design for what happens after
A lot of people still think in terms of the moment. But the real value is in what carries forward. How it gets shared. What gets said about it later. If it stops when the experience ends, you’ve left a lot on the table.
5. Stop optimizing only for scale
Bigger isn’t always better. Sometimes the most effective work is focused — built for a specific group of people in a way that actually lands. Relevance beats reach more often than people want to admit.
What challenges might companies face when transitioning away from traditional marketing strategies, and how can they overcome them?
The biggest challenge is letting go of what they already know.
Traditional marketing has been the default for so long that it’s structured, familiar, and easier to measure in the ways teams are used to measuring things. So even when it’s not delivering the same level of impact, moving away from it feels uncertain. Experiential and experience-led work doesn’t come with a neat playbook. That can make it harder to get internal buy-in.
The way through it is almost always starting small and building confidence over time. Instead of trying to reinvent everything at once, the brands that do this well test, learn, and evolve as they go. And internally, the mindset shift is just as important as the work itself. Once that shift happens, it stops being about abandoning old models. It becomes about expanding what marketing can actually do for a company.
The brands that stay ahead of this are the nimble ones. The ones that respond quickly when the landscape shifts. They don’t just stay inside their own ecosystem — they empower smart teams to go do good work, pull in the right partners, and move with the moment. That agility is what keeps them from going stagnant. And right now, agility is the thing that separates the brands that keep growing from the ones that get stuck.
How do you measure the success and ROI of these new marketing strategies?
We don’t look at it through a traditional ROI lens anymore. It’s less about immediate, linear return and more about Return on Experience — what people actually take away from a moment, and how that changes their relationship with the brand over time.
The value shows up in things like emotional connection, engagement, and whether someone is more likely to remember, talk about, or come back to the brand. You look at how people are behaving in real time. What they share. How sentiment shifts before and after. And then you connect that to downstream indicators like lift in intent, repeat interaction, or conversion where it makes sense.
A big part of how we’ve been approaching this is building actual playbooks for it — frameworks that help us and our clients measure experience in a consistent, meaningful way. That means designing measurement into the experience itself. Touchpoints, interaction data, sentiment capture, follow-through signals — all of it built in from the start, not bolted on at the end. The goal is to leave every engagement with real intelligence about how the audience actually experienced it. Over time, that data compounds. You start to see patterns. You start to get better.
It’s not one metric. It’s a combination that tells you whether the experience actually resonated — and whether it created something that lasts.
Looking forward, how do you see the role of innovative marketing evolving in the next 5–10 years?
Experience is going to move from being “one of the channels” to being the center of how brands connect with people.
What used to be treated as a cool activation on the side is becoming the core way people form a relationship with a brand. Physical and digital are going to blend further — not as separate executions, but as one continuous experience. People still crave real, in-person connection. But they also expect their digital world to be part of that experience, not walled off from it.
And this isn’t a story about marketing losing the plot. Marketing keeps innovating. It always has. The tools get sharper, the ideas get bigger, and the craft keeps leveling up. The real evolution is about how marketing meets its audience — and that audience is changing faster than it ever has. More discerning. More selective. More specific about where they’ll give their attention. The work has to keep pace with that.
Marketing is going to keep moving toward things that need to be seen, felt, and lived in. Less about pushing messages. More about creating environments — physical, virtual, or hybrid — that people choose to engage with because they genuinely enjoy them.
What advice would you give to business leaders who are hesitant to move away from traditional marketing methods?
Start by recognizing that the world your customers live in has changed faster than most marketing playbooks have. People are overwhelmed with ads and campaigns. They don’t pay attention unless something actually speaks to them in a human way.
The move isn’t to throw out everything you know. It’s to start thinking about marketing less as broadcasting and more as inviting someone to engage with the brand in a way that feels relevant and worth their time. It’s closer to hosting guests than running a campaign. That might feel risky at first. But the companies that lean into the discomfort and test small, meaningful ideas will learn faster and build stronger relationships with their audiences.
Over time, that mindset shift becomes a competitive advantage. And the ones who resist it will spend the next decade wondering where their audience went.
Can you share any upcoming initiatives or plans you have for further innovating your marketing strategies?
A lot, actually. We just rebranded the company from VTProDesign to Acronym — not because we’re changing direction, but because we needed a name that matched what we’d already become. Acronym reflects a creative firm building end-to-end experiences for brands that don’t want to play it safe. That rebrand is kicking off a new chapter of work that I’m genuinely excited about.
At our core, we’re a creative technology company. We’ve always been experimenting — that’s how we’ve operated from day one. And right now, that experimentation feels more alive than ever. The tools are getting more capable, the ideas are getting bigger, and the space between what’s possible and what’s been done is wide open.
AI and real-time personalization are a big part of where we’re pushing. Not as gimmicks. As tools that actually deepen the human side of experience. The goal is always the same: make people feel something real. The tools just keep getting more interesting.
How can our readers follow your work and learn more about your approaches to modern marketing?
This was great. Thank you so much for the time you spent sharing with us.
About The Interviewer: Chad Silverstein is a seasoned entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience as a Founder and CEO. While attending Ohio State University, he launched his first company, Choice Recovery, Inc., a nationally recognized healthcare collection agency — twice ranked the #1 workplace in Ohio. In 2013, he founded [re]start, helping thousands of people find meaningful career opportunities. After selling both companies, Chad shifted his focus to his true passion — leadership. Today, he coaches founders and CEOs at Built to Lead, advises Authority Magazine’s Thought Leader Incubator.
Breaking the Marketing Mold: Michael Fullman Of ACRONYM On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.