The Return on Real Life

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Everywhere you go in New York you see lines. For pizza, breakfast, upscale Italian dinners, and most recently, frozen yogurt – you can scarcely make it down the block without encountering one.

Given this is one of the trendiest cities in the world, it’s no surprise that people are first out the door when they hear about something exciting or new. Yet the lines are worth noticing not just for their presence but for what they represent. In an economy trending ever more frictionless, with personalized discovery, in-app checkout, and same-day delivery all offered DTC (direct to couch!), consumers are opting back in. They’re choosing to show up in person, to wait, to prize patience as the new status symbol rather than as an inconvenience that can easily be scrolled away.

In January, Eventbrite released its annual Social Study Report, which highlighted an overwhelming preference among Gen Z and millennials to reengage with real life via authentic, one-of-a-kind experiences. Nearly 80% of surveyed respondents said that they wanted to attend more events in person this year, with the vast majority desiring connection to their immediate communities via local fairs and markets, backyard parties, and “meet your neighbor” cafe events. It’s impossible not to view this as a rejection of the slop permeating the online world, where AI-generated affiliate content and product demonstrations are causing a major backlash against creators. Even on the retail side, CEOs are struggling to sift through the noise of “more products, more contents, and more trends” as consumers increasingly eschew their phones in search of products and experiences that they can enjoy in person.

Brands like Nike have started engaging their influencer networks differently, doubling down on hyper-local marketing efforts focused on live, “micro-community” activation. The bet is that, in an ecosystem trending offline, creators can more organically connect with and retain local customers by hosting smaller-scale, authentic events that build peer-to-peer trust. This is a real departure from the traditional retail model – formal, in-store footprints paired with a handful of online DTC channels – into one that is highly fragmented and localized, generating a new form of event-based commerce that brands are not yet equipped to manage. Consumers clearly want these experiences, but how do brands measure their value and prove out their returns?

Experiential marketing has always been an effective channel for customer acquisition and conversion, helping brands outperform across awareness, repeatability, and perception compared to traditional advertising methods. Yet as consumers shy away from curated, big-ticket experiences in greater numbers, they also sidestep the underlying infrastructure that allows brands to track and understand their in-person engagement metrics. This exposes a huge opportunity to serve brands that are trying to capitalize on this consumer shift so they can better optimize future events.

We’ve argued previously that the future of commerce will exist at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds: the Gen Z return to the shopping mall ushered by a new generation of digital tools, for example, or the “chronically offline” trend being catalogued – where else? – on social media. When we made our bet on Leap, we understood that the rebirth of retail would be powered by data, not footprint, and that brands would want to test and measure different in-store experiences without the burden and overhead of an expensive real estate lease. Yet the offline world remains difficult to track, in part because existing tools have not yet caught up with changing consumer preferences. In its current state, the landscape for measuring in-person analytics is still limited to two venues: the “store” and the “event.”

1. The Store. In-store and retail analytics for physical locations. Incumbents like RetailNext help retailers tie foot traffic and conversion back to business decisions such as store design, merchandising, and staffing, while players like ShopperTrak (acquired by SensorMatic in 2015) and Dor focus on the sensor vertical, building and selling people-counter technology to provide real-time traffic insights. Newer entrants like Pathr.ai (acquired by Standard in 2019) leverage computer vision to track and measure shopper behavior via in-store security cameras. Though technology advances have helped uplevel the capabilities here, serving this sector still requires operating within the traditional retail store environment.

2. The Event. Planning, execution, and measurement of events and experiential marketing activations, primarily at scale. Incumbents like Cvent and Splash (acquired by Cvent in 2024) handle end-to-end registration, ticketing, and event reporting for large corporate and consumer activations, while newer players such as Vendelux operate B2B, helping sales teams build out their pipeline through event selection and engagement. On the brand side, AnyRoad is maybe the closest use case we’ve seen so far, using AI to capture attendee data and tie engagement to downstream consumer behavior. Yet these products are all still built for the “flagship” event, relying on fixed venues and registration flows to streamline data intake; they break down when the experiences are smaller-scale, organic, and lack the established infrastructure for tracking.

As experiential marketing channels fragment further down to the community and neighborhood levels, brands will require tools to help them intelligently allocate their growing influencer marketing budgets and understand the impact of live activations on awareness, retention, and spend. The online stack is already well-served, with existing companies like ShopMy and LTK allowing brands to effectively track and attribute sales from social channels. On the discovery side, platforms such as Anvara and SponsorUnited allow brands to analyze the ROI of potential sponsors for events before connecting, and Hummingbirds pairs retailers with hyper-local creators to drive in-store velocity. Yet there is still a real gap in solutions supporting brands during and after the types of informal, smaller-scale events we are seeing today, offering a ~$130B market opportunity to anyone who can bridge this divide.

We’re not sure what the winners will look like, but we believe the right solutions will treat the point of sale as a person, not a place, and understand that authentic, in-person connection is a requirement for long-term consumer acquisition and retention. If you’re building in the offline attribution category, solving for the next wave of event commerce, or even just able to bring us some Dot Cakes – we’d love to connect. Please reach out to chelsea@equal.vc!