Every bar and restaurant operator has done some version of an “activation.” A themed night, a branded photo moment, a holiday pop-up. Some killed it. Most performed fine. A few quietly flopped. The difference comes down to the process behind it.
This process is what Nicole Braden, VP of Hospitality at multi-venue hospitality group Versus in Washington, D.C., covered in her session at the 2026 Bar & Restaurant Expo, “Beyond the Selfie Wall: Activations That Build Brands and Drive Sales.”
In her session, Braden laid out a deceptively simple framework for why some activations generate 65 million media impressions and others generate a mediocre Tuesday. Her thesis: Most operators skip the strategic middle — the part that actually makes an activation work by generating buss and revenue.
Start With Culture, Not Aesthetics
The first instinct for most operators is visual: What would look cool? What’s Instagrammable? What feels trendy right now? Braden argues those are the wrong first questions.
“The strongest activations start with culture,” she said. “What is your audience already excited about? What conversations are already happening? What fandoms, rituals, or seasonal moments are already in motion?”
To stay ahead of those moments, her team maintains what she calls a culture calendar — a live Google Doc where a junior team member (ideally someone young and deeply tapped into social media) logs everything relevant: sports events, entertainment moments, trending memes, niche food and beverage occasions, and hyper-local cultural happenings.
The goal isn’t just awareness, it’s speed. “We want to be front-runners, not the venue that sees someone else do it and then copies it,” said Braden.
The payoff can be dramatic. For Heist, a nightclub brand targeting 21–28 year-olds, the team spotted buzz around the Hannah Montana 20th anniversary — Hulu was running a special, and the audience was already talking. They hired a DJ to play a Hannah Montana set. That’s it. No major production, no big build. The cultural fit was strong enough to carry it: The post racked up over 1,000 likes and 1,500 shares. “You don’t always need a massive activation. If the cultural fit is strong, the idea can travel very far on its own,” said Braden.
Design for Demand, Not Just Discovery
A great concept still has to get people through the door, and that requires intentional demand creation. Nikki’s team builds FOMO in deliberately, not accidentally.
When they launched a Capri-themed event timed to the peak of White Lotus mania at Ciel Social Club, they didn’t just decorate and open the doors. They invited top local influencers for a first-look night before the public launch. They brought in a live painter, a spritz bar, a wind machine for photos. They built in scarcity through limited programming windows and surprise elements. Every detail was engineered to make people feel like they were missing something if they weren’t there.
“People need a reason to care now, not later,” said Braden. “They need a reason to believe this is worth showing up for, posting about, and prioritizing.”
The influencer preview night did a lot to boost the event before it even opened to the public. “There’s a big difference between a brand posting something and an influencer posting it. When an influencer posts, it feels like a friend telling you about it — you’re a lot more likely to actually book.” She’s never paid an influencer to attend. The experiences do the inviting.
Four Case Studies Worth Studying
Braden walked through four activations that illustrate different scales and strategies, each with a distinct lesson for operators.
1. Emily in Paris Pop-Up: Relevance Outperforms Footprint
A 40-seat bar got Netflix approval to run a limited pop-up tied to the Emily in Paris season release. On paper, it was a tiny activation. In practice, it reached influencers with nearly 4 million combined Instagram and TikTok followers and generated more than 60 million views. The pop-up earned coverage on Good Morning Washington, Fox 5, and NBC — and sold out the entire run.
It performed so far beyond expectations that Netflix issued a cease-and-desist (they hadn’t anticipated the scale).
“The lesson is that when you tap into something culturally hot at the right moment, you can create disproportionate attention,” said Braden. “Relevance can far outperform footprint.”
2. Cheers to the Shelf: Immersive Done Right
Partnering with the Elf on the Shelf brand for a holiday pop-up, the same 40-seat bar went fully immersive: a life-sized hot cocoa mug for photos, a full city of elves behind the bar, an immersive North Pole loft upstairs. The pop-up ran December 1 through January 1.
The result: $195,000 in gross sales — roughly 6x the bar’s normal monthly revenue. Media impressions topped 100 million. It was covered on the Today Show.
The programming strategy mattered as much as the build. Daytime hours offered brunch programming open to children (a first for the venue. Evenings featured DJ sets and a hot/cold cocktail menu for adults. Two distinct audiences, one concept, one month.
“Immersive doesn’t have to mean fluffy. Structured well, it can become a real revenue engine,” said Braden.
3. The Bad Bunny Look-Alike Contest: Precision Over Budget
For Super Bowl weekend, instead of running generic sports bar programming they couldn’t win on, the team asked a sharper question: What’s our version of this moment? Bad Bunny was the halftime performer. Their nightclub audience had a strong Latino following. The answer was a Bad Bunny lookalike contest, promoted entirely through social media with zero ad spend. The only hard cost: a bottle of tequila for the winner.
The contest went viral. One post on Washingtonian alone pulled 18,000 likes and 10,000 shares. The winner was on Fox 5 the next day. It became one of their best sales weeks in six months, with boosted revenue continuing two months later. The concept has since become a recurring platform — Bad Bunny club nights now drive repeat visits from the same audience.
“Precision beats generic,” said Braden. “A sharp idea targeted at the right audience can outperform a broad one with a much bigger budget.”
4. A 1920s Night: Brand Mythology at Scale
The final case study went in the opposite direction: a 1,000-person immersive Prohibition-era party at Washington D.C.’s Union Station, produced as a brand extension of one of their cocktail bars. The event included a 25-piece big band, casino tables, dancers, and a black tie dress code.
Guests called it one of the best nights of the year. Organic Instagram followers spiked. Future promotional posts reached further because the audience now had proof of what the brand was capable of. Subsequent themed nights saw stronger turnout because people trusted the concept.
“Activations can also be about deepening brand mythology,” said Braden. “Once people saw what we could do at scale, every future event carried more credibility.”
Measuring What Actually Matters
Braden had some advice for how to best measure an activation, and her first point was that likes are not a business metric. “They’re surface-level indicators. I want to know if the activation made money — not just on the night, but in the halo effect afterward.”
Her measurement framework runs across four layers:
- Direct financial performance — sales during the activation window
- Audience behavior — repeat visits, new customer acquisition, CRM growth
- Earned media and creator value — what would this coverage have cost to buy outright?
- Brand impact — perception shifts, halo effect on future promotions, new audience segments
Her team recently ran a bar crawl in a hot D.C. neighborhood that brought in 12,000 guests between ages 21 and 25. Revenue was secondary. The real win was a list of 12,000 warm leads added to their CRM for retargeting. “We may not have made a lot from it directly. But that list will keep paying out.”
ROI, she argues, has to be defined broadly enough to reflect reality, and specifically enough to defend internally. “You should always be able to answer: What did this activation do for the business, and how do I know?” she said.
The Mistakes Operators Keep Making
She closed with the patterns she sees trip up operators most consistently:
- Chasing trends with no brand fit. A trending concept that doesn’t match your audience is just noise. A generic Super Bowl party at a Latin nightclub would have fallen flat. A Bad Bunny contest at that same venue is a moment.
- Over-investing in visuals, under-investing in promotion. Promotion is not optional — it’s half the activation.
- Measuring impressions but not conversion. If you can’t tell your ownership group what the activation actually drove in revenue, repeat visits, or earned media value, you don’t have a defense for the spend.
- Creating viral moments instead of repeatable playbooks. Document what works. Run it again.
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