• by Fern Siegel , February 14, 2025

A new brand experience agency — Studio Secret Cinema — has debuted. The focus is maximizing an entertainment brand's events and upping experiential marketing to cement connections with audiences.

Founding clients include O2 Priority, EE, Havas Play and Activision Blizzard.

The new shop is part of Secret Cinema, a division of TodayTix Group.

The founding leadership team is Cat Botibol, business development director, Dean Rogers, creative director, and Ben Hosford, executive producer. They report to Merritt Baer, Secret Cinema lead producer and TodayTix group president.

Part of the agency's mission is to better understand how people want to experience live events and what motivates ticket sales. The company's research report, “The Power of Collective Awe: Decoding The Emergent Fan Experiences of Tomorrow,” found a growing demand for new and diverse encounters and the overwhelming desire to be awestruck.

Studio Secret Cinema builds on the success of its parent company's work with major films, TV shows and games. It will bring immersive principles around performance, audience and events to the brand and advertising space.

Botibol said: “As masters in large-scale immersive storytelling, it felt like the obvious next step to offer this knowledge and expertise to brands trying to get closer to audiences in new, memorable and truly meaningful ways. We’ve taken the time to go deeper into how we can tackle the challenges of engaging audiences authentically and can use this to design experiences that truly create collective awe.”

A 2021 report from the Journal of Advertising Research supports the idea that experiencing awe triggers an abstract mindset, enhancing ad effectiveness.

Leveraging these insights, Studio Secret Cinema has already created “EE presents: The Home Circus,”  a 30-minute live circus and TV episode that dramatizes the chaos of school holidays, while showing how EE Home’s products can make life easier. The effort was done in collaboration with Havas Play and utilized the expertise of Revel Puck Circus.

Baer added the new agency's brand vision is to create “immersive, captivating experiences which will stay in the mind forever.”