# Sasha Solonin

Sasha Solonin works in experiential marketing production at Motion LA, producing brand activations and events. The posts describe work ranging from large, multi-city productions to experiences designed to move audiences and encourage them to share.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/sasha-solonin/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-solonin-motion-la
- LinkedIn followers: 2,577
- Based on 12 dated posts, latest 2026-09-23

## Summary

Sasha Solonin is most useful for producing multi-city brand activations and events with audience behavior and content capture in mind.

- Best for: Brands needing an agency-side experiential production partner for multi-market activations with behavior goals.
- Not for: Sponsored short videos, paid posts, or brand ambassador campaigns with no event scope.
- Check first: Ask for evidence of measured behavior change if that is a buying criterion.

### Takeaways

- Telemundo World Cup 2026 program covered six fan activations across Los Angeles, Miami, and Orlando.
- Some activations ran more than 40 days and included fabrication, permitting, transport, installation, and operations.
- Posts say start with what people should do after an experience, then design for emotion.

## Main ideas

- **Start with what you want people to do after the experience**: Solonin treats the desired post-experience action as the first question in a brief, not a wrap-up metric. Event planners ask what you want at your event; experiential marketers ask what you want people to do after they experience it. Once that answer is set, the venue, creative and experience decisions follow. Strategy is the step brands most often skip, leaving a party instead of a brand experience built to drive business outcomes.
- **Logistics are table stakes; strategy, creative, content and community are the differentiator**: Solonin argues that most agencies described as experiential are event planners with better branding, focused on venues, catering and AV setup. Real experiential work, in this account, delivers impact that lasts beyond the day and covers strategy, creative, content and community, as well as psychology, community dynamics and content strategy. The test for a brand hiring an agency: is it focused on making the event run smoothly or on making people feel something that changes their behaviour?
- **Design for emotion, because feeling is what makes people share and remember**: Solonin names happiness, excitement and nostalgia as design targets. The critique: brands fixate on venue, setup and aesthetic, so attendees take a few photos and leave with nothing sticking. A triggered emotion leads people to pull out their phones, tell friends, remember the experience and become advocates for the brand.
- **Treat every event as a content moment and budget capture as part of production**: Poor content capture is one of the three mistakes Solonin says recur across more than 100 brands worked with at Motion LA. Brands spend thousands on an event without a photographer, videographer or strategy for making the material shareable, so the event produces no lasting content. The stated approach is to plan capture into event operations from the start.
- **Plan around the audience, and use an outside perspective to see what the brand cannot**: Solonin argues that brands plan events around what they think is cool rather than what resonates with the people they are trying to reach. An agency's value is seeing what a brand misses when it is too deep in daily operations. The remedy: define the audience and desired action first, then let production decisions follow. Audience misunderstanding is listed first among the recurring mistakes, ahead of content capture and missing strategy.
- **Live events fail, so respond with ownership, humour and speed**: Solonin uses KFC's UK chicken shortage as a model for handling a public failure: the brand ran a full-page newspaper ad showing an empty bucket with the letters rearranged to spell an expletive, alongside a genuine apology. They credit the response with owning the mistake, using humour without being dismissive, and moving fast while people still cared. The principle also applies to event production, where problems surface the day before, the morning of, or during the event. The brands that win respond honestly rather than never slipping.
- **Impact should be measured beyond attendance, though the posts do not show the method**: Solonin argues for measuring impact beyond attendance numbers and turning attendees into advocates, but the posts do not lay out a behaviour-change measurement framework. The figures that appear are audience counts and a count of AI-powered fan videos created for a multi-market World Cup program, measuring reach and output rather than behaviour change. Ask Solonin what framework they use to measure behaviour change.

## Work to read

- [Telemundo's FIFA World Cup 2026 fan activations in Los Angeles, Miami and Orlando](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sasha-solonin-motion-la_one-of-the-largest-experiential-productions-activity-7489064307146518528-0jSu)
- [Most 'experiential agencies' are just event planners with better branding](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sasha-solonin-motion-la_most-experiential-agencies-are-just-event-activity-7411452662552096768-wlbR)
- [Three mistakes brands make with events](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sasha-solonin-motion-la_ive-worked-with-over-100-brands-at-motion-activity-7396231045576056832-YQQN)
- [KFC ran out of chicken and handled it well](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sasha-solonin-motion-la_kfc-ran-out-of-chicken-their-response-was-activity-7407465913576349696-awZB)
- [Making people feel something is the point of experiential marketing](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sasha-solonin-motion-la_making-people-feel-something-is-the-entire-activity-7391217800578727936-sW4j)

## Brand relationships

- **Motion LA** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Telemundo** (client)
- **Universal** (mention)

## Partnerships

Sasha Solonin's posts do not describe sponsorship, paid-post, or brand-ambassador formats. They show an agency-side partnership model at Motion LA: brands engage the studio as an experiential production partner, and Solonin describes the work as strategy-led, often multi-market, and full-service from concept through on-site operation. The Telemundo FIFA World Cup 2026 projects are the clearest example: six large-scale fan activations across Los Angeles, Miami, and Orlando, with some experiences running more than 40 consecutive days. Their team handled creative execution, custom fabrication, permitting, organized labor staffing, cross-country transportation, logistics, installation, and on-site operations. A brand evaluating this relationship should define the behaviour it wants after the experience, not just the event itself, and budget production, staffing, and content capture as one package. Ask for the rate card, sponsorship policy, or partnership inquiry route; the posts offer no public details on these, only a prompt to send a direct message about an upcoming experience.

## Alternatives

- Ryan Glick: Consider Glick when the activation's real problem is what it produces after the doors close, not how three sites get built. The brief — three markets, roughly 30 days live each, a content package, and a post-experience goal of app sign-ups — matches their written position: brands are asking for a world rather than a single event, with the physical moment starting a connected build across content, talent, earned media, CRM and community. They frame the new unit of work as infrastructure, and say the most interesting briefs ask how an experience becomes a content engine, drives sign-ups or another measurable action, and turns audiences into communities that continue to be engaged after they leave. Two practical markers sit in the same material: experiential is being written into campaign plans much earlier, alongside the rest of the campaign, and attendance is giving way to search lift, sales, CRM, earned reach and brand lift as measures that matter. Glick also describes running a 75-plus-person agency building experiences for brands including Uber, L'Oréal, Chanel and Walmart — relevant scale for a campaign where the buyer wants a partner to architect the system, not only produce it.
- Saif Yousuf Sheriff: Sheriff is the better choice when the brand-decision question is about a hosted journey rather than a mass fan activation: small groups, accommodation anchors, on-the-ground hosts, and travel where the felt product is effortlessness rather than throughput. The Nexgo Spaces material describes a curated network of boutique stays and experiential micro-resorts that each serve several roles at once — accommodation anchor for curated journeys, content stage for storytelling, and operational base for logistics, ground teams and guest flow — with the stated aim of consistent standards, simpler last-mile execution, reusable content and less dependence on fragmented third-party vendors. The follow-up post makes the operating principle explicit: flexibility over fixed itineraries, one real person on the ground reshaping each day around weather, mood and pace, and logistics, local relationships and backup planning running invisibly behind a calm day. This fits a brand that wants a repeatable hosted format, owns more of the property and service layer, and judges success by whether friction disappeared for a small number of guests. It is also the clearest of the three alternatives on how the post-experience relationship continues through a travel or hospitality layer rather than a content library alone.
- Anca Platon Trifan, CMP, WMEP: Trifan becomes the better choice when the production risk in a three-city activation lies in venue terms, AV economics and budget structure rather than the creative idea. The post on Encore's IPO filing sets out a problem most brand teams meet late: by the time AV enters the conversation, venue exclusivity, revenue expectations and contract terms have already narrowed the options, and surprise costs arrive afterwards — Wi-Fi, power patch fees, rigging rules, freight elevator access, loading dock requirements, room lighting control, house sound usage, screen fees, labour minimums, service charges, outside AV restrictions and required supervision. The post says these details shape budget, creative direction, technical design, broadcast, speaker experience, accessibility and whether the audience can actually receive the message. It advises reading the AV terms before signing, asking what is exclusive and negotiable, and building a real production budget from the start rather than a leftover one. Trifan states 24 years in AV and technical production, working both as the outside production partner and as the in-house provider — directly useful for a three-city activation where each venue's technical and labour terms can reset the cost of a repeatable build.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/
