Comic-Con isn’t just a convention; it’s one of the most concentrated rooms of passionate, vocal, and camera-ready fans a brand can find anywhere. When nearly 400,000 people show up already excited to be there, event marketing stops being about interruption and starts being about participation.
The brands that win aren’t the ones with the biggest booth. They’re the ones that give fans something worth waiting in line for, something worth posting, and something worth remembering long after the show floor lights go dark.
That’s the thinking behind every activation we’ve ever built for Comic-Con. Over the years, we’ve helped brands turn a single weekend into hundreds of millions of impressions, award-winning campaigns, and content that fans kept sharing for years after the show ended. Here’s a look back at four of our favorites.
FX Networks — American Horror Story VR
IGN called it the most terrifying VR experience at Comic-Con. Five fans at a time stepped into a dark silo, lay down on a gurney, and were transported straight into the world of American Horror Story.
The result: 200 million social impressions, 440 million earned media impressions, and a Shorty Award for Best VR Experience of the Year. Some fans came out laughing. Others came out shaking.
The American Horror Story VR experience is a perfect example of just how far a great activation can travel. What started as a single installation outside Comic-Con San Diego became so popular that demand followed fans home.
After the Comic-Con event, requests to experience it kept coming in, so FX and Groove Jones took it on the road. We redesigned the experience for a modified trailer system, one built to move from city to city and let multiple people step inside for a two-person shared experience.
The tour made stops at places like Pink’s, the Grove, and Hollywood Forever Cemetery, bringing the same nightmare that stunned Comic-Con to fans across Southern California. It’s proof that the right experience doesn’t have to end when the show does; sometimes it’s just the beginning.
ConAgra Slim Jim — AR Scavenger Hunt and Merch Giveaway
When Mattel brought back the Randy “Macho Man” Savage action figure, we built the scavenger hunt that turned 75,000 fans into the man himself. Using Snapchat AR and preprinted Snapcodes hidden across Comic-Con, fans could scan, transform, and post their own Savage Selfie. The lens got featured on Snapchat’s carousel and the figure sold out before the show even opened.
FX Networks — American Horror Story (FXhibition) – Bringing Artifacts to Life Through AR and Spatial Sound
Nearly 400,000 people attend Comic-Con every year. We gave a few thousand of them a private tour of a museum that shouldn’t exist. Guided by actors playing docents and armed with iPads, fans walked through the American Horror Story Eccentricities Collection, where taxidermied hybrids and cursed spellbooks came to life through AR. It won Gold for Best Use of Technology and Social at the Event Marketer EX Awards.
Physical artifacts came to life in front of guests. Groove Jones designed and fabricated all of the physical exhibit objects in the exhibit and created the digital AR experience. Today we can bring things to life through the latest AR Spatial Computing glasses.
3DMe Volumetric Capture – Animated Movie Poster Videos with You as the Star + 3D Miniature Collectible Take Away
Step into a scanner. Strike a pose. Get dropped into a scene from your favorite FX show, from American Horror Story to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Using 90 cameras and our XR Avatar Scanner, we turned Comic-Con fans into stars of their own custom GIFs.
The 3D statuettes were more than a nice prize; they were proof that fans could walk away holding a piece of the experience itself. After stepping into the scanner, participants who shared their custom GIF or movie on Instagram or Twitter with #fx3dmesweepstakes were entered to win a miniature figurine made from their own scan.
Fans could watch the process happen live, seeing their scan turned into a physical, detailed statue through 3D printing technology right in front of them. For a lot of attendees, that was the moment the experience became real. It wasn’t just a photo or a filter; it was a small, tangible object that carried their likeness home from Comic-Con.
