IR at WXO Summit: SWAMP's Ollie Jones on creating immersive brand activations

This article is part of Immersive Rumours' coverage of WXO's London Experience Week 2025.

SWAMP is a London-based brand agency that has previously worked with the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Warner Bros to create immersive and experiential activations. From an overnight stay in the John Wick universe to a blood-soaked Vought office, SWAMP have consistently delivered elaborate and detailed experiences for some of the world's best-known global brands, alongside a string of critically-acclaimed ticketed Original productions for the general public, including The Drop, Saint Jude and the Isklander Trilogy.

At WXO's London Experience Week 2025, SWAMP's Ollie Jones and ITV's Head of Brand Experiences, Charlie Cooper Henniker, presented a case study on their collaboration on a brand activation to promote Trigger Point Series 2 in 2024. Following their talk, we spoke to Ollie about SWAMP's path to becoming a brand experience agency, how that work sits alongside their Original productions, and their approach to creating new experiences.

Photo: SWAMP

Immersive Rumours: Hi Ollie, thanks for speaking with us today. Do you mind just introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about SWAMP?

Ollie Jones: My name's Ollie Jones; I'm the co-founder and CEO. SWAMP is a brand experience agency and an immersive experience production house. We work with brand partners to do marketing events, and we also, at times, produce our own independent direct-to-consumer events.

IR: Our readers are probably going to be more familiar with your original productions like The Drop and St Jude, but the brand activation side of the company is far more active than the original productions side. I would love to know how you first established yourself as an immersive brand agency.

Ollie: Me and Clem, my co-founder, and some of the key early members of SWAMP are from a theatre background; we studied theatre. Clem and I started the company because we saw a lot of brand experience stuff happening, and we thought it was a bit flat and bland. When we were sweating blood into an Edinburgh show for no money and putting all our free time, and often all our not-free time, into that, we began to realise that brand experience work could be commercially rewarding and could help to prop up that other side of our life. We thought we could add something to the world of brand experience, and our expertise fits it really well.

We always had dreams of doing our own stuff with the proceeds of brand work eventually, but that was expedited when we hit lockdown because everything got cancelled. We had nothing else to do, so we decided to make Plymouth Point, which is the first of the Isklander games.

We felt we should do something during lockdown; we had nothing else to do, and we thought we had a cool idea. We thought if nothing else, it'll be something you can put in front of people and say, ‘Do you want to do an online brand experience? They can be interesting…’ but it took on a life of its own and became its own thing, and actually did end up saving the company. We did get a lot of work through it, and it made its own money, so we came out of lockdown much stronger than when we went into it.

Photo: SWAMP

Following that, we did The Drop, our second show, for two reasons. One was to re-establish ourselves as a live company. Having gone into lockdown as a theatre company and come out as a digital experience company, we needed to reset everyone's understanding of what we did, but also we were starting to realise at that point that independent shows were not only artistically nourishing but also the best new business tool you could ask for. Potential clients would happily come; they'd happily take a free ticket to this show, especially when it turned out to be quite good and the press liked it.

So now we kind of exist on this cycle. The brand experience work is the vast majority of our income, and the originals, as we call them now, are not the vast majority of our income, but they serve their own purpose in terms of our artistic integrity, in terms of a new business tool, in terms of being a creative agency that actually puts its creative on its sleeve, and that puts its money where its mouth is and makes its own shows on the side, so that's why we do both.

Video: SWAMP

IR: You mentioned that transition came about largely during the pandemic off the back of Isklander. For others working in immersive that want to do the same thing, do you think there is a viable path following the same model that you did, or do you think it was a perfect storm of doing successful online work during lockdown?

Ollie: I think we probably had all the right tools in place for lockdown to be as successful as it was. I think if you look at us and if you look at increasing numbers of other people who brands are working with, a lot of them come from doing their own stuff, and that's how brands find out about them.

It's often that stuff that's better and more heartfelt and more interesting, and like it's a work of passion or organic artistic expression, and that's where I think the strongest connection with an audience is. It makes sense that people who work in the brand experience space go to things like that and think that's what I want my audience to feel.

Also, we made Plymouth Point on nothing. Something we keep trying to do is remember we made that show on nothing. There are ways to make something interesting within a budget; you don't need a brand experience budget to make something that makes you feel.

IR: Finally, one thing that I've always found interesting about SWAMP’s work, whether it’s branded or original production, is that you've never repeated an idea. With every new show, you completely reset. Is that coming from a place of just not wanting to repeat yourself, or are you trying to expand your scope so that in the future you have a wide-ranging set of tools to pull from?

Ollie: Yeah, I think the business sense would say it's not the right thing to do, because we find a formula that works and then immediately throw it away and start something new, but I do think it comes from a genuine interest in trying new things. New stories and ideas come to us, and we want to just get into them in different ways. We like to stay creatively motivated and creatively interested, and it in itself has become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now we've done however many originals that are completely different from each other, it keeps the impetus on us to make sure the next original IP is something brand new and different again, and we have an idea, which again is a completely new format…

Photo: SWAMP

---

For more information on SWAMP, visit swampexperience.com.

This interview is part of Immersive Rumours' coverage of the World Experience Summit and London Experience Week 2025, which has been made possible thanks to the World Experience Organization.