Abstract black and orange dot pattern with the word "COLLAB" partially visible at the bottom.

Experiences that last.

Collab is an experience studio. We design, build and run multi-year brand programs your customers plan their year around.

Every industry has evolved to meet its consumers. Experiential hasn't.

It's still a loud spectacle designed to disappear, and measured by who showed up instead of who came back.

We design brand programs and environments that last — built on the same principles as the neighborhoods, parks, and third places that have held human attention for centuries.

Stop building experiences that expire.

Field Notes
Field Notes
The Red Bull logo featuring two white bulls facing each other with a circle between them, and the words 'Red Bull' underneath.
ESPN logo on a black background
Black background with white Adidas logo featuring a trefoil and the word 'adidas' beneath.
Universal Pictures logo with a globe and the word 'UNIVERSAL' beneath it.
Bold white text on black background reading '2XU'.
Black background with the word 'COMIC' in bold white letters, with the letter 'C' stylized as a comic book speech bubble.
Harley-Davidson logo with the text "Motor Cycles" on a black background.
Logo of Pluto TV with a black background, a white circle, and the word 'pluto' in lowercase black letters inside the circle, and 'tv' in white letters outside the circle.

  • The Lodge and Santa HQ weren't typical brand programs. They were long-term platforms we built our marketing strategy around — the Lodge for seven years at CMA Fest, Santa HQ for six years across fifteen Macerich properties. Matt was the executive producer on both, and was a huge reason they compounded year over year. He understood that the job wasn't to deliver a moment. It was to build something we could come back to.

    — Shannon Driver | Former SVP of Marketing, HGTV

  • For five consecutive summers, Cartoon Network programming became part of how we sold the season at Atlantis. Families booked their summer around it. Matt was the executive producer on the ground, and played a significant role in ensuring the program ran at the level a resort of our scale requires. You can't fake five years of renewals. The numbers have to work, year after year. They did.

    Amanda Felts | Former VP Guest Activities/Programming, Atlantis, Bahamas

➔ LEADERSHIP

Matt Ford

Founder, Executive Producer | Collab

The brands that break thru the glass ceiling all decide to build something that compounds.

Most don't. Most pay every year to rebuild the same kind of attention from scratch. A new campaign with a new agency. Whatever got built in the summer is forgotten, and by January, everyone's starting from zero again.

I've spent seventeen years on the other side of that. Touring experiences across multiple markets. Flagship builds at Comic-Con and the Super Bowl. I’ve won the awards and I know how to create a spectacle.

But the work I'm proudest of wasn't the biggest, it was the work that kept coming back.

The HGTV Lodge at CMA Fest ran for seven years. Santa HQ rolled out across fifteen Macerich properties for six holiday seasons. Cartoon Network owned five summers at Atlantis. The storytelling got better each year, and the teams started each season ahead of where they finished the last one.

I started Collab to build more of those.

Gabriel Albin 

Founder, Executive Creative Director | RÊV IMMERSIVE

I've been directing experiences for 21 years. From immersive entertainment to experiential marketing (and even the Peace Corps in Africa) — I've built expertise in shifting how people feel, think, and act through experiences that brands can own, repeat, and expand.

My work has generated multi-year partnerships and sustained investment: touring exhibitions across 16+ countries over 15 years, and the growth of tentpole experiential properties driven by client demand.

I create experiences that work because I know how people work — for brands including Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal, Amazon, and the NFL. The experiences I've led have reached tens of millions of people, won CLIO and Event Marketer Gold, and generated billions of media impressions including from the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Variety.

➔ HOW WE WORK

We work with brands serious about building long-term community with their existing customers. If that's the goal, here's the shape of the engagement:

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Schedule a Call

  • Before we build anything, we map what's already working in your brand: where your customers already show up, what they already love, where affinity is being diluted, and what's missing. We identify the real moments in your audience's year and the real places they'd return to. That becomes the foundation.

  • The form depends on your brand. It could be an owned venue at a tent pole event, an annual gathering you host, a destination program at a partner resort, or a multi-market footprint. Whatever the form, the experience is the anchor. It’s the source the content team writes from, the social team amplifies, and the main driver for your CRM.

  • Every program we design is built to run for years. We work with you on the programming cadence, the rituals and moments inside the experience, the handoffs into your other channels, and the measurement framework that makes the growth visible to the leadership team. We call this Designed Inevitability. Four pillars. One strategy. One goal.

    See the full framework HERE.

➔ START WITH AN AUDIT

If community is actually the goal for your brand, the first step is understanding what's already working, what's not, and where the durable infrastructure should live.

Collab offers The Community Audit — a strategic diagnostic that maps your brand's existing community infrastructure, identifies the gaps, and delivers one pilot concept — fully scoped and ready to execute.

Four to six weeks. Delivered by Collab + Rêv Immersive.

Learn more
Learn more