Alicia Richardson is the co-founder and managing partner of Crowd Access, the first independent measurement company creating a standard for experiential marketing. With 18 years of experience across advertising, media, sales, and measurement, Alicia has held roles at Undertone, OpenSlate, DoubleVerify, and Essence Ventures, where she helped lead sales across a powerful portfolio including Essence, Beautycon, Refinery29, and Afropunk. Today, through Crowd Access, she is helping bring clarity, accountability, and common language to an industry that has long relied on applause, attendance, and glossy recap reports instead of true performance measurement.
This episode we discuss:
- Alicia’s path from advertising and media measurement to building Crowd Access.
- Why experiential marketing has outgrown the language it borrowed from digital.
- The problem with measuring live events through attendance, applause, and surface-level engagement.
- Why brands need to define what success looks like before an activation is built.
- How Crowd Access is creating the first independent measurement standard for experiential marketing.
- The role of the Experiential Power Index, or EPI, in evaluating events and sponsorship opportunities.
- Why transparency, common language, and real-time measurement are critical to the future of the industry.
- How experiential teams can move from post-event “autopsy reports” to actionable insights while an event is still happening.
- Why agencies are often unfairly tasked with proving ROI without the right tools or shared metrics.
- How better measurement can help brands justify larger experiential budgets to CMOs, CFOs, and leadership teams.
Follow Alicia and Crowd Access at:
https://www.crowdaccess.co/
https://www.instagram.com/crowdaccess/
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