Awards
2026 EX Awards Winner
Category: Best Olympic Activation — a first-ever EX Awards category created to recognize the brand experiences that defined the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games.
Michelob ULTRA Summit is the inaugural winner of the Best Olympic Activation category at Event Marketer’s 2026 EX Awards. The category was created to honor the activations that set the standard for Olympic brand experience in the Milano Cortina cycle. As its first-ever winner, Michelob ULTRA Summit defines what the category recognizes: live, on-the-ground brand experiences built for the Olympic moment and the audiences celebrating it.
2026 Experiential & Event PR Awards Winner
Category: Best Sports Tie-in/Sponsorship Activation, presented by PRNEWS and Chief Marketer. Michelob ULTRA Summit also received honorable mentions in Best Olympic Tie-In/Sponsorship Activation and Best Overall PR Event/Experiential Campaign (B-to-C).
The win, together with its two honorable mentions, reflects recognition across sports sponsorship, Olympic activation, and overall event categories — the full range the program evaluates, in a single campaign.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sparks served as the lead experiential agency partner responsible for concept, creative, design, custom fabrication, AV and event production, interactive activation design, on-site execution, and program measurement. The work covered the four-day public outdoor village at the base of Canyons Village at Park City, the invite-only ULTRA Summit experience at Red Pine Lodge, and the new lighting infrastructure that illuminated the night ski run.
At Canyons Village at Park City Mountain in Park City, Utah, from February 19 to 22, 2026 — the closing weekend of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games.
Park City is one of the country’s most iconic winter destinations and is shaped by the legacy of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games and will welcome the world again in 2034. It was one of the only places in the U.S. where the activation’s story had the right physical context — a mountain inseparable from America’s Olympic Winter Games identity.
The Best Olympic Games Activation category is a new category created by Event Marketer’s EX Awards to recognize the brand experiences that defined the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games. The category recognizes Olympic Games activations as a discipline distinct from general sports sponsorships — and ULTRA Summit is its inaugural winner.
Three things. First, Sparks treats the environment as the medium, not the backdrop — every element is designed for the place it lives in, not adapted to fit it. Second, Sparks operates as one integrated team across strategy, creative, fabrication, and on-site delivery, which is what makes activations executable in conditions that would fragment across separate vendors. Third, Sparks designs for cultural timing, building experiences scaled to the moments that matter most to fans, audiences, and the brands that earn the right to host them.
Sparks specializes in experiential design for brands whose live programs perform on multiple axes at once — earned media, commercial impact, partnership visibility, fan acquisition, and brand authority — during the cultural peak of global sport. If a brand is activating a multi-year sponsorship, an Olympic Games platform, a championship series, or any outdoor program that needs to do more than show up, Sparks’ work on ULTRA Summit is a direct precedent.
