Independent marketing and creative agency Curious Orange has launched a dedicated experiential agency, Curious Orange Live.
The new agency will be headed up by Kieran Traynor who has been appointed as managing director for EMEA. Traynor brings more than 18 years’ experience across production, client services, strategy and agency growth. His background includes two years working in-house at Google on B2B product marketing events across EMEA as well as stints with Catapult, Verve and the S4 Capital-owned Monks where he worked with Curious Orange founder Emmet McCaughey and co-founders Linda O’Connor, Caoimhín Magee and Brian Finucane.
The new agency has already secured work with Google, YouTube and Discord and it will operate as a standalone business in its own right, providing strategy, creative, production and measurement services while drawing on Curious Orange’s wider content, digital, social, design and technology capabilities.
The launch follows a period of expansion for Curious Orange, which was founded in 2024 and now operates across EMEA, the US and Latin America. Its leadership team also includes co-founder and board member Shawn Mielke, a former Google and eBay marketing leader, and co-founder Jen Coleman, who previously held senior roles at Google and YouTube.
Emmet McCaughey said the decision to establish a dedicated experiential agency, rather than add events to Curious Orange’s existing services, was deliberate.
“Brands want genuine live experts who also have the backing and scale to handle complex briefs,” he said.
“Curious Orange Live brings its own leadership and sharp focus, backed by the full capabilities of our wider agency. We know Kieran inside out, and we’re entirely aligned on building a unique force in live experiences.”
Kieran Traynor added that the agency would maintain a small senior core team, assembling additional expertise around individual client briefs.
“The name is new. The experience definitely isn’t. Many of us have worked together before, and we’ve deliberately kept the core team senior and tight, building the right team around each brief,” he said.
He added that the agency aimed to become involved earlier in clients’ planning, helping determine the role an experience could play before its format was agreed.
“Experiential partners are often brought in once the audience, format and brief are already pretty formed. We’ve built Curious Orange Live to be useful in that earlier conversation, when a client has an audience, a business challenge and an important moment, but hasn’t necessarily decided what the answer is yet.
“This gives us the opportunity to help shape the brief, find the idea that makes the experience worth being part of, and take it all the way through to the room and beyond. We don’t need more events for the sake of it. We need better reasons for people to show up.”
