
Reaching new audiences: The Kia Connected Home at the Forum
August 28, 2025
Kia’s award-winning Connected Home is back! And it can be experienced in person at LA’s iconic Kia Forum through January 29, 2026.
If this environment looks familiar, you’re not imagining things. We originally designed, engineered and fabricated the Connected Home in 2024 to highlight the bidirectional vehicle-to-home charging capabilities of Kia’s vehicles. Located directly outside of CES’s main hall, the two-story, 2,400-square foot structure made quite an impression with tech-minded audiences (as evidenced here, here and here).
But if you, pardon the analogy, write a hit song, why would you only play it for one audience?
Fast forward to today. Leveraging custom-built properties from CES remixed for use in front of a live entertainment venue, Kia is bringing its story of electrification, convenience and reliability to life with new audiences — at a rate of approximately 17,000 people per night.
In our opinion, Kia’s revamped Connected Home experience is a win for two important reasons.
- A shift in how and where brands activate
Participation in in-person events finally appears to have bounced back to (and even exceeded) pre-pandemic levels. Recent research from Deloitte found that most consumers (61%) had attended at least one live event (such as a music concert or festival, in-venue sporting event, comedy show, or theatrical performance) within six months.
This increased participation in live events opens up opportunities for brands to engage audiences in the spaces they love (rather than expecting audiences to come to them). And such experiences can pay big dividends for brands. A recent study from Limelight Platform showed that 91% of consumers believe in-person branded experiences make them more likely to buy from a brand.
Shifts in consumer behavior serve as a perfect backdrop for the Kia Connected Home. (These shifts are also a key reason why we recently launched EWI’s Live Environments division). As customers continue to spend more time away from home and participating in live experiences, forward-thinking brands should be rethinking how and where they can show up for their audiences.
- Return on investment
By relaunching the Connected Home, Kia maximizing the ROI of their investment in experiential marketing. In our experience, temporary builds that can’t be reused aren’t always in a brand’s best interest. Though lightweight builds certainly do have their time and place (preserving budget, streamlining logistics, etc.), they can also lead to wasted resources and higher long-term costs across a years-long program. We’ve seen instances where brands inadvertently create more work for themselves by trying to save budget in the short term, as each time the brand wants to reach a new audience, they need to start over.
Kia sidestepped this pitfall by designing for longevity and adaptability from the outset of the Connected Home project. The project was purposefully designed to endure high traffic, environmental changes and repeat use. And now Kia can engage audiences with a unique, high-touch experience without having to reinvent the wheel.
With over 135,000 attendees at CES and 17,000 visitors at the Forum each night, we’re happy to see Kia reap the full benefits of their investment. It’s a great example of what can happen when design, fabrication, strategy and a long-term vision come together.

