Curious Orange has launched Curious Orange Live, a standalone experiential agency led in EMEA by Kieran Traynor as managing director.
Curious Orange itself only launched in March 2024, founded by Emmet McCaughey, previously managing director of Media.Monks in Ireland (before that, Firewood Marketing, which S4 Capital acquired in 2019), alongside Linda O’Connor, Caoimhín Magee and Brian Finucane. By its first anniversary the agency had grown to a team of around 15 spread across Dublin, Paris, Barcelona, New York, Austin and San Francisco, with clients including Decathlon, AIB Life and Irish Rail alongside Google and YouTube.
Traynor has more than 18 years in production, client services and agency growth, including two years in-house at Google running B2B product marketing events across EMEA. He previously worked with McCaughey, O’Connor, Magee and Finucane at Monks. Curious Orange’s senior leadership also includes co-founder and board member Shawn Mielke, formerly of Google and eBay, and co-founder Jen Coleman, who held senior roles at Google and YouTube.
McCaughey said the decision to spin out a dedicated live agency, rather than add events as another in-house capability, was deliberate. “Brands want genuine live experts who also have the backing and scale to handle complex briefs,” he said. “We know Kieran inside out, and we’re entirely aligned on building a unique force in live experiences.”
Traynor said the aim was to get involved earlier than most experiential agencies typically do. “Experiential partners are often brought in once the audience, format and brief are already pretty formed,” he said. “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.” He added: “We don’t need more events for the sake of it. We need better reasons for people to show up.”