Clorox Twitter Fountain
COMPANY NEWS
Event Marketer recently featured Clorox s launch of the Twitter-powered water fountain at SXSW Eco which highlighted the #safewaterproject.
Check out the article here!
Unique Event Formats: Pecha Kucha Night What it is and how to host one
LIVE EVENTS
Pecha Kucha (also called Pecha Kucha 20 20), is a nifty presentation format in which speakers have a very short, controlled period of time in which to introduce a series of Powerpoint slides. Traditionally held after work hours, Pecha Kucha was first conceptualized by expat architects based in Tokyo as the perfect event format to allow chatty architects to showcase their design work without rambling on too long. The event genre has since outgrown its architectural roots to accommodate a wide range of disciplines
The Pecha Kucha website features videos of past Pecha Kucha events and a global map of upcoming PK nights.
The presenter themselves is not in control of the rotation speed of the slides, and can t advance the slides on their own. The presenter stands in front of the presentation, and is granted exactly 20 seconds to speak about the content of each slide. The 20 second rule is sacrosanct: even if the presenter is done speaking before the 20 seconds is up, the current slide remains on the screen until the 20-second timer runs out. If the speaker over-shoots the 20 second mark, the controller will change the slide regardless. The 20 slide rule is treated with the same rigidity: presenters must show 20 slides, no more, no less.
The tight timeline and tight restrictions of this highly structured format makes for some excellent creativity.
What you ll need to organize a Pecha Kucha:
- A projector and large screen
- Laptop or computer loaded with all presenter s slides
- Ideally 2 microphones, one for the presenter and one for the slide controller
- An easy-to-reset timer for the slide controller
- Seating area for attendees
Presenters should submit their presentations to the organizer before the event so that organizers can run a quick compatibility check with the Pecha Kucha guidelines, and can predict how each event will go.
It might be wise to check out a local Pecha Kucha before you host one of your own. The official Pecha Kucha site has a mapped listing of events, so check out this page to find the Pecha Kucha nearest you.
National Book Festival 2013
COMPANY NEWS, LIVE EVENTS
For the third year running, Decibel was selected to manage the logistics and event operations for Washington DC s annual National Book Festival. Check out this behind the scenes video showcasing our work.
National Book Festival 2013- Behind the Scenes with Decibel Management from Decibel Management on YouTube.
Held every year on the National Mall and attended by tens of thousands of guests, the Library of Congress annual National Book Festival is one of Decibel s flagship events. The 2013 festival marked Decibel founder Dave Sonntag s 9th year on the NBF organization team, and Decibel Management s 3rd year handling NBF logistics.
More than 100 authors held events in the genre-specific pavilions, including Joyce Carol Oats, Margaret Atwood, Justin Cronin, and Christopher Buckley.
Decibel handled every aspect of the event, including collateral design management, site permitting, setup, breakdown, audio, and other logistics.
How to Screen Celebrity Speakers: Booking Tips for Your Event
EVENT INDUSTRY, TIPS & TRICKS
It s a tough wake-up call for readers of Perez Hilton or the Daily Mail: all those famous people who make headlines and sell newspapers don t always make engaging speakers at events. Sure, big names are great at getting butts in seats, but it s easy to forget that expertise or fame doesn t necessarily relate to engaging stage presence unless the celebrity is familiar and comfortable with the in-front-of-a-podium format. Here are a few things to remember when booking a celebrity guest at your event.
Run their talk through an approval process (just like everyone else)
Most conference planners would blanch at the idea of a keynote speaker being allowed to go on stage without casting a glance at their presentation materials, and without making sure the speech fits into the theme of the event as a whole. This should not change if your speaker has a face known to millions ask to see the goods before anyone takes the stage.
They re on the clock too
Celebrity speakers are often hired to appear at dozens of various conferences and events, and one can easily blur into the next. To ensure your to-do is not seen as yet another payday, ask your celebrity speaker to spend some time discussing how you can best tailor their speech and presence to your event s needs you deserve it.
A performer does not always a speaker make
You wouldn t ask an air-conditioning repair guy to fix your fridge. Same deal here: Well-known news anchors, singers, actors and media personalities may be dynamic on screen or on the air, doing what they love best, but that magnetism many not translate when facing a rapt audience of strangers. They may not have experience writing their own material, or they may be used to another performance format that bears little resemblance to public speaking. Similarly, famous subject experts may really know their stuff, but may not be used to explaining it or discussing it with laymen.
If possible, look to book celebrities with speaking experience. While booking agencies can get you the talent, it is important to utilize YouTube and other social networks to search for videos and examples of past speeches, if any, for a preview of what you can expect.
Michael Douglas could make a killing if he appears as Gordon Gekko
Give them a safety net
Some celebrity speakers, particularly on the political lecture circuit, just have it. From a lifetime of media training, they can take the mic in any packed conference room and deliver a speech that will enthuse and motivate a crowd at an annual meeting for chartered accountants. Others do not. If an event manager feels that their speaker will flounder alone, arranging to have them as the guest star in a panel discussion may be the best solution. This allows them to shine in specific moments, giving the audience their money s worth while taking away much of the pressure.
Screen for (and do your best to accommodate) divas
In addition to appearance fees, many celebrities will provide a sheet of requests called a rider , a list of additional instructions for everything from which snacks they d prefer to have available in the green room, to, in Kanye s case, requiring all chauffeurs to wear 100{04d9822e7d95da125d508d8e1efbcf2edc79acd8aec1f0bbdcbd6a6f684f9bb3} cotton fabrics. It s a good idea to get your hands on a rider before the booking actually occurs. If someone is going to require seven bottles of Dom in the green room, it ll be good to know that as early as possible.
Where to find some celebs!
APB: Speakers International A large listing of A-list speakers, including sample speaking topics, videos and biographies.
WSB: Washington Speakers Bureau The Washington Speakers Bureau brings audiences quality speakers and experts whose ideas are changing the face of business and inspiring the world.
Booking Entertainment A large agency with some great names
[Heads up] UK s Event Organizers Summit is Coming Sept 7 & 8
EVENT INDUSTRY
The UK isn t our typical stomping grounds, but the upcoming Event Organizer s Summit, produced by Forum Events and scheduled to be held at the Hilton London Wembley, caught our eye. What s different about about this industry pow-wow? No-BS decision-making, that s what.
The Event Organisers Summit brings together reputable suppliers and Corporate Event Organisers who want to find inspirational and innovative ideas for their future events. The Summit is the ultimate hassle-free, no-time wasting platform for executives, managers, directors and buyers who are directly responsible for the purchase of their organisation s event organizing products and services to create new business relationships with key suppliers for the event industry.
A get- er-done get-together where attendees are screened for their ability to sign that contract? Yes, please.
Hey, we love multi-day, everyone s-invited, three-speaker-tracks event industry conferences, we do. It s a nice way to get energized and keep a toe in the wider stream. But a high-impact, business-focused environment where every minute is maximized is a very welcome counterpoint if you re short on time (aren t we all?) and looking to expand your supplier list.
Plus, tickets are free for delegates. If you re in the UK, do follow these guys on Twitter and reserve your place.
Best Event Branding & Collateral: a June Roundup
EVENT COLLATERAL
First impressions are kind of a big deal, and event branding counts as a first impression. The beauty and usefulness of programs, maps, badges all the pieces of detritus that attendees are handed the minute they walk in the door constitute a collective statement of purpose and intention by the organizers. We love ogling killer examples of event branding, because we know we re not just looking at pretty artwork, we re looking at a dedication to detail. Here s a tip of the hat to four events and designers that really nailed it.
Now Happenings Festival
Designed by Rocio Fernandez, the Argentinian NOW Happenings festival collateral tacks down the tone of the event instantly: avant and highly artistic, an event for creatives and thinkers.
Launch Tradeshow
The Launch Tradeshow collateral set by San Diego s Wedge and Lever, say Organizers of an all-new, California-based lifestyle apparel Trade show contracted us to create a complete identity that would give the Launch Trade show a refined look and feel for its debut. And that they did, with a fresh, beachy theme.
Yay Festival
The Yay Festival is all about the thrum of raw creativity, an energy reflected in the primordial riot of jungle colors and driving brush strokes of their palette and font. Created by Snask from Stockholm, Sweden.
British Independent Film Festival
From the creator, Sam Lane: the idea was to create something innovative that would grab attention and connect with the British Public instantly in order to promote the Festival and Independent Film in Great Britain. This was achieved through the use of a bold colour scheme along with a copy-led campaign that has a very tounge-in-cheek British approach to it.
Heads Up and a Quick Review: Show Themes Specializes in Event Themes for WordPress
EVENT PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY
On what s turned into an essentially endless quest to catalog good event themes for WordPress, we stumbled across Showthemes.com, a WordPress theme development provider whose work is targeted at the event industry.
Before we dive into the detalis, perhaps a peek at their promo video:
Thank freakin goodness and hats off to Show Themes it s about time a development shop sat down to tackle this, and a good event industry theme catalog is very needed. Show Themes currently offers a catalog of 5 theme options, some of which are geared towards conferences, some toward expos, some towards managing multiple events. The basic features are all there: speaker management, Eventbrite / Etouches integration, schedule listing, countdown clocks, ticketing levels, and tiered sponsor management good stuff.
Now, a small critique: I know that Show Themes is just really kicking off and is bound to evolve quickly, so take this with a grain of salt, but I m not 100{04d9822e7d95da125d508d8e1efbcf2edc79acd8aec1f0bbdcbd6a6f684f9bb3} sold on the front-end and I think the themes still seem a tad clunky on the visual design side. Tyler Theme, for example, could benefit from some work on the typography (Vertoh Theme fares better in this regard).
Where Show Themes really shines in terms of evaluation is that they provide access to the WordPress back end prior to purchase many theme developers don t offer the same courtesy. A look at the Vertoh administration panel:
The back end is off to a good start, utilizing WordPress custom post types features to create event-specific input categories in WordPress upon theme install, but benefit from some tweaking and extras. For example, it would be nice if we could see each session s time and location on the session listing page, then drag-and-drop to reorder sessions, as opposed to having to enter each event and manually re-set the time and date in case the event schedule changes (which of course, it will).
Speakers & Exhibitors
Nice one: session administration pages list all speakers present in the system, and allow event managers to associate speakers with sessions. This is crucial, because it means that you can easily edit session content in a couple of clicks without a ton of fiddling around with code.
At the moment, speakers and exhibitors must be entered manually by the site administrator, meaning that application submissions must happen via a different system. It d be nice if future themes offered a custom registration that automatically created an unpublished draft speaker / exhibitor entry in the system for the administrator to review.
The verdict
While in its infancy, Show Themes should be on your must-watch list. We very much hope they continue to develop the concept and their list of theme offerings this is a much needed niche that we re excited to see filled.
Three Ways to Leave Conference Speaker Selection in the Hands of your Audience
EVENT PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY
In the age of social-everything, there s no need to take the close-your-eyes-and-pray method to choosing conference speakers.
Survey Last Year s Attendees
Your attendees from last year are one of your best resources for constructive feedback. It s best if you can collate feedback collected right after last year s event was over, but if you don t have access to that data (it was never collected, or maybe the organizer from last year s conference is unavailable), jump onto last year s mailing list and send out a survey. Whose speech did attendees most enjoy? What do they best remember about the previous year? What topics would they be most interested in hearing about this year? Anyone they d particularly like to hear from?
Use Klout
Professional event speakers are typically very active on social media, and they should have a significant following. The more followers and the more reach their posts get, the more support they have from the community, and the more likely they are to put on a good show. Klout is a free web app that measures the impact of experts by topic, using their social media oomph as a measurement. Search for any topic, and Klout will return a series of experts in that field, ranked by their social impact.
Use Speakerrate
Speakerrate, a sandbox project by the innovation lab at Viget, is a cool social startup that benefits event organizers, speakers and attendees, allowing planners to find the perfect speakers for your event based on real audience ratings and recommendations. You can view past talks, and see how attendees rated these speakers in the past.
It s Still Awesome: Five More Videos of Outdoor Facade Mapping
FACADE MAPPING
One of these days, we ll get over how awesome facade mapping is, but that day is not today.
Getty Museum, Los Angeles
For the launch of Pacific Standard Time at the Getty Center, Megavision Arts was tasked by producer Ben Bourgeois with designing a multi-media immersive experience that was projection-mapped onto five of the buildings. Incorporating artists works from over seventy Southern California institutions, the visual experience, synchronized with music and narration, illustrated the History of Art in LA: 1945 to 1980.
Grand Palais, Paris
Holy artspeak, Batman. Created by the abstract minds at teamLeab, The waterfall video art work is created in 3D space and uses what we consider to be the logic structure of spatial recognition of our Japanese Ancestors.
Parr Hall, UK
Made by the emerging technology gurus at Draw & Code, this projection mapping project featured Parr Hall, Warrington s top venue nestled in its historic quarter. With the help of local students, who provided the themes for the animation and its soundtrack too, we took the audience on a journey from Warrington s Roman roots through the literature of Lewis Carroll through the world wars and onto today.
Lakeview East, Chicago
Created by DCBolt Productions for the Lakeview East Festival of the Arts, this work was projected onto the Lakeview Athletic Club building facade to commemmorate the festival s 10th anniversary.
NOVAK
This one s kind of a mish-mash: the motion design guys over at NOVAK have put together a showreel of their recent projection mapping work, and it s worth a serious gander.
Decibel Vendor Profile: CGS Premier
EVENT INDUSTRY
CGS Premier, one of Decibel s vendors, has been around since 1993 producing awesome fabrications, specifically creating large-scale vehicle wraps for mobile media (trucks, trailors, vans, etc.), but also for custom trade show booths and displays, pop-up shops, and other set-it-up, break-it-down portable experiences. Fabrication is one of those things the public sees everywhere, but rarely questions where it came from: graphics and logos printed on semi trucks, advertisements on radio station mobile rigs, movie posters on the sides of city buses, branding on the outside of tour vans. We sat down with Bill Kurinsky, CGS s Director of Business Development, to talk shop.
Can you give us a quick intro to what you guys do?
CGS is a fabricator for the experiential marketing agency. We build everything from a 53 trailers to kiosks. The assets we build are used in marketing campaigns typically that provide a unique experience for the consumer. Some recent examples include: a mobile pro shop for the NFL, a pop-up retail station for the Gap store, and demos of mobile devices and high speed internet connections in a trailer for several telecommunication providers.
Can you give us a little rundown on when and how CGS got started and what was the inspiration or background behind the company?
We ve been in business for 20 years, and we started as a large format digital printer. In the mid 90 s, we starting building small marketing items for our print clients, such as unique trophies and other little things. We quickly grew into fabricating one-off trailers, and then in the 2000 s, our business really picked up and started to include larger fabs, such as SUV s, shipping containers, RVs etc
Your vehicle wraps are super cool. For those people out there who ve never done a project like that, can you tell us a little bit about how they re done (and how to get them off!)?
Wraps are a fun part of the business and truly give the projects we work on the special character everyone remembers about them. First, CGS creates a template to scale for our clients. The client s designers then use that template to create the custom wraps, and we provide insight about how to achieve the best wrap possible. We might call out areas that would effect the wrap negatively, or we might install the wrap in several layers to avoid seams in the vehicle or handles.
You guys print on a whole lot of unique surfaces what was one of your most challenging jobs?
This one s tough. We ve printed on concrete, I think would be the most unique.
For those readers that have never done a fabbing project, one burning question: what s the deal with photo resolution and printing at ginormous sizes? Can you get a quality print from a 300dpi image?
Actually, we like to see 400 DPI at 1/4 scale, but DPI isn t the only consideration in terms of quality you ve also go to think about how good the printing equipment is and how much the experience the installation team has with similar projects. Our printers take more passes across the wrap surface, which creates a prettier, more vibrant image, and our staff is very good at getting the digital color to match the actual printed product. You ve also got to be extremely well-versed in installing the final prints on a whole host of surfaces, expertly removing sideview mirrors and lights so that the vinyl can be tucked and flattened properly.
Boring business question: what sets you apart from your competitors?
Not boring at all, and that s simple: our people set us apart. We take all of our projects to heart, so much so that all of our staff can recall small details on projects they did years ago. Personally, I take great pride in two things: one, when clients come to the shop to see their finished project and they say Wow, I can t believe it, it looks just like the drawings we provided! At that point I know we hit a home run. Two, when a client tells us they plan to use something for a single-year summer tour, but three years later they come back and they ve been using our product the whole time. That s real craftsmanship.