Creating a beautiful customer conference experience
Inforum is Infor’s largest annual event. It’s where the company interfaces with thousands of customers, prospects, analysts and the press to showcase new ideas, demonstrate products, provide training and make news. Beautifully presenting a clear message and providing a seamless experience for all attendees is imperative.
As the director of brand experience at Infor’s internal creative agency, Hook & Loop, I was responsible for helping to convey these messages and shaping the overall attendee experience at Inforum. My team worked diligently to creatively produce four successful shows in 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017.
Our work included:
Pre-show marketing—web, social, video, email
Environmental design, planning and execution
General session keynote presentations — story flow, multimedia, visual design
Videos and special interactive features
Branded collateral design and production
Attendee app re-skin
On-site creative and logistical support
Post-show communications
Because the branding budget for the event was tight every year, with the lion’s share of funds allocated to logistics (space rental, food and beverage, travel) and headline entertainment for the closing concert (Maroon 5, Bruno Mars, Flo-rida) the creative team had to get crafty and maximize every surface and touch-point in the attendee’s journey to make the experience feel special.
Along with the events team and core marketing team, we hustled for months leading up to the events and worked round-the-clock during the events themselves to ensure Infor put on a show of the highest quality and that content both at and about the show was as compelling as possible.
Our vision
An experience that’s bold, beautiful, fun, useful and cohesive across all media for every audience.
A look & feel that’s quintessentially Infor and provides an energizing backdrop for all content and interactions.
Success metrics
Positive attendee feedback
Positive executive feedback
Meeting budget requirements
Lack of snafus online and on-site
Event experience guide
At the outset of every show, we created a robust set of guidelines to codify the look and feel of the show to achieve buy-in from executives and stakeholders before executing and to ensure consistency of production from all contributors including in-house talent and external agency partners.
It included explanations, examples and assets that applied to pre-event marketing, on-site collateral and on-screen media.
General sessions
Along with a few other senior creatives and marketers, I worked directly with the executive team to flesh out the story each for each year’s general session keynote presentations. We defined the individual stories and how they would weave together to form a vision of the previous year’s achievements and its vision for the future.
My creative team produced all the assets for the huge general session screens along with other atmospheric elements that added dimension to the show.
We conceived the staging set-ups, oversaw lighting & music and co-directed the shows with our external A/V partner.
Every year featured two general session keynotes which ran about 90 minutes each. That’s a lot of planning, video, visual concepts, slides, and on-site coordination!
Environmental design
When it came to the on-site experience, our principle challenges were to:
- Create a connected feeling of space across the convention centers and off-site locations
- Provide an appropriate visually branded backdrop for interactions
- Make way-finding easy and intuitive for attendees
Budget constraints always meant making the most of limited surface area, so we used bold colors, super-graphics and clear type systems to make the conference feel special and cohesive.
The Hook & Loop remote studio
For the 2014 Inforum in New Orleans, we created a special exhibit which showcased Infor’s latest breakthroughs and experiments with enterprise UX.
The pavilion brought visitors behind the scenes of Hook & Loop and connected them with some of the organizations designers, developers and product managers.
The 360-degree experience was designed to entertain, inform and inspire. A hit with attendees, it conveyed the value and importance of design in business applications and showed Infor’s future enterprise software experiences.
Plus some of the best swag from the show ;)
Event marketing
Each year we designed and built the event’s website to provide information, generate interest and facilitate registration.
With each successive version, we made improvements based on the previous year’s performance metrics and feedback from users and stakeholders.
We supported marketing efforts through across a range of other channels with video, infographics, and dynamic content templates that gave marketers the flexibility they needed to deploy their messages to segmented audiences.
Final thoughts
Helping to produce four Inforums was incredibly demanding, frequently exhausting, always creatively exhilarating and ultimately an honor. To get a better sense of the show experience, check out this recap video (one of many we produced in-house):
Thanks to so many amazing colleagues for this experience: Angie, DG, Sara, Sarah, Valerie, Rachelle, Marc, Lindsey, Steve S, Joel, Peter G, Peter H, Steve E, Julian, Ted, Lauren, Josh, Melissa, Ric, Nan, Susan, Cory, Chuck, Chris, Adam, Danielle, and I’m sure I’m leaving out at least 30 important people!
If you’re an Infor customer, or curious about becoming one, check out the latest on the event.
