The Meet (2019)
Another one of Steve's crazy ideas, a festival-style customer conference.
The company wanted to do a customer conference, but most parts of the group were just holding theirs in-office and only a handful of people turned up. So we brainstormed ideas about how we could attract more people, and somehow we got on to music festivals and rock music posters. I'm pretty sure it was Jo who mentioned Glastonbury first, but I'll still blame Steve "King of Strange Requests" Atkin.
So I'm tasked with making the areas of the business appear like rock band logos, close enough that people get drawn in but not so close that we get sued. I say rock bands, I tried to use as big a spread as I could – from rap to heavy metal to post punk to indy bands – although not many of the rap ones made it into the final product.
We had the posters printed up on really nice paper in a couple of sizes, although we had a bit of a reverse Spinal Tap when a few turned up and we hadn't realised how big they were going to be - but at least they weren't three metres by one metre, which is what someone originally wrote down! The T-shirts were a nice touch too.
We also got to use the new website to its full potential.
Right from the start of developing the website code base I added the facility for per-page scripts and styles - the ability for single pages to have their own custom CSS and JavaScript. This means that creating microsites can be done directly in the CMS.
This meant there was no need for a separate site, just a bit of CSS to hide the headers and footers, then restyle everything (and then make sure it stays restyled in dark mode). Thenm like the rest of the site it's still searchable, still has all of the social media bells and whistles and so on.
It was great to see the double-takes people in the office, and even more gratifying to see over a hundred people attend. We took over an industrial warehouse that usually held a street food market, had it lit nicely, got one of the street food vendors in to provide free toasties, played some tunes...
Steve and I have an ongoing joke where I moan about not having business cards, and he points out that I don't go anywhere. And I usually duck out of getting filmed. But somehow I got papped talking to a customer and even made it in to the final video Apparently I have expressive hands?