Case Study: Google Cloud NEXT conference
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What are the challenges of putting on a B2B event for a consumer giant?
When it comes to big brands, it doesn’ t get much bigger than Google.
Late last year, event production agency WONDER London won the pitch to put on seven Google Cloud NEXT conferences for the internet giant in EMEA in 2017.
“ They were interactive events for the Google Cloud team,” director Ben Turner tells Engage.“ The audience was made up of IT decision makers, developers, marketing people and sales people within the companies Google attracts with Google Cloud products.”
The events, unlike the main Google brand, were B2B through and through, which required WONDER to rethink and reimagine the iconic Google branding in a business context.
“ You can be a lot more flexible with the Google search engine brand,” explains Turner.“ With Google Cloud it’ s a corporate sector that they’ re working in, but there’ s still a bit of flexibility. There are just more guidelines for the logo positioning and things like that.”
The brief from Google was this: reimagine the flagship Google Cloud NEXT conference in San Francisco for an EMEA audience.
“ The San Francisco event is 12,000 people and takes place over three or four days, with a larger budget than the London event,” says Turner.“ They made a creative and design for it and then it was our job to create our version of that event
suitable for the EMEA markets in terms of audience size, venues and budget.”
Against the clock
While some of the planning could be done in advance, the WONDER team had to wait until the San Francisco event in March to finalise the design and content of the EMEA events. Since the first EMEA event – London – was set to take place at the start of May, the timing was tight.
WONDER worked closely with audio visual production company Blitz by GES, which provided video, lighting and audio for the London event.
“ It was a great working relationship,” recalls Turner.“ Some of our team had worked with Blitz on big jobs before and it was a really good relationship. When you’ re doing such a big job like that, under such tight time constraints, it’ s great to have a supplier that backs you up with everything you’ re doing.”
The event that WONDER created had to be easy transportable, as it was required to travel round seven EMEA venues throughout the year.
“ Our job was to create a set of assets – stage sets, pods, exhibition stands – which could then go on tour,” explains Turner.“ It’ s logistically challenging doing all of those events, and not having visibility of all the locations and sizes at the start.”
WONDER London’ s first task after receiving the brief from Google was to select seven venues around EMEA for the conferences to take place in.
ExCeL London was chosen as the UK venue for the event, as it had room for the large stages plus the numerous plenary
6 engage
Winter 2017 / 18 in association with GES