THE CHALLENGE: On Event Production Co has enjoyed a long association with Virgin Media Business and we were delighted to once again be teaming up with the brand, via our good friends at JDPL, to help it deliver the final of it 2018 Voom business competition.
Following our successful delivery of the event in previous years, we were once again commissioned to handle full production for this year’s event.
This is the fourth time that we’ve worked on Virgin Voom and the company really ratcheted the event up this year to make it bigger and better than ever before. It included new categories and catered for bigger businesses.
Held at London’s Tobacco Dock, finalists from six fast-growing start-ups and small businesses had to deliver their pitch to Virgin supremo Sir Richard Branson.
He was joined by a judging panel made up of former Apprentice star and Tropic Skincare founder Susan Ma, Innocent Drinks founder Richard Reed, serial entrepreneur and TV presenter Sophie Morgan, and Virgin Media Business’ MD, Peter Kelly.
An audience of 300 people attended the event, which was hosted by One Show presenter Alex Jones and broadcast live to 20,000 viewers via the Virgin Media Business Facebook page.
A total prize fund worth more than £1m was up for grabs and the winners were presented with their awards by multi-Olympics champion Sir Mo Farah, Director of Going the Extra Mile at Virgin Media.
INSPIRING THE AUDIENCE: Our brief was to create and deliver the staging and full technical production for the event, ensuring it was on brand and facilitated maximum audience engagement. We also had to co-ordinate production on the day to ensure the event could be run and broadcast simultaneously via social media.
We supplied a giant 30m x 3m LED video screen, which provided a 12k pixels-wide canvas for the event content to be displayed upon. It was built in three sections, a straight middle section and angled side thrusts, to tie in with the brand and make the set feel more immersive.
We also liaised with the content designers to ensure that all the on-screen content would work in such an irregular format and to check it wouldn’t be too busy and distracting to the live audience.
To compliment the screen we designed and constructed, at our in-house facility, a 10m wide split level triangular stage finished in high gloss flooring and fascia.
We supplied a technical team of ten people, plus an additional team including cameras, show-caller and event team of 30 to coordinate the show and ensure the proceedings went off without a hitch.
