Practice makes perfect – Creating memorable event experiences

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This is especially important given how much money is often invested in live conferences. Staging, equipment and audiovisual technology can take up a massive proportion of an event budget. Reduce the risk of embarrassing technical errors by rehearsing with all elements before the event goes live. It’s something we strongly advocate here at The Outlook Creative Group.

Your schedule will be unpredictable.

People will be tired from travelling.

Technical issues may occur.

By rehearsing, you minimise the risks these issues bring by putting people at ease and reassuring any nerves ahead of time. And hey – it’ll help you to relax too, which will mean you get to enjoy it more and won’t be rushing around sweating madly.

As Alan Jay Zaremba notes in his book Speaking Professionally, rehearsing can minimise 75% of speakers’ nervousness. Additionally, when it comes to public speaking, 95 per cent of a presentation’s success will come from the work put in before presenting. This may include:

  • Becoming familiar with the way the room looks and how the audience will be seated
  • Analysing the audience and who will be participating
  • Preparing for any audience interaction (or non-interaction if no-one puts their hand up!)
  • The type of equipment and microphone used, and the levels check with the sound desk
  • Preparing how to walk on and off the stage, the (if any) music cue, and the distance and route=
  • Checking any questions that have been sent in ahead of time
  • Reading through any scripts or notes to ensure you know your subject in detail
  • Practising with any videos, slideshows, animations or presentations that enhance and support your story to ensure they’re working and your team know what to press and when

Even though the hare had an advantage when it came down to speed, the slow and steady tortoise always wins the race. When you put aside dedicated time to ensure your communication engages your audience, you create experiences to remember.

Key techniques to ensure you’re always getting the best use of time

1. Schedule a dedicated rehearsal slot with the technical team to run through the event cue to cue. This prevents any last-minute changes or anything getting forgotten.

2. Ensure you have everything you need for your practice run-through ahead of time, and that all the people you’re working with know where they need to be. You can do this by printing off a running list or schedule for everyone to review.

3. Make sure all the technical staff have aligned their equipment with the communications for the most effective results.

How Outlook can help

Our experienced Events team can help you plan your event, provide dedicated timings and establish what to prioritise. Get in touch!

Brand storytelling that your audience cares about

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Your brand’s story is more than marketing blurb to catch people’s attention. It should express the very foundation of your company’s culture. It’s a way to inspire, and it’s a way to intrigue, letting your audience grasp your values and why you’re the best choice. Remember: your storytelling is a powerful tool.

How to tell your brand’s story

Whether your story is built around characters or just your commitment to great products and services, it needs to be authentic. When you speak honestly about who you are and what you do, you stimulate the emotions and imagination of your teams and your potential customers.

Think of the high-impact brands such as comparethemarket.com. Through their memorable and long-standing meerkat character campaign, you know their story, their product and their web address. Through engaging, entertaining and shareable character-driven content, comparethemarket.com connects with their audience.

This is how storytelling makes a difference. It brings people into your world, speaks to their needs and creates space for you to connect.

Getting the right message to the right audience boosts your customer engagement, brand awareness and sales. In practice, that means using multi-format content like video, infographics, animations and direct marketing that all point to a single story. Your values, visual identity and critical messages all need to be consistent throughout your website, advertising and promotional activity to get the best results.

Your brand’s message is important

The best stories tap into people’s emotions and genuinely connect a customer with what the brand stands for. Painting these pictures, and creating personal relationships, builds long-term brand loyalty, returning customers and, ultimately, business growth.

We’re experts in building ideas that people can connect to. Talk to us today about how we can help you write the story that drives your company’s success.

The partner of choice for all your production needs

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Here are four reasons why we think collaboration is the key to effective teamwork:

1. Keeping communication open

True collaboration means that everybody is listened to. Communication in the workplace shouldn’t just be one way – or two ways, or three – but every way. We want you to know you can say whatever needs to be said. By keeping all avenues of communication open we can produce the best end product possible. Genuine and unafraid communication is the only way to achieve your maximum potential.

2. We challenge each other to be better

Working together as equals is exhilarating, and there’s nothing quite like a partner to keep you on your toes. This is all the more true in creative work. Think how many of the world’s greatest artists and thinkers did their best work in partnerships: Lennon and McCartney, Monty Python, Simon and Garfunkel, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak – need we go on?

3. Every idea is worth hearing

Not all thoughts are good ones, but you never know where the best ideas will come from. We love a good brainstorm and collaborating with our colleagues and clients. We take everybody’s ideas seriously. Some of our best work has sprouted from the most surprising places – long may it continue to do so.

4. We love working together

Last but certainly not least, working as a real team is freeing. Nobody feels left out, and everybody is valued; work is more enjoyable and we’re all the more productive for it. There’s nothing quite like looking forward to work every morning, knowing that each day brings new challenges, new ideas and new collaborations.

If you like the sound of the way we work, get in touch to discuss how we can collaborate with you to achieve success together.

Transform your internal communication with video

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With inboxes full to bursting, internal emails often go unread or are quickly skimmed.

Similarly, days jam-packed with internal meetings and presentations result in lost productivity and resources, as well as a few snores. Face-to-face sessions can be especially difficult and costly when workforces are based remotely or work non-standard hours.

Create engagement and authenticity

Video helps you to bring energy and honesty to your internal communications. When employees feel like they are involved in the business, they work for, and that senior managers take the time to connect with them, engagement and productivity improves.

As well as this, research shows that viewers retain 95% of a message from a video compared to 10% when reading it in the text.

  • Share interviews with CEOs and senior management on corporate policies, financial performance and crisis management.
  • Creatively explain internal announcements and changes in company structure or direction to increase awareness and feeling of engagement and inclusion.
  • Learning and development teams can take full advantage of video with inductions for new starters, full progression training programmes and refresher courses.
  • Increase team morale with peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, weekly team updates and company events highlights.
  • Through existing distribution channels, your videos can be instantly accessible to employees on all their devices and are perfect for saving in a shared location for repeat viewing.

Maximise your ROI with Outlook

For many businesses, getting started with video can be daunting.

At The Outlook Creative Group, we offer more than just a technical service. With their background in creative and strategic production, our Video team will ensure that your content gets watched, not skipped.

  • Fast – Circulate messages quickly with next-day or same-day edits.
  • Engaging – Develop a cost-effective strategy that creates an authentic and rewarding dialogue between executives, employees and shareholders.
  • Value for money – Cut back on full production costs without compromising on quality with our one-, two- or four-person film crew.
  • Flexible – Give direct feedback to our team while still shooting and work as closely with us as desired.
  • Measurable – Keep track of who’s watching your content to measure impact and effectiveness.
  • With clear price packages, you can be sure of a right-first-time approach. We’re experts in creating and delivering meaningful content that generates results for our clients.

Get in touch to find out how you can incorporate video into your internal communications strategy.

Our free venue-finding service

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The vision starts with the venue

We know the venue for your event is as much a part of the ambience as anything else you do. That means it’s important to find somewhere that reflects what you’re trying to achieve for your guests and partners.

If you’ve got big ideas for this year’s events, our free high-quality venue-finding service gives you the power to deliver your vision.

It goes beyond location, location, location

We offer a wide range of venue-finding services including:

  • Honest opinions – We’ll help you choose the right place for you by sharing with you honest feedback from previous event organisers.
  • Support with suppliers – We can make practical and well-researched suggestions on which suppliers will suit your needs.
  • Venue visits – We can organise for you to visit suitable sites and support you in asking all the right questions.
  • Price updates – You’ll know when a suitable venue for your needs is offering a great price.
  • Customer focus – Let us know what you’ve got planned for the year and we’ll get you great venue ideas well ahead of time.
  • Advice on accommodation – We’ll negotiate with local hotels to get your guests suitable and well-priced places to stay
  • Our brand new venue-finding guide – Click to download.

Talk to us about booking the perfect venue for your meeting, conference, celebration, client entertainment or any other opportunity.

Top 10 event activities and innovations

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Check out our top 10 event activities and innovations to inspire your next event.

1. Live streaming

Engage a larger audience by live streaming your event to participants who couldn’t attend or for a closed room event that streams out to its full audience.

Before the event: Promote your live stream before the event with a teaser trailer that includes details of the event for participants to subscribe. A streaming link can then be sent out to attendees 48 hours before you go live within an e-flyer or posted on to a social media platform.

During the event: Subscribers are sent a reminder that the stream will go live. Once they click on the link, they can access the live stream and enter the event. For further engagement, you can provide them with the option to post questions during the live event.

After the event: Get the most out of your investment by posting the full footage or selected highlights online or internally for delegates to rewatch and share.

Check out our live event capture service.

2. Real-world role play

Professional actors bring realism to an artificial situation during your event. This may be during assessments, training, developments, simulations/scenarios or just for fun.

A unique way of getting your delegates involved is to invite them to act out potential real-life situations in an office environment to learn and discuss how to deal with challenges.

3. Table microphones and CatchBox

Table microphones allow your audience to ask presenters questions immediately and at the touch of a button. Rather than waiting for a host to struggle through tight tables with a mic, it allows delegates to ask their questions more freely. The microphones are still controlled via a sound desk.

Another option is CatchBox, a soft foam square with an inbuilt mic to the centre of it. Instead of having to wait for the mic to ‘walk’ to the delegate, why not have someone throw it?

4. Live artist (or turn your delegates into artists!)

Use live visual artists to scribe what they see and hear during a conference. On a 2m canvas, the artist can create stylish caricatures that highlight the main topics of conversation. After the event, you have the option to take this piece away and install in your offices or have a smaller version printed.

Another option is to install a blank canvas outlining the event’s theme or brand logo and let the delegates add their contributions.

5. Open Space Technology

Open Space Technology is a new approach to events through an agenda- and technology-free forum designed to encourage discussion and problem-solving. With a robust pre-defined theme, the leader facilitates parallel working sessions and discussions, controlling the timings and flow of information.

6. Virtual and augmented reality

As two of the hottest trends in events, virtual and augmented reality technology is continuously evolving and changing to keep up with its audience. Virtual reality offers a personal experience, separating the delegate from the real world by a headset, while augmented reality is incorporated into the broader event itself.

Stand out from the crowd by offering your delegates interactive experiences to promote your brand, product or message.

7. Group orchestra

Always well-received by delegates, your event can include a musical collaboration exercise. Your representatives are split into smaller groups to each learn a small music part (on violin, drums, brass, etc.). They then come back together to form a collective orchestra with assistance from professional musicians. This principle can be applied to other musical genres or other activities where parts come together to make the whole.

Our Video team can be on site to capture their learning and the final product, which can be shared on social platforms and internal comms.

8. Unique venues

There is an increased demand for venues that are unique and stand out from your standard conference hotel with awful carpet. Enhance your event’s impact by using a venue that reflects the theme, whether that’s technology and innovation or something grand and high profile. The venue could even be a blank canvas they can be transformed completely.

Check out our free venue-finding service.

9. Content enhancement

Presentations are a presenter’s primary tool to engage, inform and interact with their audience. Many presenters are veering away from death by PowerPoint and more of a TED-like presentation with great imagery, which is more impactful and memorable. Keeping an audience engaged during a presentation is key to ensuring they walk away with your message!

10. Event apps

Event apps now enable a delegate to have all of the information they need at the swipe of a finger. Systems such as Ignite Response (our event app) allow delegates to interact seamlessly with presenters, panels and each other.

Utilise event apps for obtaining post-event feedback. We’ve seen an increase of up to 80% in returned forms when they are done electronically on a tablet.

If you need some help with ideas or a venue for your next event, give us a call.

How to be a content Hero

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Zero to Hero

Hero content celebrates your major moments as a brand. Whether it’s in a featured blog, article, video or campaign, this is the inspirational and aspirational content that focuses on your brand’s story, identity or values. It is designed to raise awareness, be shared widely and bring new audiences to your brand.

While some brands still have the expectation that all their marketing content needs to go viral, this perception is slowly diminishing. Hero content is designed to have the potential to go viral – it is the crown jewel in your content strategy tiara – but its main goal is to boost brand visibility in the short term so you can build an engaged audience with other content.

Schedule your Hero pieces to promote the most important events of the year or an exciting new product launch. Great examples from 2017 that entertain and inspire with emotional storytelling are John Lewis Christmas advert #MoztheMonster and Audi: Clowns TV advert for new intelligent technology.

Here at the Outlook Creative Group, we’ve created Hero content for big brands, including the inspiring 1000 Days video for EDF Energy for 2012 London Olympic Games:

Make the most of your Hero content

The YouTube Brand Playbook, which pioneered the Hero, Hub, Help strategy, includes advice for maximising your Hero content:

  • Use Google Trends to gauge how much early and sustained interest there is around an event.
  • Develop a programming calendar covering all the Hub content you are going to create or curate for the event.
  • Ask yourself: Would people bother to share this on social media? Would this make a good newspaper headline? Can you imagine your audience paying for this content?
  • Ask for your audience’s participation in the event. Can they design it? Star in it? Vote for it? Turn your audience into advocates who will promote ahead of the launch.
  • Use offline advertising, social media posts and influencer support. Planned promotional strategies that build over time work better than one-off flashes of activity.

Although it’s roots are in YouTube, Hero content is more than just video. Create and promote as many different content types on the platforms your audience regularly uses to develop shared passions and start building your community.

We can help turn you into the hero of your business. Get in touch to start the conversation.

Our new live event capture service

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Share your event beyond the live audience with our new cost-effective video service, designed to capture and distribute your messages and content securely, no matter where your wider community are.

Capture, share, inspire

A video is the most effective message-sharing strategy:

  • One-third of online activity is spent watching videos.
  • 82% of Twitter users view video content on Twitter.
  • 45% of people spend more than an hour watching Facebook or YouTube videos a week.
  • More than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube each day.
  • 92% of mobile video viewers share videos with others.
  • By 2019, internet video traffic will account for 80% of all consumer internet traffic.

Source: Wordstream

We’re experts in delivering meaningful content and communications that create results. We’ve brought our Events and Video teams closer together to combine skill sets, knowledge and client insight to offer you a brand new live event capture service.

  • Maximise your investment in your live event by extending the shelf life of your content.
  • Next-day or same-day edits mean messaging can be circulated quickly.
  • Share multiple optimised edits for greater social engagement, including highlight videos, full presentations and audience interviews.
  • Give us direct feedback during the event filming and editing.
  • Generate event hype online and on location before and during the event.
  • Live stream and share your event to any phone, tablet or remote location.

Some of our exciting new packages

    Package

      Ideal for

       Key feature 
Presentation capture
  • Recording formal presentations
  • PowerPoint heavy content needing description
  • Town halls and stakeholder pieces to camera
  • Fast turnaround or streaming
  • Allowing essential information to reach a wider audience – quickly
  • Expandable coverage depending on the size of event/number of speakers
  • Autocue available if required
Full event content capture
  • Full event video capture
  • Sending live capture to screen
  • Including audience participation elements, multiple presenters, etc.
  • PowerPoint
  • Playing out video content
  • Capturing more significant events with more dynamic editing and creative options
  • Individual presentations, topics and content delivered as separate pieces of material ready for sharing
Live event capture plug-in
  • Large events with existing AV and big-screen coverage
  • Plug-in to existing technical set-up to maximise the event activities and sharing
As-live panel discussion package
  • As-live panel discussions and interviews
  • Keeping the dynamic nature of a studio debate in a controllable environment.

The service extends beyond the set packages listed – talk to us about your event needs. You will always receive one-on-one personal attention at a very affordable price, with every deliverable designed and considered for your unique requirements by experts in video communication.

We’re a quality business, its official!

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We’re proud to announce that we’ve been awarded ISO 9001 accreditation!

This accreditation recognises that we have in place clear processes that cover what we do, how we do it, and where we can improve and manage quality across every part of our business.

That’s just the way we’ve always worked, which is why ISO 9001 principles are reflected in our company core values:

Creativity – Making imaginative ideas a reality by empowering talented people

  • Our talented team work hard to improve their skills and innovation continually.
  • By planning, we make sure we have the right resources and knowledge.

Commitment – Delivering a consistently high standard in everything we do

  • All of our services and procedures meet both customer requirements and regulatory and statutory requirements.
  • Our Leadership team regularly review our systems, policies, procedures and processes to assess whether they’re still fit for purpose.

Collaboration – Nurturing free-flowing constructive communication at all levels

  • We document our policies and quality procedures in a transparent and standardised way so that everyone understands them and has access to them.
  • Every member of the Outlook team provides valuable feedback on potential problems or opportunities for improvement.

Motivation – Our desire to succeed, create great work and surpass expectations

  • By refining and aligning our processes, we work more efficiently to increase productivity and efficiency.
  • We are always talking to our clients and suppliers to find out how we can improve our services.
  • We’re delighted to offer exceptional high-quality solutions to our current clients and expand into new markets that require ISO 9001 accreditation.

Give us a call if you want to work with a quality agency.