The Brief:

The brief was to hold the first joint Agri-Tech conference, bringing together all four of the Governments Agri-Tech centres for the first time. The Agri-Tech Centres are a unique collaboration between Government, academia and industry to drive greater efficiency, resilience and wealth across the agri-food sector. The goal was to highlight the innovations available in the food and farming industry to stakeholders including NGOs, Food Retail, Farmers and all elements of the agricultural supply chain. Those innovations are driven by the four Agri-Tech Centres. The timing is critical – Brexit, Covid, Climate Change and an increasing worldwide population mean that Innovation For Food Resilience has never been more important.

The Challenge:

It was decided ahead of lockdown number two that this event would be close to 100% virtual. The challenges were to prerecord eight keynote presentations remotely ahead of the event – many of whom were in rural areas.

The other challenges were to make this different from our usual 100% virtual offering – to achieve this we pre-recorded Countryfile’s Charlotte Smith outdoors making the welcome speech and then the presenter introductions. Then on the live day, we bought Charlotte into our London Studio to host a live Q&A panel with the presenters (bought in remotely). The effect was brilliant – as close to a TV broadcast as was possible in the restrictions of the second lockdown and having eight remote presenters A key learning was that we can create an event that is somewhere between a Hybrid and an 100% Virtual – with a bit of creative thinking.

The Solution:

The solution was to carry out speed tests ahead of the recordings, once happy we then sent identical lights, webcams, and mics to the presenter’s home addresses ensuring a consistent sound and picture quality. All eight were recorded controlling their own slides via VMix links into our studio with an editor and a producer on each call, this allowed us to coach them during the recording and allowed them to take pauses where required – and enabled us to remove any distractions in the post-recording edit. (Pets, Amazon deliveries etc…). The event was streamed on our broadcast partner’s platform Livestream Global.

Our other main role was to create a suite of marketing materials to support the conference promotion. A stunning event logo that encompassed all four of the centre’s logos, an assets file of all possible branded elements for social media and web use, and a presentation template and website template for the live stream.
Most importantly a stunning launch film to encourage registration – and that was then repurposed as the event opener.

The Result:

Budget: The budget was met exactly.

Delivery: On time and flawless

Content: On message

Targeted attendee numbers were exceeded at 1,250+, an excess of 50% on expected numbers – and critically we saw no drop off from viewing numbers at the start versus the end.