CONTEXT
Every two years Starbucks invites key investors, analysts, and media to an Investor Day to provide an update on the state of the business. The event has been held in various locations in Seattle and New York, and consists of in-depth financial presentations, forecasts, and brand and product experiences, alongside face time with senior leaders. Presentations cover a range of business-critical topics, from key leadership changes to the company’s expansion in China and other emerging markets; from evolving digital strategy to new products and store formats.  

In December 2020, in response to the ongoing global health crisis Starbucks asked Touch to reimagine Investor Day to make the entire event virtual.  

OUR APPROACH
Touch has played an integral role in producing each Starbucks Investor Day for more than a decade, including their first China Investor Day in May 2018. Our role extends across the entire event, including overall strategy development, media design and production, presentation content development and design, staging design, environmental and production design, audience experience integration, live-streaming the event, designing and coordinating 3D builds and print production, and managing the ancillary brand experiences.  

In previous years, Touch created a dimensional walk-through experience that brings Starbucks store formats and scaled offerings (premiumization) to life at each event. These experiential builds detail store design, equipment, beverage, and store innovations across the entire enterprise, including digital, channel development, licensed stores, company-operated stores, and partner (employee)-facing programs and processes.  

In 2020 we collaborated with the Starbucks team on new, bold ways to bring Investor Day presentations to life. Starbucks Investor Day 2020 consisted of an hour and a half of simu-live content pre-recorded and edited by Touch, plus live slide transitions and roughly 45 minutes of live Q&A. All pre-recorded content was captured in person in Seattle and Atlanta, following all CDC safety guidelines. The live Q&A portion occurred in Seattle, where four executives were socially distanced on-stage and another participated remotely from Atlanta.  

Until a week before the event, due to changing state health guidelines Touch and Starbucks decided to cancel all out-of-area travel and eliminate any on-site tasks that could be performed equally well from off-site locations. This meant we had to connect technical operators and video control facilities across three states, orchestrate tightly timed audio and video handoffs, and support real-time collaboration with back-channel video feeds, private multiview monitoring, and remote intercom. The team successfully supported producers working from their respective locations—all in real time. Although we couldn’t see one another face-to-face, we delivered a perfect combination of live and simulated-live show as if we were merely sitting in adjacent rooms.