CONTEXT
For the last two years, the World Gold Council has collaborated with State Street Global Advisors to produce their annual Evolve conference. The event provides a critical platform to inspire institutional investors, by helping shape the conversation around gold as a mainstream investment and to share valuable knowledge and insights from across the investment management world. The invitation-only, in-person conference is an exclusive event normally held at one of New York’s finest venues, providing attendees with a high-value program focused on continuing to make the investment case for gold. As Coronavirus forced companies across the globe to rethink their in-person events, the Evolve event was migrated to a digital platform, bringing on Touch as a partner to ensure the highest possible level of quality and polish for attendees.

OUR APPROACH
Compared to most virtual events, this program was designed to be more of a premium broadcast experience than an interactive virtual event. A lineup of industry experts and luminaries formed the backbone of the program and featured expert guest speakers from Morgan Stanley, State Street Global Advisors, Citi, and Cambridge Associates, with segments and interviews hosted by World Gold Council executives, CNBC, and Institutional Investor magazine.

The event brand was a simple and elegant typographic treatment, with gold and blue animated particles reflecting the elemental nature of gold as a commodity. We built a broadcast-quality motion graphics package that included elegant lower thirds for names, titles, and announcements, plus segment transitions and opening and closing animated videos to bookend the program. 

We worked with a virtual event platform vendor to create a simple site to host the three-hour broadcast, consisting of the agenda, speaker bios, and value-added downloadable resources from World Gold Council and State Street, along with the program feed itself. Registration was handled by the client and integrated into the platform when the site went live.

During the pre-production phase, our team focused on preparing each of the 16 guest speakers and hosts, connecting over Microsoft Teams to work with them on optimizing their remote environments, talking through the flow and content of their segments, and ensuring they felt supported and ready to participate in the live broadcast.

The agenda consisted of eight segments covering a range of issues focused on the economic impact of COVID-19, what the pandemic teaches us about our institutions, asset allocations, and portfolio strategy, ending with a discussion on the political landscape ahead of the U.S. presidential election. The event attracted nearly 500 attendees, who engaged with our speakers by responding to live polling during the session, as well as by submitting questions via the digital platform that were then answered in real time during the broadcast.

The end result was flawless. Each speaker was perfectly supported, all content and graphics looked terrific, every cue was hit precisely, and most important, the client was delighted with the outcome.