Interesting Vancouver 2014

Challenge
What does a leadership position for a company mean? The best products, service, process? In our view, leadership is also about taking a long term view of your place in the industry and the community to develop it and the greater community. To foster discussion, debate, progress, and basically to just be a part of upping the ante rather than having to catch up to it.

It is for this reason that we not only involve ourselves in events like Creative Mornings and Interesting Vancouver, but are the driving force behind both here in Vancouver.

Indeed, it could be argued that a wider audience around creativity, unique and surprising talents and passions is a little out of the sphere of a company that is positioned to help businesses grow and profit through a strategic application of branding, marketing and design. We don’t think so.

Being engaged in, and driving relevant communities is critical to authentic expression and corporate culture, especially with built environment professional services firms such as in architecture and engineering.

Hence, our leadership of Interesting Vancouver, an annual speakers series about ordinary Vancouverites doing extraordinary things with their time and their lives. We wanted to bring this already popular event to the attention of an even wider audience, increase sponsorships, and make a bigger splash by developing a fresh and engaging campaign.

Approach
The purpose of Interesting Vancouver is to expand knowledge of what is possible through interesting stories, explorations and discoveries. Speakers have included the likes of a national yo yo champion, a senior with a passion for photographing punk rockers, a paramedic who is also a magician and many more.

The brief for an event with “interesting” in its title is that the marketing has to be, well, interesting. Frankly, if any communications are not interesting to the intended audience, it’s probably a failure right off the bat, but the bar was certainly set.

The concept we devised was born from the simple truth that day-by-day, whether we’re catching a bus, crossing a street or queuing to pay for a coffee, we’ve probably all unknowingly brushed shoulders with someone who does something extraordinary. Interesting Vancouver aims to reveal these otherwise anonymous folks and delight, surprise and inspire people in the process.

We built 3D “box head” props based on the cube-like logo to put on the heads of iconic Vancouver monuments such as Gassy Jack in Gastown and the bathing woman in Stanley Park. These “box head” monuments created a fun, informational brand moment, and photo ops that crossed over to the digital realm by being shared on social media channels.

Posters around town used an advent calendar type mechanism where the bold caption: “Being curious has its rewards” invited passersby to open and interact with the poster. Behind each window, was a short compelling description of upcoming speakers and one that gifted a free ticket to the people who’d taken the initiative to discover it.

Amongst many things during the event itself, we skipped a boring program and went with an interesting folded piece that attendees could open and explore from corner to corner.

Results
Interesting Vancouver sold out for the seventh year in a row and brought in over 200% more sponsorship revenues, setting the stage for even more growth in 2015. In fact, the event itself has progressed over the course of it’s existence, the purpose also being to catalyze attendees and the general public with inspiration to try something new and uncharacteristic, or to recognize something they are already doing within themselves.

Interesting Vancouver is going places, and is set to expand well beyond a single, annual event. Interesting Vancouver is a movement, one we’re behind.