Virgin Holidays

Virgin Holidays, one of the UK’s largest and most successful long-haul tour operators, needed help to deliver strategic and creative support for an important sales conference.

Virgin Holidays, one of the UK’s largest and most successful long-haul tour operators, realised they needed an event marketing agency London to help with the delivery of a high profile sales conference. The process of organising their sales strategy conference began by meeting with their board directors, one by one, to discuss departmental strategies for the year ahead. We were also briefed by their Strategy Director, Finance Director and Managing Director to discuss content requirements for the main presentation.

It became apparent that we needed to create a series of breakout sessions that would allow us to divide the delegates into smaller groups in order to create more intimate conversations with each of the departments. We created a brand identity for the overall event theme consistent with their current through-the-line consumer advertising campaign, with sub-branded themes for the five breakout sessions.

As well as being informative and educational, the event needed to be interactive and fun, in keeping with the client’s core brand values. To achieve this goal, we worked closely with each department to create an exciting and relevant presentation. We even sat a desk at their head office in Crawley for six weeks to make sure we were always on hand to deal with emergencies. We created all the presentations, each of which included animated video sequences to bring the concept to life. Feedback from delegates was much more positive than had ever been recorded for previous sales conferences, achieving a 97.5% approval rate.

Before being appointed to deliver strategic and creative concepts for the sales conference, we had previously worked on other live events as a co-partner with their event management company. The first opportunity we were given was to deliver branding for a boat party parked up by Waterloo bridge on the River Thames embankment on the same day as the London Marathon, sponsored by Virgin Money. This gave Virgin Holidays the perfect opportunity to celebrate their 25^th anniversary with corporate hospitality for their UK sales channel. After developing the event branding in partnership with the client, we applied the chosen style to various materials, including exhibition stands, banners, bunting, gazebos, signage, flags, staff uniforms, plates, cups, and so on. By the time we finished, the boat looked amazing.

We were also entrusted to help out with an exciting event in Florida. We were tasked with working directly with Sir Richard. We flew with him on a Harry Potter-branded Virgin Airways jumbo jet to Orlando. We filmed him during the flight – serving drinks to passengers, mixing with Harry Potter stars and chatting away on the plane’s intercom. He even agreed to wear an event-branded apron whilst serving champagne. We edited the film during the flight so that it was ready to use that very evening at the Hard Rock Café in Orlando.

“Very pleased with all aspects of their work – they clearly know what they are doing. They were great fun to work with and delivered everything we needed under great time pressure without ever once losing their cool.”

Andrew Shelton
Marketing Director
Virgin Holidays

Category

Marketing consultancy
Design studio
Corporate presentations
Corporate videos
Event marketing