See Who Won the 2019 BizBash Event Style Awards

Leading Caterers of America Three-Day Executive Summit
Submitted by 24 Carrots
Leading Caterers of America’s hospitality industry conference took place at the 24 Carrots headquarters in Orange County, California, in November 2018. The event offered three days of nostalgic experiences that included a life-size game of Guess Who, vinyl hopscotch, and a carousel that guests could ride before and after dinner. The catering at events included design elements with culinary humor, such as passed trays displaying an “A” Sanitary Inspection Grade and small plates with names like “No Bad Eggs” and “What If Cod Was One of Us.” Other small bites included adults versions of childhood classics, like “Kobe Beef Cup o’ Noodles” and “Foie Gras Mini Uncrustables.”

The 2019 Masters Circle
Submitted by CSI DMC
The top salespeople of an automotive brand were invited to Palm Beach for this exclusive program that included dinner with a former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, a cooking class with a Food Network star in which individual kitchens were assembled for each participant, and a private hospitality and gifting suite. Plus, on the hotel property, a football field was built for guests to play catch with a celeb quarterback and a temporary club was constructed where an ‘80s rock band performed.

Snap Partner Summit 2019
Submitted by the Gathery
Snap Inc. hosted its inaugural development conference in April 2019 with curated programming that included tech announcements, breakout sessions, V.R. activations, gaming stations, A.R. Easter eggs, and more. The Gathery ensured that augmented reality was incorporated into every touchpoint to reflect the client’s goals. The campus approach to the conference also allowed attendees to focus on programming that best suited their interests. A mix of creators, media, influencers, and collaborators attended the one-day event.

Google Assistant at C.E.S.
Submitted by Google & Sparks
Google’s two-story, 36,000-square-foot exhibit at C.E.S. 2019 centered around the Google Assistant, the company’s A.I.-powered virtual assistant. Working with Sparks, the brand created a “playground” complete with a three-minute theme park ride that took attendees through a house. Dozens of interactive vignettes and demos showcased the product in an entertaining way, such as an animatronic grandmother who commented on guests' clothing. At the end, riders were given a picture, a branded macaroon, and a free Google Home Hub redemption code.

YouTube Top Creator Summit
Submitted by MAS Event & Design
YouTube invited 150 of its “Top Creators” to a multi-day event that invited them to meet with the platform’s executives. MAS Event & Design created experiences for the event including a wellness lounge that offered essential oils customized to each creator based on their astrology signs; a photo booth that printed photos of guests with color splashes that represented their aura; and a 70s-theme roller rink disco for the event’s after party. Kris Jenner and Gary Vaynerchuk spoke at the summit, which drew 7,600 mentions and an estimated 68 million potential impressions on Instagram.

The Elevator Pitch at Cisco GSX Hub 2018
Submitted by George P. Johnson Experience Marketing
At the 2018 Cisco Global Sales Experience, a gathering of 18,000 Cisco staffers, the company worked with George P. Johnson Experience Marketing to create a live game show experience. Dubbed the "Elevator Pitch," the challenge tested the team's overall learning; a digital carnival wheel would spin and land on one of Cisco's five core pillars, and contestants quickly worked together to pitch the idea to their peers. Presentations took place in an elevator-inspired space and were broadcast on a giant screen. During the pitch, technology tracked biometric and presentation data such as how much eye contact the sellers were making.

Taco Bell FranMac
Submitted by the Sheppard
For the 2018 FranMac conference, an annual event hosted by Taco Bell’s Franchise Management Advisory Council for franchisees, the Sheppard spiced up what had become a stale event by adding in a choir and group sing-a-long, as well as a marching band and a choreographed dance routine for the final presentation. As a result, attendee engagement and feedback increased, with more than 90 percent of attendees using the event’s app to participate in real-time polling.

Walmart Associate & Shareholders Meeting 2018
Submitted by LEO Events
For the 2018 Walmart Associate & Shareholders Meeting, the company aimed to go beyond the traditional corporate sessions and create a weeklong celebration of its associates and shareholders. Working with LEO Events, Walmart created a variety of sessions and performances, all leading up to the main event: a three-and-a-half hour live show hosted by Jamie Foxx. In addition to a choreographed opening number and multiple musical acts including Jason Derulo, the conference had one particularly memorable moment: a live hologram of late founder Sam Walton, intended to spotlight Walmart’s position as a tech-savvy, forward-thinking brand.

The Dodo’s Best Dog Day Ever
Submitted by ProductionGlue
Animal-centric website The Dodo partnered with Samsung to host an event for more than 1,400 dogs and their humans in June 2018 in New York. The event, located at Brookfield Place, was entirely geared toward pups with a fenced-in space covered in turf that offered activities and photo ops including a ball pit, paw- and bone-shape pools, a mini obstacle course, and treats from Shake Shack. The event also gave attendees swag, which included doggy neck scarves, personalized bone-shape dog tags, and a poop bag dispenser. Production Glue produced the event.

Grand Opening of the Four Seasons Hotel Kuala Lumpur
Submitted by the Fame Events Sdn Bhd
For the grand opening of the Four Seasons Hotel Kuala Lumpur, which took place in November 2018, an ethereal cylindrical holographic performance brought to life all four seasons, starting with a sprouting tree. It was accompanied by an immersive 360-degree projection mapping display that complemented the seasonal holograms. In addition to the reception, guests enjoyed an outdoor cocktail party by the property’s pool.

SAP Sapphire Now
Submitted by SAP
For software company SAP's annual Sapphire Now event in 2019, organizers completely rethought the floor design, using a “live, work, play” approach to help attendees with specific business challenges. Five color-coded “neighborhoods” each represented one of the five business disciplines in the SAP suite of products; once attendees entered a neighborhood, they were greeted by experts who offered best practices and guidance. Different areas showcased real-life examples of product solutions; Cirque du Soleil, for example, showed how SAP technology can engage audiences and produce special effects on stage. The show floor also included immersive theaters, networking-friendly lounge seating, and on-site meeting rooms.

Evine After Dark Vagina Wall
Submitted by Patrick J Clayton Productions
Digital commerce company Evine’s late-night talk show and shopping experience, called Evine After Dark, hosted a women's empowerment evening that included a sex toy product launch. During the event, reality TV personality Carole Radziwill facilitated a Q&A about female empowerment and sexuality with industry leaders. To create buzz around the event, Patrick J Clayton Productions designed an eight-foot-tall floral wall depicting a blooming vagina.

Audi & A.F.I. Film Festival Projections
Submitted by BartKresa Studio
For the 2018 A.F.I. Film Festival, Audi commissioned a projection-mapped animation on the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood that celebrated diversity. BartKresa Studio designed the projections and WorldStage provided strategic production for the activation, which consisted of graphics that illustrated inequality women face in the film industry. After showing statistics of underrepresentation in black and white, the projections changed to full color to announce that 48 percent of films at the festival were directed by women. The six-minute show featured photos of more than 200 women filmmakers involved in the festival.

Klarna Smoooth Sessions NYC
Submitted by Sequence
Swedish financial services company Klarna held its first U.S. event in New York in 2019. Klarna’s “Smoooth Session” (so smooth it needed the extra "o") was designed and produced by Sequence Events with interactive stations designed to push attendees out of their fashion comfort zones. Highlights included a mannequin with a 20-foot-long arm that held shopping bags from Klarna partners, plus a photo booth where guests could wear a shaggy brown coat and stand in front of a fan, mimicking a Klarna ad starring an Afghan dog. There were also dessert trays attached to oversize helium balloons, plus fur-covered bar fronts and walls wrapped with custom event collateral.

John Muir Health Gala
Submitted by Blueprint Studios
For the John Muir Health Gala, which took place in November 2018 at the Concord Jet Center in Concord, California, Blueprint Studios designed an “Out of This World” spaceport, featuring audio and visual effects including rumbling thunder and smoke that mimicked a rocket liftoff. The hangar was furnished with illuminated dining tables and clear acrylic chairs. Blueprint Studios worked with Got Light to create a glowing setting that included custom lighting fixtures.

Skookum Sustainability: Protecting Our Coastal Home
Submitted by Skookum Festival/BrandLive
Launched in 2019, the Skookum Festival, a music, food, and art fest that featured indigenous artists through a partnership with the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations, incorporated numerous green-operation initiatives including installing a temporary substation to power all event operations; using only compostable, recyclable, or reusable food and beverage containers on site; banning the sale of polyester and fleece merchandise; and employing eco-friendly transportation such as a bike valet service.

Think Today Broadcast at IBM Think 2019
Submitted by Drury Design
To adjust to its new home in San Francisco, IBM’s annual Think conference worked with Drury Design to adapt Think Today, a real-time event channel that used on-the-ground reporters and strategically placed cameras to keep attendees connected and informed. The channel—which was hosted by a professional broadcast team including anchor Traci Mitchell and field reporter SuChin Pak—aired 26 broadcast segments, more than 12 hours of original content, and some 50 hours of guest interviews throughout the week. The team reported from a fully functional TV studio built outside the Moscone Center, and it was broadcast to more than 400 screens in 13 different locations.

Dell Experience and the Alienware Outpost
Submitted by Lacy Maxwell Experiential
Lacy Maxwell Experiential produced the annual Dell Experience for a sixth year at SXSW 2019, this time transforming the space overnight in the Alienware Outpost, a gamer-focused space that featured live esports events. The Alienware Outpost also hosted the official SXSW Gaming Closing Party and Cosplay Competition. Dell TV and Xplit in partnership with Twitch live-streamed the events, which drew an online viewership of nearly 1.2 million streams. The space also was home to Moon Rover: Powered by Alienware, a mixed-reality experience that invited guests to step into a vehicle that took them across the moon’s surface with virtual-reality goggles and a motion platform.

When Literature and Classical Music Come To Life
Submitted by Kristin Banta Events
This b'nai mitzvah for 13-year-old twins translated their interests—classical music and literature—into a whimsical theme with interactive components. The tablescapes included flowers made from sheet music paired with live florals, along with instruments such as French horns and trumpets filled with blooms. Large art installation-type arrangements brought books to life, with pages floating up to the ceiling, while the dance floor was designed to look like a page out of a book and listed the teens' favorite authors and publications.

Nissan's 50th Anniversary Celebration
Submitted by George P. Johnson Experience Marketing
For Nissan's 50th anniversary celebration in 2019, the car brand worked with George P. Johnson Experience Marketing to reimagine the traditional vehicle reveal. The invite-only event included a gallery retrospective of Nissan's GTR and Z models followed by the unveiling of the new NISMO 2020 GTR. Creative highlights included a liquid nitrogen cocktail bar, interactive vehicle painting from a Japanese calligrapher, and performance art and vintage arcade games. Other fun details included a 3-D step-and-repeat with die-cast vehicles, an izakaya-style speakeasy that served Japanese whiskey, and a tattoo shop.

Super Bowl Spectacular
Submitted by Bold Catering & Design
For a Super Bowl LIII kick-off dinner in Atlanta hosted by Georgia Pacific, Bold Catering & Design ditched traditional floral centerpieces for elegant hand-cut football figures made of white foam core. A mirrored vase with glowing votives stood in the center of the action figures to add depth. The menu cards, which were embossed with silver type and the client’s logo, were wrapped in football-like pebble-grained leather and finished on both sides with white leather ties to mimic the laces on the ball.

Art Alive 2019 Premiere Dinner
Submitted by the San Diego Museum of Art
The San Diego Museum of Art’s V.I.P. dinner had an elegant, flower-filled Art Deco theme inspired by photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt. As guests entered the museum's rotunda, they encountered a massive chandelier made from 3,500 red roses inside glass boxes. Inside the dinner space, 40 golden chandeliers created a dramatic setting, and tables had jewel-tone floral centerpieces, an emerald velvet tablecloth, and on-theme gold place settings. The dinner kicked off the museum’s annual Art Alive spring fund-raiser, which features four days of events showcasing more than 100 floral interpretations of classic works of art.

Charity: Ball 2018
Submitted by Trademark, Bodega, and Charity: Water
For Charity: Water’s first West Coast gala, held in San Francisco in 2018, the brand worked with Trademark Event Production to create a 40,000-pound “Halo” with 840 LED tiles. The curved screen immersed dinner guests in a moving video from Bodega Studios, which documented an Ethiopian woman’s daily trek for water. The screen was also used to display informational graphics and the gala’s donation totals. Each of the 522 dinner guests was given an iPad preloaded with their information; 11 times throughout the evening, the iPads prompted attendees to donate. Overall, the gala raised $7 million.

Amazon Prime Video’s Good Omens at SXSW—The Garden of Earthly Delights
Submitted by Amazon Prime Video
To promote its series Good Omens at SXSW in March, Amazon Prime Video partnered with experiential marketing agency CSM LeadDog to create a secret garden with good and evil elements inspired by author Neil Gaiman’s source material. The activation featured costumed performers, apples with written prophecies, and a photo op inspired by the bookstore in the show. The space also had a 25-foot hand-carved tree that served beer and wine and a Hellhound Puppy Pen with adoptable dogs from the Austin Animal Center.

Walmart Associate & Shareholders Meeting 2018
Submitted by Leo Events
The Bud Walton Arena, the venue for this annual event, and an audience of 14,000 dictated the stage design, which featured multiple layers of video archways that created an infinite portal effect for viewers. The design’s multiple video surfaces also allowed for a range of graphic content, social media tags and posts, video animations, and storytelling, especially during Walmart president and C.E.O. Doug McMillon’s keynote address.

Sviatovid @ ISE
Submitted by BartKresa Studio
For the Integrated Systems Europe conference, which took place in February in Amsterdam, BartKresa Studio designed Sviatovid, a 15-foot, 360-degree projection mapped sculpture, located at the entrance of the RAI convention center. The design of the four-sided installation was inspired by a ninth-century Slavic deity and a medieval sculpture of the same name. The sculpture used four Panasonic laser projectors to create colorful, music-driven animations on the exterior. After premiering in February, the sculpture has traveled to the Centre for the Meeting of Cultures in Poland and InfoComm in Orlando.

Houston Launch Event
Submitted by Wolfgang Puck Catering To celebrate the launch of its services in Houston, Wolfgang Puck Catering hosted an event in February 2019 for clients including wedding and meeting planners, production companies, and destination management professionals. Food stations included an edible art table, which featured a chef “painting” with different dressings and fruit spreads. Guests received swag such as bottled cocktails, a mini whisk, Wolfgang Puck Catering branded chocolate, tumblers, and more.

Jays Curve Ball Gala 2018
Submitted by FMAV
The Jays Care Foundation partnered with Candice & Alison Events Group and audiovisual and event tech company FMAV for its Curve Ball Gala in June 2018, held at Rogers Stadium. To highlight the impact of donations to children whom the foundation supports, FMAV created graphics and content projections to showcase specific journeys of children, and also designed a map of Canada with pinned locations to show the foundation’s reach. FMAV also projected the Jays Care logo onto a 20-foot circular truss to simulate a baseball. The gala raised more than $1.5 million and drew more than 1,500 guests.

Skookum Festival
Submitted by Skookum Festival/BrandLive
The inaugural Skookum Festival, which took place in September 2018 in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, featured almost 30 percent indigenous programming, thanks to a partnership with the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. The mix of music, food, and art included headliners the Killers and Florence and the Machine, a dinner series with local chefs, and an art pavilion, as well as a variety of sustainability practices.

GES Project Central
Submitted by GES
Las Vegas-based live events provider GES created a platform for event organizers to manage details before, during, and after an event. For pre- and post-event needs, the cloud-based platform allows organizers to create work and sign orders; make proofs, designs, and schedules; and make custom ordering reports. During the event, organizers can use the platform to make service requests; add project management tasks and dashboards; view approved proofs, designs, and orders; and view attendee engagement analytics.

Miles of Pride
Submitted by Pacific Event Services
For Santa Monica's inaugural Gay Pride Festival, Pacific Event Services created a "Miles of Pride" lighting installation that served as a backdrop for a monthlong slate of events. It was the first installation of the Colors of Progress Project by Tre Borden and Phil America, created to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. The rainbow-colored row of lights stretched across the bridge leading to the Santa Monica Pier; colorful lights also lit up nearby palm trees.

Concert at the Kennedy Center: An Evening of Music
Submitted by Bravo Entertainment
The Kennedy Center in Washington held a retirement celebration for Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah in December 2018. Bravo Entertainment produced a concert for Hatch, with acts including Lee Greenwood, Wintley Phipps, the University of Houston chorale, and the Brigham Young Vocal Point chorale. The Virtuosi Foundation chamber orchestra backed the performers during the ceremony. The event was originally slated to take place at the National Cathedral but moved to the Kennedy Center 36 hours beforehand because of the death of President George H.W. Bush.