Ferring: Leadership Starts With You

Digital first empowers leader community to deliver ambitious growth strategy.

The Challenge

Enable 500 leaders to re-connect with Ferring’s strategy in a way that inspires and empowers employees to take a transformative vision forward.

The Approach

Entrusted to deliver Ferring’s first ever virtual event, we combined agile planning, creative content and digital expertise to produce a high-value experience.

Faced with fast-evolving Covid restrictions, we ran three concurrent event plans, which eventually culminated in a live studio broadcast from Switzerland, with additional contributors and leaders joining online from every corner of the world.

Working with Ferring, we developed the event theme: Leadership Starts With You. This was explored through a 3-day programme encompassing executive-led sessions, workshops and networking, filled with creative content designed to re-connect leaders with the vision. This included an executive team-created video which told a powerful story of a compelling future.

Workshops and networking opportunities encouraged idea and information sharing, with the ultimate goal of enabling every individual to play their part in delivering the strategy.

Collaboration was key and we ensured seamless delivery by co-ordinating teams, suppliers and speakers across multiple locations – from remote-leading rehearsals with the Swiss studio team, speaker coaching and tech support for contributors, to daily debriefs during the live event to share learnings and plan improvements.

The Result

A successful ‘virtual first’ for Ferring, with nearly 500 leaders participating live, across multiple time zones. Participant feedback was incredibly positive:

+90% felt inspired as a result of the event
97% felt the strategy was the right direction for Ferring
+80% left with specific actions to apply in their area of responsibility
All leaders aim to submit 30/60/90 day action plans within four weeks of the event

I would like to say a huge thank you to the Smyle team for what we have achieved over the past three months. Within an incredibly short timeframe, fantastic teamwork and agile working helped to deliver a first for Ferring; a successful global event that has had a positive and measurable impact on our leaders’ attitudes, beliefs, and actions.

Thanks so much for your collaboration, support, and commitment to solving problems and pivoting plans amidst everchanging COVID-19 restrictions. In the face of a number of challenges, be that content, technical or logistical, we found a way forward together and we truly felt like one team.
Bhavin Vaid - Head of Corporate Comms, Ferring Pharmaceuticals

Samsung Galaxy Launch

Samsung calls the shots with interactive virtual media launch with British singer and songwriter Raye. This launched the new Samsung Galaxy A Series with her performance all shot on Samsung devices.

The challenge

Deliver the first-ever virtual NDA press review for the Galaxy A Series, generating tech and lifestyle coverage stacked with Gen Z appeal.

What we did

Allowing journalists to experience new phones under embargo allows them to prepare editorial for publishing on launch day. But how to do that virtually? Combining innovation and creative content this launch encouraged participants to ‘call the shots’ by personalising how they interacted with and explored the new Galaxy A Series.

Leveraging the Music Galaxy Thursday partnership between Samsung and Universal Music, we worked with emerging Gen Z artist RAYE to create, film and produce a storytelling narrative. This culminated in a performance of her latest hit and clever product placement ensured RAYE illustrated key A Series features as part of the action. All footage was captured using Samsung mobiles.

Using WIREWAX technology we enabled participants to ‘choose their path’ by opting for different content scenarios, such as selecting RAYE’s performance costume in the opening scenes.

We also pre-recorded a series of informative launch presentations and Q&As led by Samsung experts. Again, we added additional interactive content, by overlaying WIREWAX hotspots, which users could activate to reveal additional product information.

All this was accessed via a super-intuitive, on brand web platform that curated relevant event content based on different audience needs.

The result

Call the Shots generated 690 articles in total, across the target technology and media titles.

An audience of 470 media contacts generated 2,662 interactive hotspot clicks during the event, indicating a high level of engagement with additional product information.

IMEX: BuzzHub

Maintaining attendee engagement ahead of IMEX America 2021.

The Brief

Use Smyle’s knowledge of virtual events to create experiences that are fun, rewarding and continuously evolving.

The Approach

With the coming return of IMEX America as a physical event in November 2021 we developed the IMEX Buzzhub. This is a branded online community built using Swapcard – an end-to-end event platform with customisable elements powered by artificial intelligence, along with additional add-on technologies like Gather.town for tailored community experiences.

Everything we did focused on delivering value to event professionals. Speakers, key content and fringe activities and even sponsored elements all added value and kept the audience connected to the IMEX brand.

The highlights of the campaign were the three ‘Buzz Days’. Each had its own theme (‘Building back better’, ‘Extreme innovation’ and ‘Future focus’) and each was packed with fun presentations, opportunities to interact with speakers and time set aside to ‘just talk’ about areas of mutual interest. In a bid to keep innovating, each Buzz Day had a mix of activities and formats. Participants had choices of what they could do: listen to a thought-leading speaker, ask questions in an intimate Q&A, or join a forum. But it wasn’t all work-focused and enabling authentic human interaction between participants was encouraged. There was even a co-located Buzz Day, where attendees could jump between two entirely different events, and another aimed just at the large German audience – broadcast entirely in German.

The Results

IMEX and Smyle worked in a collaborative way to make the IMEX BuzzHub a success. Over 2,300 professionals registered with 400-800 session views each month. Participant feedback scored an average of 4.5 out of 5 for all content and experiences. The primary goal of the campaign was to keep IMEX front-of-mind and encourage attendance at the November 2021 show in Las Vegas. With 582 BuzzHub participants indicating that the experience positively impacted their likelihood to attend (and lots of content sharing across social channels), we can take at least some of the credit for the 5,000+ that turned up for the main event, which was buzzing with energy. In one final push, Smyle delivered live content from the show floor for BuzzHub virtual participants during the show.