Amazon Business Conferences
Amazon Business Reshape Conference 2021-22
Role: Creative Director & Designer
Challenge: In late 2020 in the heart of the pandemic, Amazon Business (AB) decided to launch its inaugural Reshape conference. The naming was determined based on the AB 2020 tagline ‘Reshape Buying’ and nodded to AWS’ suite of conferences (re:). The goal of the conference was to help generate sales leads and drive registration and awareness of Amazon Business as a thought-leader in the B2B-procurement space. The 2021 conference launched in Q1 and was wholly virtual, and created from scratch with limited agency support my role was branding the conference and creating all of the visuals.
The 2022 conferences featured significantly more investment from leadership in terms of headcount and budget (~$3M investment compared to $800K) however with the increased budget came additional challenges. Two conferences were planned, a virtual summit in May and an in-person summit in September, the in-person was a last minute effort decided after the May conference leaving less than 6 months to pull together.
Team:
2021 - Me, Project Manager, Enterprise Lead + limited agency support.
2022 - Me, three Events Coordinators, Events Lead, two Tech Coordinators (Amazon-owned sites and external sites), Head of Brand and Creative, three Content Leads + full agency support.
Process: For all Reshape events I am responsible for coming up with the event branding for several reasons, the first being cost effectiveness, the second being I know the branding and what our leadership wants. This involved rounds of concepting, competitive audits, and style-guide creation all by myself with no support. After that the guide and kits are handed off to an agency to execute. For the first execution for the event, I was responsible for creating over 200 assets for the event including promotional materials, site activations, and more.
In 2022 we had embedded agency support and so was able to hand off the styleguide and event-kit to the agency to produce assets with my oversight and approval. However due to the tight timeline for the in-person event, I was forced to step in on multiple occasions and create materials for internal sponsorships, the physical tradeshow floor, and owned-channels.
Concept & Design Evolution:
2021 - The original concepts (r1 concept deck) were driven by our 2020 agency rebrand, however leadership wasn’t a fan of any of the design stylings at that time (see Amazon Business Brand Identity case study for more information). In coming up with revisions I focused on elements that conveyed B2B-professionalism, which involved upward moving and energetic line elements (r5 concept deck) this led to the earliest iteration of our motion lines across our brand. The final direction chosen featured using the lines in an upward graph motion and our signature blue and cool color tones (final concept deck).
2022 - As I looked to up-level the branding, there was a certain childish quality to the 2021 motion lines that wasn’t gelling with the sophisticated direction we wanted to go in. Leadership really liked the flexibility and significance of the line elements conveying motion on the dark background, so staying in that lane I went for 3D modeled ribbons with lines applied as texture maps. The hero line was this graph-like element seen above, but 10 other line variations were created for variety across events. When the in-person event was planned right after the virtual, I knew we needed to keep some consistency with the virtual event, but also differentiate. The solution was to modify the color palette adding gradient backgrounds, and an addition to the logo to give the 2022 branding longer legs in a cost-effective way. During this time I also conducted a competitive audit of all other B2B conferences to validate color and branding decisions.
Performance & Learnings : Both virtual events performed well, garnering 8k views in year one and 12k views and 2k amounts of leads for sales in 2022. However the in-person event performed poorly given economic headwinds, pandemic concerns, late lead time for registration (less than two months to register is not enough to secure budget approvals for most companies). The original intent of the event was a invite-only C-suite executive focused event in an exclusive AZ resort, however given the lateness of scheduling the chosen venue was changed and the event was opened to all levels of procurement professionals. A total of 500 guests were expected, in reality only ~130 external attendees registered for the event with 113 attending onsite, however this led to three major deals with notable clients (Twitter, 600+ YMCA chapters, MGM) with projected income from deals estimated over $2MM. Those who did attend had favorable reviews of the creative, venue experience, and speaker content per post-event surveys on onsite anecdotal interviews.
Other learnings were around naming difficulties: while the original name was re:Shape in 2020, due to divergence in the AB and AWS brands we pivoted away from including the semi-colon in the name, this led to overlap with another conference called Reshape hosted by Insider. In 2022 AB deprecated its ‘Reshape Buying’ tagline, looking forward there are discussions to change the naming conventions to ABX to align all AB conferences globally and avoid any naming confusion.
Other difficulties arose with Coupa’s Inspire! conference, while designing the lines for this event it was a natural progression to lean into smaller lines for the graph in 2022, however a few weeks before our event launched, Coupa had simultaneously launched their event branding which has similarities in color palette and also featured line elements (visible in competitive audit above). There was no way I could have accounted for their new design direction, given they launched after our branding was solidified with the agency and the colors and branding chosen were not a part of their standard color palette. However moving forward I do comprehensive competitive audits to account for incidents like these and in the end the branding was different enough to not become an issue.
For the upcoming 2023 event I will still be wholly responsible for creating the concept and styleguides and approving the branding up through senior AB leadership, however we now have 9 months lead time. We’ve also scoped additional agency support in terms of creative resources to help prevent the amount of issues where I had to step in.
Amazon Business Exchange 2021-22
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