The event industry was celebrated once again last week under the spotlights of Saint Petersburg’s Leningrad Center during the third edition of EuBea Festival. After the first day, entirely dedicated to the jury session, the International Events and Live Communication Festival offered a rich content program exploring the latest market trends and evolutions according to this year’s edition objectives: inspire, empower, succeed.
An engaged and attentive audience followed a full set of workshops and seminars which aimed to provide participants with the most up to date tools to face future challenges: from the massive influence of digital and mobile on the live experience to the need, on the agency side, of a more flexible approach to life’s conditioning and the value of networking for any event success.
The training and education program focussed on the latest instruments for building successful events, including a handbook illustrating five simple steps to enhance events effectiveness, techniques to prove their value, and strategies to maximise the audience engagement.
The International Events and Live Communication Festival offered the paneuropean association LiveCom Alliance the perfect chance to gather all of its members in Saint Petersburg to discuss affiliations progress and further growth objectives, while for the first time all Festival attendees had the opportunity to book 15 minutes one-to-one meetings with any of the speakers and jury members.
The afternoon ended with a presentation of the Russian edition of Meeting Architecture, Marteen Vanneste, president of the Meeting Design Institute, best selling manual which groups and explains the essential skills for todays event planners, and an interesting social experiment which made clear the basic tools that allow to reach people’s hearts and minds through meeting design. As for the latest Italian BEA, the European Festival greatly benefited from the EuBEA app designed by Digivents: a simple to use yet higly sophisticated interface between ADC Group’s management team and all participants, which guaranteed an agile and effective organization of time, schedules, networking and sharing activities. The climax of the day was of course the Awards Ceremony which brought the Russian EuBea to a close.
Like a Champions League of Events, the aim of the Awards is to recognize and celebrate in style the best creativity among the 276 entrants – a number on par with last years’s record breaking edition. As master of ceremonies, ADC Group’s president, Salvatore Sagone, opened the show introducing on the Leningrad Theatre stage all winners: a fast and exciting parade of international excellences which shined even brightlier under the theatre’s spotlights, where they were welcomed by this year’s jury president, Gerd de Bruycher, Cisco’s North European marketing manager.
The flow of the prize-giving ceremony was enriched by extraordinary exhibitions which wowed the large audience through exceptional set designs, coreographies and performances, all outcomes of a refined theatrical research in line with today’s most avantgarde trends. But of course, the EuBEA awards were the star attractions of the evening.
The much coveted ‘elephants’ were assigned in 19 ‘normal’ and ‘special’ categories: among the latter ones, “The Takeover” event by Massive Music Amsterdam for Heineken won for Creativity and Innovation (it also won the Business To Consumer macro-category), El Cronista “Flight” by Casta Diva Buenos Aires (part of Casta Diva Group Milan) was recognized for its effectiveness, Adidas NMD by Jad Production for the Channel Strategy and the 2016 Opening Ceremony of the Hannover Trade Fair gained a special mention for its Execution.
Casta Diva Group was nominated Best Event Agency, while Samsung France got the title of Best Corporate Client. The Best Event Evaluation Award went to the Belgian event for the European Union pavillon at Expo Milano 2015. Heineken’s “SpyFie”, by Jack Morton Worldwide, received the prestigious Press Award, while the new People’s Choice Award – voted by the audience through the official EuBEA app – was swept by Ideal Comunicazione, from Italy, for its “Casa 500” event for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.
Among the 114 shortlisted events, another Italian agency, Simmetrico, scored at the top of the Business To Business macro-category with the event “La meccanica delle emozioni” for Alfa Romeo Giulia. Celebrations ended with the EuBea Grand Prix, won by the French agency Magic Garden which signed the winning event – S7 Lifechanger Park per Samsung France – in collaboration with Cheil France.
In saying goodbye to Saint Petersburg, Salvatore Sagone disclosed that Porto will be the host city of the next edition of Eubea, but he also announced that the Festival has grown up to such a level that it will open its doors to the world beyond Europe, becoming a truly global event. We hope to see you all in Portugal, next year, between the 9th and the 12th of November!
