Iris Experience takes centre stage at Event Awards

Congratulations to Iris Experience, who walked away with the top prize at this year’s Event Awards.
The agency, whose clients include Sony Ericsson, Sony Electronics, PlayStation, Amnesty International and Unilever, was placed in four other categories at this year’s ceremony.

Iris won Creative Event of the Year for Sony Ericsson Night Tennis and Best Brand Activity at a Festival or Public Event for Ibiza Rocks with Sony Ericsson. It also achieved two finalist spots for Best Brand Experience Campaign and Agency of the Year.

The Event Awards 2008, organised by Haymarket Events and my former employer Event magazine took place on 26 September at London’s Hilton Hotel, Park Lane. Some 600 guests gathered to see trophies handed out in 24 categories ranging from venue awards to Caterer of the Year and Exhibition Organiser of the Year.

Winners included GSP for Agency of the Year, Brand Events for Exhibition Organiser of the Year, Zafferano for Caterer of the Year and Private Drama Events for Entertainment of the Year.
The Innocent Village Fete, which takes place annually in Regent’s Park won its agency Sledge the award for Best Brand Experience Campaign. The Metro Ski and Snowboard Show at Olympia won organiser DMG World Media an award for Most Improved Consumer Exhibition. And agency Sprout (pictured) won Best Use of a Blank Canvas Space for the launch of the Infiniti Europe luxury car brand during the 2008 Geneva Motor Show.

The venue awards went to The Brewery for Best Conference or Purpose Built Venue, Sony Colour Rooms for Unique Venue of the Year and the Sheepdrove Eco Conference Centre, which won the Green Award. London’s Royal Parks walked away with Venue In-house Events Team of the Year and Stage One won Supplier of the Year.

Tiger Beer's mash up of art & music

I’m sure RPM managing director Hugh Robertson would rather I was blindfolded and led through the backstreets surrounding Liverpool Street station to have reached the Tiger Translate party. As it was, I don’t think I could ever find again the underground car-park that RPM transformed into an asian fusion indoor mash up of art and music on behalf of Tiger beer.

Normally, I wouldn’t hesitate to reveal the whereabouts of RPM’s hidden venue gem and recommend this blank canvas concrete jungle as an event backdrop. But if I had to draw you a map? Well, we passed a giant sculpture of a voluptuous woman laying on her side outside a bank behind the mainline London station, found ourselves in a dead-end where the buses turn around, climbed over a fence, along a maze of passage ways and into an East End side street where every warehouse door most likely hid cartons of cigarettes, meat freezers and speakeasies.

We must have chosen the scenic route as more than 1,000 other people easily found the free party on 20 September. On a small budget, RPM created an artist’s workshop in the midst of a nightclub bunker. The crowds were treated to artists with names like Pure Evil, Monorex and Eine, hard at work adding paint to canvas. Whilst on stage, an asian rock band and a series of DJs had the car-park jumping long into the night.

Visitors engaged with Tiger beer brand values via the overall party theme - Voyage. The artists and acts had been asked to visualise the journey that each bottle of Tiger takes from its home in the Far East and to capture the vibrancy and intrigue of Tiger’s enchanting Far Eastern heritage.

Highlights included a hackney cab painted in Tiger brand colours (which now acts as a meeting room in RPM’s offices), an art wars competition between graffiti artists (check out my video below to see who won), headline DJ the Patchwork Pirates with the Nextmen tearing up the mic, and emerging beatbox talent Reeps 1 (also filmed for You Tube and posted below). All this washed down with plenty of Tiger beer.

The next big thing in corporate entertainment?

This week I've been in Birmingham for Event UK . The exhibition, formerly known as the National Venue Show hosted a two-day talent contest for unsigned corporate entertainment acts and I was asked to be one of four event industry judges.

Called the Next Big Thing, this X-Factor style competition gave new talent the chance to perform on stage during the show. Myself and my fellow judges, Izania Downie, Matt Storey and Adam Sternberg, each did our best Simon Cowell or Louis Walsh impression after each act and the gathered audience then voted with interactive keypads. The prize on offer was £1,000 and a contract with Sternberg Clark entertainment agency.

Congratulations to The Red Bullets who walked away with the lucrative contract after beating The Big Beat in the battle of the covers bands final.

The standard of unsigned talent who entered the contest was extremely high and even included singer songwriter Wesu Wallace who had made it into the last ten acts of Pop Idol 2.

For anyone in the business of hiring entertainment ranging from the silky footballing skills of Extreme Fooball Freestyle to the down-right bizarre masochistic behaviour of drag act Chrysalis, all the semi-finalists are listed and linked below:

Yildiz Hussein
Extreme Football Freestyle
Michael Douglas as Neil Diamond
Chrysalis
Hannah Dallas
Raven Dance Company

In search of Top Gear's tank

This morning (1 Sept), Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and Captain Slow, James May thundered across London's Tower Bridge in a tank to promote their upcoming world Top Gear Live tour, organised by Brand Events. The tour kicks off at Earls Court on 30 October before moving to Birmingham on 13 November. It then travels to Dublin and from there, takes in 10 cities around the world.

To help promote the tour, Event Solutions - a division of Visit London set up to help organisers with some of the logistical problems of staging events in the capital - worked its magic to close off Tower Bridge to traffic, presumably so Clarkson didn't try and crush anyone on the way over. I was there to capture it all on video and this is my debut video blog.