Our work with Stella Artois / Budweiser

High profile corporate event management

Our Symphony Event Management Software enabled global sports marketing agency Octagon to manage over 3,000 guests on behalf of Stella Artois and Budweiser at corporate hospitality events during Wimbledon 2018 and the World Cup.
The platform allowed their team to meet the logistical demands of managing ticket allocations, seating plans, catering, budgets and invitation workflows.

Visit Symphony

Tight timescales, many players and moving parts. The customised Symphony solution made corporate procedures simple and fool proof.
- Gerard Lennox, Symphony Director

Supporting a winning team

Summer 2018 saw Octagon stretched to the limit. With the World Cup in full swing, much of their focus was on Russia.
However, Budweiser’s Bud Boat needed to sail down the River Thames accommodating thousands of football fans over a four-week period. And as the major sponsor of Wimbledon, Stella Artois had a complex hospitality schedule to manage.
To ensure everything ran smoothly, Octagon needed a specialist software tool to support their events team during this busy period.

Scoring an early lead

Prior experience at this level meant we already understood the challenges Octagon faced so they didn’t need to spend valuable time explaining the event logistics. We could swiftly configure, implement and launch Symphony with minimum, customisation ready to use.
We presented Octagon and their clients with a series of interactive prototype layouts for the guest management portal. This allowed us to confirm that workflow logic and data capture were correct at each point in the registration process.

Our solution

Corporate Event Management is a very complex area that involves many people. We hid the complexity by making the end users life very easy.

Organising the team

Traditionally, after securing sponsorship, Stella or Budweiser field sales teams would bombard their brand managers with emails justifying why their customers should receive corporate hospitality tickets.
Customers range from local pubs up to Sainsburys. Complex spreadsheets were used to keep track of ticket requests and guests, requiring manual updates of multiple variables.
Symphony structured the way in which brand managers communicate with their field sales staff, eliminating the need for thousands of emails whilst enforcing structure and providing real time data.

Communicating with the players

Each user group required different information. For example, brand managers needed to give approval for invites and allocate budgets whilst guests wanted a concise schedule for the day and to know where the free bar was!
Quba developed portals that presented personalised content to each user group and integrated with the Symphony software, enabling seamless communication and data capture.
Adhering to brand guidelines was essential across all event touch points. Meanwhile client staff and event managers could get real-time updates on who was and wasn’t coming and the effect this had on budgets — all without resorting to hours of spreadsheet production.

Making every shot count

To minimise the Octagon team’s manual input, we focused on automating back-office functions at every point. Tasks like setting up users, scheduling each of the 25 separate events and sending out relevant emails became a simple and reliable process.
As circumstances altered on the day — as they always do in event management — the Symphony EMS provided notifications to guests and managers, cutting out hours of manual updates.

Ready to discuss your project? Let’s talk

Greg Mathews

Client Services Director

If you fancy a chat about anything digital, feel free to contact Greg on email or give Greg a call on 0114 279 7779.