It’s that time of year again, when we at BatesMeron get to help promote the annual meeting for the options industry—the Options Industry Conference. The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) and the host exchange for the event—this year, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE)—plan a great event, and we work with them to share their plans with the options industry. We come up with a theme for the meeting, designed to get options industry professionals excited for next year’s event. That theme is then pulled through the website, ads, programs and other promotional pieces. (If you would like to learn more about the process BatesMeron goes through in order to promote a meeting, visit my previous blog “The Lifecycle of a Successful Annual Meeting.”)
One of the pieces we create is a short teaser video, which is played at the conference to officially introduce the next conference’s theme and location. This video is meant to be exciting, informative and memorable. Most of all, the video sets a visual tone for the conference, as it’s one of the first pieces we create after the mood boards and the first seen by our audience.
In addition to getting options industry professionals excited about attending the 2013 conference, we also needed to communicate several important messages. The first was that the Options Industry Conference would be returning to Las Vegas for the second time in five years. Our challenge was to find a way to get attendees excited about the 2013 event, even though they had recently visited Vegas, by reminding them of what they liked while still making the 2013 conference feel like a new experience.
Another key message was the conference’s new date sequence. Traditionally the conference has been held over the weekend. This year CBOE decided to move the dates to Wednesday through Friday, in hopes that a free weekend and more time to explore the destination city would be popular amongst potential attendees.
And let’s not forget the main message, which was introducing the 2013 meeting and giving reasons to attend via the meeting theme. The theme we developed for the 2013 Options Industry Conference was “Vintage Vegas”—meant to remind people of the Las Vegas of old. We drew inspiration from the Rat Pack, the Sands, the Flamingo and everyone’s favorite giant neon cowboy, Vegas Vic, who stood atop the entrance of the Pioneer Club.
With all these messages and vintage visuals clamoring for attention, it was time to get to work. The video creation process began with the BatesMeron team collaborating with the OCC and CBOE team to determine their wish list for the video, including the length, tone and messages mentioned above. Next we created a storyboard, which paired visuals with on-screen text to show how the video would communicate to our audience that Las Vegas was the place to be in 2013.
We mined stock photography, Vegas tourism board video and photos, vintage shots and hotel photography to find visuals that captured both the Vegas experience and our vintage theme. For the soundtrack, we were inspired by Ocean’s 11 and chose an instrumental track that had an old Vegas feel with a new twist. Once we had the visuals, on-screen text and music working together, it was time for us to run through a final checklist to make sure that we created a concise, compelling video that captured the 2013 Options Industry Conference’s overall messages: favorite location, new date sequence, theme and conference highlights.
The end result was a two-minute video that successfully communicated our many messages and brought our Vintage Vegas theme to life. The video premiered at the 2012 Options Industry Conference, and the OCC/CBOE planning team was very happy with the result. The video now lives on the conference website, where it continues to entice options industry leaders to mark their calendars for the Options Industry Conference 2013.
Do you need to introduce an event or kick off a campaign with a splash? Ask us how videos can complement your other marketing efforts.
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