Showcase Live Streaming – brings the retail industry together virtually for World Retail Congress Connected 2020

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Showcase have been successfully delivering Ascential’s World Retail Congress for 5 years. Up until six months ago the team were busy preparing to head to the ‘Rome Cavalieri’ in Italy to deliver the 2020 event, but due to current challenges and restrictions, this year’s delivery will mean a slightly different format and venue.

The uncertainty of the pandemic meant that the event organisers needed to make the call to either postpone or cancel their events for 2020. Showcase’s Managing Director Ben Collings and his team, have been working closely with their clients to support them through these challenging times, investing and developing their ‘Live Stream’ department to allow them to keep their ‘event’ alive. This department solely dedicated to ‘live’ and ‘hybrid’ events will host World Retail Congress Connected 2020 this month – Three days of virtual content that will bring together the leaders of today’s global retail industry.

The three-day event will be hosted through a dedicated ‘virtual online platform’ created by Showcase to give their client what they are desperate for – a live event experience. Swap the phrase ‘a web-based portal’ for ‘event venue’ and you begin to get the picture. It’s just like the real thing, attendees arrive at the virtual reception and enter to view event schedules, speaker profiles and view the content streams. Sponsors get maximum coverage and as with any event it’s all about the stats, reports will be produced to advise sponsors just how much traction they received.

Managing Director Ben Collings explains ‘We understood the need to change the way we delivered events and were keen to ensure that the solution was not just a ‘live stream’ feed against a soulless backdrop. Our ‘Virtual event online platform’ offering allows us to create an event in it’s true sense, with a live audience and maintain maximum numbers. Whilst the industry has seen many cancelled events the World Retail Congress team has embraced our offering, as a way of bringing the retail industry together to help reset retailing as it emerges from this global crisis’

Taking place on 15-17 September, the virtual Congress will host a number of keynote presentations and interviews and panel discussions that will be streamed into multiple broadcasts. Content has been pre-recorded over a number of sessions at Showcase’s London Studio based at St. Ermin’s Hotel, using green screen technology and animated virtual stage set designs. Every element
of the content has been designed for maximum attendee experience, 6 days of filming, 8 days of editing will result in 10 hours
of engaging content. The live studio at St. Ermin’s has allowed key speakers to be filmed in a safe and inspiring central London location.

‘We are so excited to use Showcase for our virtual event World Retail Congress Connected which consists of panel sessions, keynotes, awards, polls, and videos and Showcase have offered us a really diverse platform to achieve this. They have created amazing animated virtual stage set designs, along with user friendly sponsor pages and speaker pages, making the platform visually exciting and engaging. Showcase has also offered us studio facilities to film our key speakers where possible, as well as remote dial in options. Their service level and flexibility is impeccable, they have gone above and beyond producing project timelines, schedules, production meetings to ensure we capture all of our content, as well as editing the content. With 30+ international speakers for the event, and thousands of viewers, we are really excited to create such a high level virtual event.’
WRC’s Director of Operations, Natalie Wilkins.

More details: www.weareshowcase.com


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Sam Hyland
Author: Sam Hyland

Sam is the assistant content manager for Event Industry News (EIN). Sam is involved in publishing news stories, videos and podcasts. Sam also collates the latest stories for the EIN e-newsletter. If you have a press release or story you think we might be interested to know about please email editor@eventindustrynews.com