Last week we were delighted to receive an invitation to one of the events we’d helped to create for an international insurance company. The events are touring Britain and beyond, but we visited one in Gloucester, UK which was a great opportunity to see our theme and tools in action – and to gauge the audience reaction for ourselves.

The overall theme was ‘weather’ …this year has been stormy for most of us, but this company is looking forward to a brighter outlook and the events reflect that. They’re not complacent though…there’s always room for improvement and we created a giant magnetic weather map for an activity to get the audience to rate their feelings about core strategic issues. They place weather symbols representing their mood, from ‘stormy’ to ‘sunshine’ on the map as well as writing their thoughts on cards that will be collated later. This activity is followed by a debate about the issues.

The weather themed presentation is delivered by a mixture of senior leaders supported by two films. The first has a serious message – in ‘View from the Floor’ Senior Leaders interviewed employees about their opinions on the positives and negatives of working for the business and their hopes for the future. The second is the grand finale –a celebratory music video in which loads of employees from across the company dance, sing and generally ‘rock out’ to Katrina and the Waves ‘Walking on Sunshine’ – we saw for ourselves what a big hit it is and the hope is that it will spread virally to any employees who missed it and may even be used as a recruitment tool!

We enjoyed ourselves, but the best thing is receiving positive feedback from our client who says: ‘The weather theme was a great concept and well received by everyone… We were pleased with the final result…and the ideas and support we received from the Loop. We look forward to working with you again.’

In August The Loop sought inspiration from Banksy, through a company trip to his surprise exhibition at the Bristol museum.  Banksy is arguably the world’s most controversial living artist and certainly Bristol’s finest. Whatever people may think of the rights or wrongs of graffiti art, or indeed the quality of Banksy’s work, it is no doubt that the show was inspiring for many very positive reasons, not least his generosity in staging the show for free. It was his gift to his home city and raised thousands of pounds for the museum through donations, local charity shops (who anonymously received boxes of merchandise) and businesses.

At least 300,000 people saw the show, many queuing for over five hours – a testament to the power of his art to enthuse and intrigue people of all ages and from all walks of life.

And what of the show itself? It was an entertaining mix of throw-away visual ‘gags’ combined with a hefty wedge of political comment.  Alongside the signature stencils were mock ‘classical’ artworks or real artworks that had been ‘Banksyfied’. The main event was the room full of clever and disturbing animaltronics, such as the moving ‘chicks’ that on closer examination resembled chicken nuggets, but the most fun was had playing ‘spot the Banksy’ as his work was scattered adhoc amongst the museum’s usual exhibits.

If there’s a element of his work that should influence our own it’s the way he combines his strong messages with a playfulness that draws you in.  Visitors obviously enjoyed seeing something unexpected –  a twist on their everyday reality –  and one that is imbued with a healthy amount of humour, but also makes them pause for thought.

The Loop helped make a global power systems company’s first ever ‘Day for Quality’ workshop a great success. The workshop brought Quality Managers from around the company together to share best practice and learn from each other and from external Quality specialists. The Loop moderated the event and designed and delivered the lively breakout sessions, which generated plenty of ideas. We were also responsible for developing creative concepts for the event branding.

Ecclesiastical wanted a creative concept for their ‘Communicating Change’ roadshow for employees across the UK and Ireland. The Loop also produced creative deliverables to support all the conferences, including a 20 minute video, voting cards, stage backdrops, and ‘take-away’ cards for employees to take away from the venue with the key points learnt from the day. An interactive voting system provided attendees at the larger venues the opportunity to vote on certain issues with individual, interactive handsets.