THE CHALLENGE
How do we help Denmark's leading tech festival make a strong comeback in 2021?
THE SOLUTION
Create a technically and visually strong virtual expo housing a broad program of talks on 4 different stages.
Making a strong comeback in 2021
In cooperation with DigitalLead, Create Media, Campfire & Co, and others.
Every spring, Internet Week Denmark materialises in Aarhus to let us all learn, discuss, be inspired, and look into the digital future. But in the unique year of 2020, IWDK had to pull the emergency brakes and straight-up cancel the spring festival.
The new goal became to make a strong comeback in 2021. But with the lockdown dragging out longer than feared, the festival decided to take this year’s Internet Week Denmark virtual.
Visit the virtual universe here, or see a few looks below:
More “experience” than “webinar”
The main challenge was this: How to make expo visitors feel they are part of an experience, rather than just seeing another webinar?
Firstly, we wanted to create a distinct universe that felt different from just another website. We placed live-streamed talks at the centre of that universe. And we turned passive viewers into active participants by including a chat window for participants to ask questions and for speakers to create polls.
This way, you are not just watching an interesting talk – you are experiencing the talk in real-time and engaging with the speaker, as well as the other viewers at the same time.
A futuristic and intriguing visual concept
Internet Week Denmark already had a strong visual identity created by Campfire & co. So, building on that, we started sketching out a virtual universe that feels futuristic, enticing, diverse and inspiring.
Another important point is that Internet Week Denmark does not happen in one place, so there was not a familiar venue to recreate digitally.
The result was a visual concept that consists of boxes of different sizes, colours and textures, situated in a smoky and mystically lit void. The different boxes embody the diversity of the IWDK festival program, and the misty mood and lighting add an element of intrigue. The inspiration for this look came from the milky mists known in Danish as “Mosekonens bryg”, and from the look of greenhouses lighting up low-hanging evening clouds – an evocative image that gives you an undefined feeling that there is something interesting and hidden there.
A record number of participants and zero seconds of downtime
Internet Week Denmark is an Aarhus-based festival, and they even ran outdoor advertising in Aarhus for this year’s virtual festival. But with the virtual festival, Internet Week Denmark 2021 went far beyond Aarhus and even set a new record for people participating in the festival.
Thankfully, our technical platform was able to handle the excitement around the festival, and the thousands of minutes of live-streamed talks across four virtual stages, 85 events and 160+ speakers went by without any unwanted interruptions.
I am amazed about the smooth and effective creative process Cadpeople took us through when building the virtual IWDK conference room. All the way through, we felt an enormous responsiveness to our wants and needs. And apart from being professional to the fingertips, the Cadpeople team is a friendly, easy-going and very cooperative team to work with. Best of all, we have received a lot of positive feedback from IWDK participants who really enjoyed this new online experience.
Randi Vestergaard, Festival Director, IWDK / Senior Event Manager, DigitalLead
PSST… THERE’S MORE.
