We're becoming black-tie regulars at the Royal Albert Hall this week! Thursday's event was Post's British Insurance Awards, followed by last night's Investment Week Fund Manager of the Year Awards 2014, sponsored by FundsNetwork.
Check out our gallery of highlights from the FMYA evening below, with thanks to Investment Week and Mike Jackson from FundsNetwork for the few pics we've borrowed.
To see some snaps from the BIAs, check out our brandformula blog.
BIBA has just shared this video of Mark Huxley’s interview with BIBA Executive Director, Graeme Trudgill at the close of BIBA 2014.
Hux quizzes Graeme on his highlights from this year's conference, and the exciting pieces of work he’s brought with him.
Watch the video to hear their chat in full and to see the new guides launched by BIBA at the event.
This year's AIRMIC annual conference had some of our most impressive (random) stats yet. Check out our full infographic here:
In line with the continued growth of this specialist insurance and financial services marketing agency, the brandformula & Lamb team has seen a number of key new recruits join the company. Julie Jarvis has joined as events director, where she will support the large industry-wide gatherings such as the BIBA & Airmic Conferences that are a key part of their service as well as the client specific work they undertake. On the creative front Mark Leman has joined along with Dalia Merecinskaite as senior designer and designer respectively.
Completing the current round of joiners, Bradford Jordan has joined on a fixed term contract to widen the available resource within their digital communications services. He will be primarily assisting the in-house team with the delivery of their social media services.
Speaking of the creative additions, Nick Patchitt, the group's creative director commented: "I am excited at the outlook for Creative, Mark brings a wealth of brand identity experience from his time at some top creative agencies and Dalia has a wealth of skills to help drive our creative offering into digital, animation and other multi-media channels. The team is looking ahead with confidence at continuing to build on our track record of creating engaging brand identities and award winning campaign work, and the new additions to the team will help us move forward with real purpose."
Mark Huxley, executive director of brandformula & Lamb added: "This is a really exciting time for us. It will soon be 18 months since we merged the two businesses and the intervening time has seen a consistent period of growth, with increasing levels of support from existing clients and many new friends made. Being able to build our team in such a positive way is a wonderful testament to this and we are really looking forward to the great work they will deliver."
Many of you will know that for a few years now Lamb CMC have created the theming for Post Magazine’s annual British Insurance Awards. Seeing this year’s shortlist being published always gives us here a timely reminder of what a great event this is and how the reputation of winning a “BIA” have helped drive some stellar work by all those who feel it worthy of submitting their efforts for stringent, objective and external scrutiny. As a business that has the word brand at the spiritual heart of everything we do, we take our collective hat off to all those that made this step and would congratulate them in equal measure as those that have been shortlisted and the eventual winners. Within the insurance industry “brand worth” is something that is sometimes not properly understood or appreciated to itself, but the metrics that define it are. It is a sector that is utterly driven by reputations at the corporate or personal level founded upon trust. Another word for which could be truth and it is the ability to show this across the business and more importantly deliver it in its service offerings that truly define a real winner.
When we look at a business’s brand, we look to four key facets that we believe define it:
Authenticity – How ‘true’ does the business remain to its original vision
Compelling – What emotional connection does the business make with its clients
Distinctive – How different is the business to others/competitors
Excellence – Does the business offer any unique service or skill and is it good at it/a leader
To us a good brand has to deliver on all four. Any failing within any of these can, in our mind, cause an imbalance that will mean the business will never reach its full potential and stand out amongst a “Night of the Champions”.
The annual BIBA conference is the insurance industry's leading event taking place over 2 days which this year was hosted in Manchester. BIBA 2012 was Lamb CMC's biggest and most successful event to date which saw us designing and building 11 exhibition stands for various clients throughout the hall. Each stand required an individual creative approach to ensure it was as engaging as possible on the day but also tied in with individual marketing campaigns and product pushes. No modular systems here thankyou! Of course our work didn't stop at stand designs with many clients using the opportunity to launch their new brands and marketing campaigns, it was a hectic few months leading up to BIBA but without exception we are delighted with the results for each and every project.
We'd like to thank all of our clients for embracing our designs and all who worked so hard from initial concept sketches through to final stand build - this really was a great event for all who took part.
Below is a brief summary of each of our stands, full details of each stand will be in our work section soon so please check back shortly.
Abbey Legal Protection
Using BIBA 2012 as a launch date for Abbey Legal's new product meant that we could go bold and simple with the design of this stand and focus on functionality. We designed a stand which featured a demonstration bench allowing face-to-face presentations of the new online system across various devices. This stand surpassed expectations and looked stunning on the day ensuring a very happy client.
Catlin
Our brief was to take Catlin's amazing office environment and bring it into the BIBA hall - a home away from home. We replicated various finishes and features from Catlin's London office including a large coffee bar, bespoke artwork, quality floor finish, lighting and even a full length hanging red acrylic ribbon feature. These all looked exceptional but let's not kid ourselves, the coffee was the draw on this stand and we ensured that Catlin were offering the best at BIBA.
CNA
Move over Tom Cruise, the cocktails are on us. The CNA stand was kept very open, bright and inviting with the lure or freshly prepared cocktails. On stand messages were kept to a minimum, and defined separate areas were created allowing for impromptu meetings and conversations. Visibility of the CNA brand was maximised ensuring the stand was viewable from a maximum area around the stand. This was a quality bespoke stand that sat very comfortably and confidently within this competitive area of the hall.
DAS
This stand was a lot of fun to produce, more film set design than clean corporate stand. DAS wanted a stand showcasing their business recovery product and how it helps customers to get back up and running after any disaster. We replicated a typical pub interior with genuine working pub bar and proceeded to set it on fire (well, not literally), giving the effect of fire damage. This was certainly not your average insurance exhibition stand and attracted a lot of attention as a result.
Davies Group
Our ongoing Remarkable People doing remarkable things marketing campaign and continued sponsorship of Team GB cyclist Andy Tennant has continued to gain traction over the last year so we used this as the focus for this year's stand. The stand was in a fantastic location within the hall which ensured large footfall past the stand, we simply let the campaign shine. Showcasing 2 of Andy's bikes, his world champion jersey and videos of him in action sparked real interest in the campaign and meant the Davies representatives were kept busy across the 2 days.
Heritage
This is a real working stand which has already been used in various exhibitions around Europe. We developed it in 2011 to be adaptable to various size configurations and reused the basic structure again this year with updated graphics tying in with the conference branding. We also developed a quick interactive ipad survey which delegates completed on the stand with updated results displayed live on it proving to be a real talking point and hook to starting conversations with passing delegates.
Insurance Times
As with previous years Insurance Times were recording live video footage and editing at the event, showcasing their talents and giving a real insight into the hectic nature of journalism. With a limited stand footprint we maximised space on this stand to include interview areas and a private hidden area for editing video which was then included into an updated looping video screen on stand.
MAPFRE Group
After the success of their award winning stand last year MAPFRE were keen to keep the same concept and evolve the stand for this year's BIBA conference. We kept the tapas bar theme which reinforced MAPFRE's proud Spanish heritage but opened the stand up by removing a wall and lightened the wood panelling. Again this proved to be a very popular stand with the delegates who couldn't resist the warm Spanish hospitality on offer showing MAPFRE at their best.
NewLaw Solicitors
Keen to break into the insurance market, this was NewLaw's first time at the BIBA conference and potentially the first time a lot of delegates would have seen the solicitor. NewLaw were keen to have a stand which pushed their brand and their new NL24 company as effectively as possible. We designed and built a stand which gave maximum exposure to their brand which was well received by all; a positive step for NL24 getting a foot in the insurance market.
NMU
All change on the NMU stand this year; they used the BIBA conference to launch the new look NMU with new branding, collateral and a completely new CMS website which is launching any day now. Utilising the stand we built last year we replaced the floor and backwall with updated quality finishes and added a large hanging lightbox above the stand which guaranteed the NMU name was seen from around the hall.
Transactor
Transactor is a software company which offers systems that can easily expand as a client's requirements increases. They wanted a playful, fun stand which still reflected the professional nature of the company. We took their logo as a start point and repeated the shape into an organised grid picking out individual squares with various details. It is always satisfying to overhear people around the show complimenting one of your stands and this was one of those examples.
Again, all of these projects will be updated shortly in the work section of our website where you will be able to see much more detail of the stands and various details.
Thanks again to all!