Organizing a  thought-leadership event for Polestar in the Stedelijk Museum

The challenge of organizing the Future Talk event in the Stedelijk Museum was a very unexpected twist of events for me, but a highly rewarding one..

Polestar, a major client of Capitola, asked for urgent assistance because their PR & Events manager had quit unexpectedly.. And the timing turned out to be tricky, because a major event, called Future Talks, was scheduled in the Stedelijk Museum within 1 month.. I was still working at Capitola, and was able to join the marketing Team at Polestar as interim PR & Event manager to take Future Talks from concept to execution.

The Future Talks concept

Result of a strategic partnership with Stedelijk. A collaboration in which we could going in-depth on the subject of sustainability, zooming in on the topic: Materials.
The program was set up into three panel sessions that reviewed the material subject from three different angles: Design, resource management, and business. The panel guest where thought leaders in their field, and the event was hosted by news anchor Sacha de Boer.

Working together with the other agencies.

To make this event happen, I worked together the following agencies:

• Gardeners. PR and general event support.
• Comms. Organization support.
• Wink. Stage Design, Sound and event support.
• Change Inc. Inviting speakers and discussion points.
• Code Azur. Ad Campaign Design & presentation Design
• Dentsu Media placement, Radio commercial production & podcast

Coordinating the list of Speakers and Panels

Getting together a group of credible speakers an generate a buzz in the media within a month was quite a challenge. We were pushing hard to have a prime speaker from Polestar HQ to the Netherlands. Another difficulty was forming the panels, and combining  the 'Art and design' scene with speakers from a business background. Forming panels of people who could have a fruitful discussion was quite challenging.

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Setting up the Promotional Campaigns.

The timeline for creating and launching the campaign was extremely short. However, through a mix of digital ads, radio ads and a Podcast published on the NRC channels, we managed a succesful campaign that drew people to the event, as well as communicate the thought-leadership position of Polestar within the sustainability space.

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The result.

The event was fully booked and received positive coverage from several magazines and online publishing websites.

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Learnings

The main learning of organizing this event was how to strike the right balance between being varied, and allow people to go in-depth. In this specific format we hosted three panels with each 3 or 4 speakers. The result was interesting but it wasn't really possible to dive deeper into the interesting talking point, because everyone needed to have a say on stage. The concept would work better in a smaller setting with fewer speakers, because that would allow the discussion to go into more detail.

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