When the pandemic hit Irish events companies, they invited the world to join them

In March 2020, tumbleweed was the only thing moving in Ireland and the mood music for events companies was sombre. Not any more. All the world’s a stage for the nation’s top tier event companies. Ireland has a world class events sector and the pandemic proved it. When lockdowns closed down live events, they turned their creative powers on themselves, and thrived.

Here’s how four of them did it.

Verve

Award winning events management company Verve celebrated three decades in business earlier this year at Connectopia, an ‘ultimate corporate summer party’ event that ran all summer long at Dublin’s RDS.

Now is the time for a cohesive, age friendly healthcare system

---

How your legacy gift to Concern Worldwide leaves a better future for some of the world’s poorest families

---

Good governance is critical for effective healthcare investigations

---

Joined-up IT means medics have more time to focus on patient care

---

The fully themed party package, which corporate clients could take all of or share space in, was a chance to celebrate the return of face-to-face socialising and up to 2,500 people attended each night.

It’s a sign of the huge pent-up demand for live events, which Barry Muldowney, head of events at Verve delightedly describes as having “gone from a tap to a fire hydrant”.

But in March 2020, tumbleweed was the only thing moving in Ireland and the mood looked very different indeed.

“2019 had been our busiest year ever. Then we went into lockdown, and everything stopped,” says Muldowney. “So, we asked ourselves what would a client use us for now, why would they want to pay us?”

The answer led them to devise a range of virtual events, TV-quality broadcasts of live shows ranging from 60-minutes to six-hour long sessions, for clients that included everyone from tech companies to state bodies.

‘The number of Irish agencies out there competing is incredible. As an industry, we are making a significant impact internationally.’

They hired actors and wrote scripts. Participants could wander away from the main stage into a workshop on anything from meditation and mental health to karaoke. “On one occasion we ran a 90-minute live event, back-to-back, in three different time zones,” he says.

Prior to this the term virtual had simply meant livestreams that people could click into, he points out. Not anymore. Now even though live events are back with a bang, bookings still come from around the world for Verve’s online events, enabling the company to come out of the pandemic stronger than it went in.

It is now attracting new customers from all over the world.

“I put it down to the Irish ‘we need to get this done’ mentality, which we do in a nice way. Irish people are very flexible and responsive. No doesn’t exist in our vocabulary,” says Muldowney.

“We were doing things that agencies in the US and UK weren’t doing. At a time when they were sitting on their hands waiting to see what would happen, we got out there and solved a problem. Word spread that there was this Irish agency doing great virtual events and it snowballed from there. We have won new clients across the US and Asia Pacific. As a result, Verve’s headcount has increased to 120 staff across offices in Dublin, London, Amsterdam and San Francisco.” verve.ie

Honey+Buzz

The origins of brothers Jonny and Paddy Davis’s brand experience agency Honey+Buzz dates to 2005 and their first marketing business, Imagine. They rebranded in 2019 and two years later, in May 2021, sold the business to Allied Global Marketing, a US company it had partnered with for years.

From the buyer side, the way in which Honey+Buzz had responded to the pandemic was part of its appeal.

“I’ve never been prouder of the team than I was at how everyone responded to the challenges we faced. It focused us as a team and allowed us to stop for a second. Where previously we had always been on the go now, all of a sudden, we could ask questions like what are we doing, why are we doing it, and how can we do it better?” Jonny explains.

“We looked at the skillset we had and we spoke to clients. They still had objectives they needed to attain, and we saw opportunities,” he says.

Like many Irish agencies, Honey+Buzz quickly pivoted to offering virtual events. “I didn’t see the same speed and quality of response in other markets in terms of what people did and delivered for clients here, how they learned so quickly and how everyone was really willing to upskill,” says Davis.

‘It was down to everyone’s resilience and adaptability asking how can we turn this around? It turned out to be the biggest brief we’d ever had to deliver.’

Honey+Buzz won global clients as a result, such as Amazon and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok. It is currently working with Paramount to celebrate 25 Years of the television show South Park in Europe and Asia.

“It’s all down to talent and the fact that success breeds success,” he says of the industry’s growth here. “People are now coming to Ireland to work in the events sector here, because we punch so far above our weight as an industry.” honeyandbuzz.com

FUEL

Going into the pandemic events company Fuel had 25 staff. Today it employs 85.

“We were already growing rapidly and had a full calendar ahead when everything fell off a cliff,” says Bettine McMahon, its creative director during the pandemic lockdown.

What now, they wondered, but only briefly. “It was down to everyone’s resilience and adaptability asking how can we turn this around, how can we diversify? It turned out to be the biggest brief we’d ever had to deliver in the entire life of Fuel,” she says.

The company had already been considering a rebrand before the pandemic. It took the opportunity to execute that, and in doing so created a media splash, gaining valuable attention.

“Suddenly having so much time on our hands allowed us to look at things differently and pushed us out of the confines of what we were doing. The rebrand helped us to make noise too,” she says.

It invested in new technology and, like so many Irish events companies, began producing TV shows for clients, starting with a major virtual event for itself, to launch the rebrand.

The team trialed 40 virtual platforms to find the right one to broadcast on, and in the end decided to build their own. Called VStage, it can be customised for each client. One now uses it to broadcast events to 40 offices globally.

“We made such progress with local clients in Ireland who are global companies, that we started turning heads abroad, and their overseas office began getting in touch with us,” she explains.

Fuel recently opened an office in San Jose, has one in New York and one in Cork. Pre-pandemic, less than five per cent of it’s business came from overseas. Now 50 per cent does.

Coupled with live events back on stream, “it’s all go”, she says.

“We had to jump in at the deep end with virtual and endure a vertical learning curve. As a result, we are now platform developers as well as an experience and entertainment agency. My advice to anyone is to be fearless.” fuelhq.ie

Catapult

Catapult started life two decades ago as a production company, providing the nuts and bolts to marketing and PR agencies who wanted to run creative events. If clients had the idea, Catapult could bring it to life. In time, the team at Catapult realised they could come up with better and more creative ideas, on budget, themselves. So that’s what they did.

Coming into the pandemic it employed 27 people. Today it has 55. It recently finished working on the UK’s Future Lab event, part of the Festival of Speed, which saw upwards of 60,000 people a day visit its pavilion.

It also worked on the interactive Van Gogh exhibition in Dublin’s RDS and runs events for clients such as Coca Cola and Mastercard around the world. Catapult have recently signed a contract with FIFA for a large-scale project at the World Cup, (and are producing an event in NYC in mid-September hosting President Biden). “We had always worked overseas but during the pandemic we needed to diversify quickly,” says Des O’Leary, its managing director. “We needed to work with more clients and organisations internationally.”

“The events industry in Ireland is very industrious. Whatever needs to be done will be done. The first thing we did was call clients and say, don’t cancel, let’s go online instead.”

Today it has clients across EMEA and North America, with fast growing offices in New York and Los Angeles. But when the first lockdown took hold, “we saw €10m worth of business wiped out straight away. It was a pretty scary place,” he says.

A track record of delivering success meant clients trusted them. The more successful the events it ran for existing clients, the newer ones began knocking on their doors, including the UN, for which it ran a series of online initiatives. Today half of Catapult’s revenues come from outside of Ireland.

It routinely goes head-to-head with the biggest agencies in the world for new business, and wins. “The number of Irish agencies out there competing is incredible. As an industry, we are making a significant impact internationally.” says O’Leary. “I can genuinely say, if we are pitching and see another Irish agency on the list, we really know we are up against it.” thisiscatapult.com

“The turnaround, as described here by our event agency members, is something I have watched with pride and admiration and I am delighted to see them gain international recognition for their hard work and ingenuity”, says Charley Stoney, CEO, IAPI.

“As marketing services have evolved, so too has the nature of IAPI’s membership. Over the last two years, our membership has grown by 25 per cent as we have seen the inclusion of not only events and experiential companies, but PR agencies, planning consultancies, design houses and digital businesses, all of whom contribute to our “Ireland: Where Creative is Native” output.”

Find out more about IAPI’s Creative is Native initiative at creativeisnative.com.