CASE STUDY
The IBM Security Summit gathers the top players in cyber security, an audience whose entire job is skepticism. It is the hardest room in the world to impress.
IBM needed the event to do more than inform. It had to establish IBM, unmistakably, as the leader of the field, and it had to do so in a category where the product is invisible and every competitor makes the same claims. The usual trade-show playbook would not survive contact with this crowd.
The Idea
If the subject is digital and abstract, the answer was to go physical and real. The Summit was staged in a raw warehouse beside the Brooklyn Bridge and built out as a high-end, handcrafted environment: reclaimed wood, stone, steel, and glass, the opposite of vaporware.
At its center sat a new identity, a shield built from an ascending arrow, protection and progress in a single mark, rendered across every surface in the room. The message was made of materials before it was made of words: this is a company with substance.
The Work
Glen Hawkins created the Summit identity and designed the experience around it. He drew the shield-and-arrow mark and built it into the space itself: laser-cut into reclaimed wood, printed across angular blue wall panels, animated on the main-stage LED, and engraved into the wooden badge every attendee wore.
He designed the interactive pieces, including a touchscreen exhibit that let attendees explore the Summit's three themes hands-on, and a sculptural rendering of the mark that anchored the room. And he produced the general-session presentation deck and opening film for a stage whose featured speaker was IBM's chairman and CEO, Ginni Rometty.
The Result
The Brooklyn flagship worked so well that IBM took it on the road. Glen translated the bespoke build into a templated system of graphics and messaging that IBM teams could stage in cities around the world: the same identity, the same standard, reproduced without him in the room.
