Informa's People Awards

Shows and Storytelling

The theme Shows and Storytelling was chosen for Informa’s annual awards. As a company whose specialty is producing and sharing world class shows and stories, Informa connects people and businesses through their events, training, marketing research, and publishing subsidiaries.

Broadsword is honoured to join forces with Informa as a production partner for a third year, helping them to celebrate the achievements and hard work of the people at Informa at these bespoke awards in London.

Bringing stories to life

Every detail is thoughtfully curated to shine the spotlight with themed touches and stories weaved into the evening.

As soon as guests arrived at the show they are immersed into the theme that promises a special night. Cinema style ‘Now Showing’ posters, themed digital signage, and luxurious blue velvet draping led guests through the venue to the main stage where the theatre style drapes were replicated digitally in our stage design. Sweeping digital drapery across layered LED sections and dynamic lighting created a visually striking centrepiece that showed a vintage movie style countdown to start the show.

Opening up ‘Act One’, a flash mob with eight disguised singers and two acrobats emerged from the crowd to grab the guests’ attention in a playful performance with the song lyrics personalised to key people in the business.

Inclusive by design

The live event welcomed an audience of 400, while 1,000 tuned into the livestream from Informa offices around the world.

To deliver a seamless awards experience for both audiences, Broadsword provided event management, production, and logistics support across rehearsals and the live event, as well as providing filming and streaming services to make everyone feel part of the celebrations. The hybrid format includes a custom web platform giving colleagues the opportunity to engage pre-event by voting on categories. Content for the digital audience includes an interview set up with the winners in a red-carpet style set up, a highlights reel, and social-ready content to capture stories from the night, while all live content featured subtitles on screen.

The hosts of the event come from across global businesses, with an internal campaign ran in the lead up to the event where colleagues can apply to be a host or present an award via increasingly competitive and engaging video submissions.

Achieving objectives

The event is more than a celebration. It is an opportunity for Informa to celebrate different strengths, unite around what their people have in common, and move forward in the same direction as One Informa. With this, we thought about how the event could achieve wider business objectives including to showcase innovation and future thinking by highlighting new AI initiatives and thinking ahead to how these could be integrated to the 2027 awards. Live voting was integrated with Informa’s internal AI platform and a new category being announced focused on AI.

Additionally, sustainability was hugely important to the business throughout the production of the event. Broadsword, as a B Corp certified events agency partner, reduced, measured, and reported on the carbon footprint of the event throughout the project.

Work with us

If you have an impactful employee event to deliver, a brief that is still taking shape, or a challenge you are not yet sure how to solve, talk to us about it. Our events agency offers full service event management from design to AV and production.

Get in touch with our team to discuss how we can help you with your next corporate event.