I'm Luke Bishop – a Creative Director and Writer with 15 years' experience across both in-house and agency environments – I have a passion for concept development, creative strategy, copywriting, brand building and team management.
ITM: Elevating an events
business with big dreams
January 2025
ITM Events is a regional event production company with ambition by the bucketload.
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Known throughout the Thames Valley, London and Europe as ‘the events people who always deliver’ – one problem remained: the ability to gain new leads away from traditional recommendations and word-of-mouth marketing.
As a business where brand recognition, creds decks and creative output had always come second to getting the job done, I formed a creative partnership with ex-Dojo design lead Rodrigo Rodrigues to establish a brand identity that would help them facilitate further growth.
The original ITM homepage
What had started as the need for a new website, quickly became a root-and-branch rebrand and repositioning project – starting with the all-important brand workshop to get to the heart of what ITM stood for and what they wanted to become.
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As a smaller business, there was initial concern that engagement in this type of process might be met with some resistance – but we needn’t have worried.
Rod and I with the ITM workshop crew
The production, operations and management teams got stuck into every task willingly – and consistent themes very quickly started to appear.
One of the key threads was the realisation that ITM had always gone above-and-beyond to deliver exceptional event production, but struggled to articulate these capabilities outside of their core audience.
The other was a desire to move away from their outdated reputation as just the ‘AV guys’ and instead be seen (rightly) as holistic event production specialists.
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The route(s) to a new brand
So with the workshop done and dusted and information well and truly gathered, we got to work exploring routes for the new-and-improved ITM.
As always, nothing was off the table to begin with. With such a blank slate to work with, we were able to develop three very different routes that all reversed into the idea of holistic event production with a creative spirit.
While each route had its own merits in elevating the ITM brand, in the end, our Future/Vision proposal won out as it effectively celebrated the business's rich 30-year history while also providing the polished and contemporary edge that would ultimately position the company where it wanted to be.
For logo development, we experimented with a ‘badge of honour’ approach – keeping things fresh and contemporary, while also celebrating how far the business had come over three decades of operation.
In badge format, it also made creating different tagline lock-ups easier as words and visuals wouldn’t clash.
What do we actually offer?
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While we began work fleshing out our chosen route, there was another separate workstream that required some brain power. ​
ITM had always been extremely capable of talking about what services they offered in person, but any cold leads that came to the site would have to work quite hard to fully understand what level of event production was actually on the table.
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Using insights from our brand workshop, we began to unpick ITM’s expertise and capabilities, then began to formulate both primary and secondary service offers that they could confidently take to market.
This work was a crucial part of the puzzle, as it not only ratified their reputation as holistic production experts, but the addition of a ‘Creative Services’ also meant that the new company positioning of ‘Creative Event Production’ sat comfortably as the overarching proposition for the business as a whole.
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The one-month website
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Once we had the brand building blocks in place, we could start work on creating a website that would beautifully demonstrate the new ITM identity – and the new, simplified product offering.
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But we had to do it quickly. 30-days quickly, to be precise.​
Our chosen platform was Framer – a hugely intuitive hosting solution that stripped out the need for a traditional CMS, meaning ITM staff would have the ability to update both visual and verbal elements simply and easily once the project came to its conclusion.
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Effective content design was key to the success of the new site, so heroing the new service hierarchy became the primary point of focus to kick things off. As well the services themselves, we also made sure who they were offered to didn’t miss the spotlight.
ITM had worked with hundreds of blue-chip clients since its inception in 1994, so we made sure this point of proof didn’t get missed on first visit to the new homepage, including a rolling gallery of past and present client logos.
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From a copy point of view, out went the previous corporate and technical tone and in came a more natural human voice to help articulate the ITM offer in a more understandable and accessible way for those less au fait with the nuts and bolts of corporate event production. ​New 'About', careers and case study pages for additional social proof rounded out proceedings.
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The shop window was finally complete. And yes, we made the 30-day deadline (give or take).
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A film to capture the now and next
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With so much work going into reinventing the brand from the ground up, we felt it was only fitting that we produced a film that brought the whole experience together.
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Something that would not only galvanise the business and generate excitement of what was to come, but also something that was engaging and insightful enough to be client-facing during new business meetings. ​
What followed was a flurry of writing, shooting, animating and editing – condensing the new ITM identity and service offer into a 60-second showcase of what was to come.
Considering the time and budget constraints, it hit all the right marks:
Hosting a winning launch day
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With work now complete, there was only one thing left to do – get our glad rags on and host a launch event for clients, prospects, partners and suppliers to showcase the new brand and direction.
So that's what we did.
Around 100 guests turned up at Newbury Racecourse in August to observe the fruits of our labour.
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Not only was feedback was hugely positive on the new direction of the business, but the transformed ITM identity helped lead to new conversations, business opportunities and partnerships – helping to repay faith in the brand project with tangible, measurable benefits.
And while we didn't have any winning runners and riders on race day, it's fair to say Rod and I got very lucky being able to partner with a business so open to change and ready to embrace the future.