Mobile World Congress 2019
What happens when you acquire a new company one month before one of the most important conferences of the year? You move fast.
After Glispa acquired Mobfox, I had to shift gears to full-throttle in order to accommodate Mobfox into our plans for the conference - from a re-designing the booth to turning a group of relative strangers into a collaborative team.
This acquisition was a massive step in cementing our place in the future of mobile advertising, but it also meant a big hurdle for me because due to with deadlines with the venue, it meant I had three days to change to design of the booth. To make things a bit more challenging: we had no in-house designer available to provide edits. Plus, the branding for each company was starkly different; Mobfox’s brand colors are black, blue and silver and Glispa’s brand colors are black, yellow and white.
We had to act fast. As a marketing team, we rallied together to the get USP’s boiled down for the product walls and I worked closely with our vendor to edit the design in a way that would still tell the story of both companies.
We decided to make the space neutral in as many ways as possible and to then create specific walls/areas for each company, where the pops of color and product descriptions were displayed. This gave us a seamless way to introduce the acquisition while also solving the problem of our drastically different brand colors.
One of the most important tasks prior to a conference is ensuring the team in attendance has a united front. If the messaging is not consistent across all teams, you run the risk of looking unorganised and/or without clear direction. I held MWC training sessions leading up the conference to ensure colleagues build rapport. We also started the week with a team dinner and cooking class, giving everyone an opportunity to let loose and bond before the intense week.
The result: we managed to not only create a booth that was on brand, welcoming and conducive to our goals - we created a lot of additional excitement about the company with clear ROI seen within one month. It was an incredible way to announce the acquisition and a beautiful start of a larger integration of Mobfox into the Glispa team.
