Barging In …

A few weeks ago, while attending IdeaFest in NYC, we heard from Bryan Rafanelli (celebrity planner of the Chelsea Clinton wedding amongst other big gigs). He presented on a unique event he produced on a Barge.  It took the crew forty-five days to build an enclosed venue on this floating platform, all for a 5 hour event, and just because the client wanted to do something different. They wanted to give guests a unique experience that couldn’t be recreated anywhere else. This is an ask we hear with increasing frequency in the events industry. Creating truly unique, sharable, postable, memorable moments. As a society, we’re starting to see a strong shift towards valuing “experiences” over “things”, which forces us to get super creative, as designers and architects of these moments.

And speaking of barges … anyone notice the growing speculation around the barges seen in the San Francisco Bay and Portland area lately? After some heated online debate, they were finally linked to Google, who revealed that the barges are giant marketing showrooms that have already done what good marketing does best …generate a lot of buzz!  More details here.