Gyro has followed Circle K Europe since they made the big leap from legacy brand and cultural identity pillar Statoil - with a long local history especially in the Nordics - to the foreign, newly revamped Circle K brand in 2015. Moving several thousand people across Europe into the new identity, aligning brand awareness, building a new community and sparking pride and enthusiasm throughout the many business regions has been our project over the last 4 years.

For the 2018 kickoffs in Scandinavia and Central and Eastern Europe, Gyro was challenged with coming up with a new conference format that would give all the critical business areas their platform, but that would trigger interaction, dialogue across departments, exploration and curiosity.

Our solution - receiving top score on learning, engagement, motivation and making new connections - was to turn the conference into an open festival in which Gyro would design customized booths for each strategic area. To ensure the overall brand building, the booths were framed by common signage and banner designs.

To encourage interaction, we integrated gamification into the festival and built an augmented reality solution for mobile phones, in which video content would be triggered by graphics embedded in each booth’s design. The search for the graphical AR-triggers enabled a scavenger hunt for the attendees and a conversation starter for the booth hosts. 

A DJ-tower and an inviting, stepped lounge platform added a relaxed, playful atmosphere.

To make sure the festival environment had the most impact, the day started off with a plenary session, and the festival concept was kept secret. On cue from CEO Jacob Schram and EVP Hans Olav Høidal on stage, a drape-drop on both sides of the plenary stage revealed the large festival environment beyond. 

A key element in the art direction for the plenary presentation was to keep the CEO’s images large, clean and visually striking, building a story that would move in larger arcs, enabling a storytelling intimacy without demanding a lot of reading and split attention from the audience. This too was meant to implicitly set the stage for the saturated, dynamic multichannel experience the attendees were about to splash into.