Company: Informa Middle East, Dubai, UAE
Company Description: Informa operates a leading business intelligence, academic publishing, knowledge and events business. Informa is the world's largest events producer with several thousand events annually welcoming 150,000 delegates in over 70 countries. Our offering spans key industry sectors, providing the highest-quality content and thought leadership alongside platforms for connecting and collaborating.
Nomination Category: Event Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Brand & Experiences - Launch Event
 Nomination Title: LEAP, Informa Markets PLC
- Which will you submit for this nomination, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length or a written essay of up to 525 words? Choose one:
Essay of up to 525 words
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the nominated video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video:
- If you are providing a written essay for this nomination, submit in this space an essay of up to 525 words describing the event: its genesis, goals, development, and results:
Total 517 words used.
LEAP is a kinetic verb that evokes immediate ideas of motion and energy, it symbolises the movement from one place to another. This is symbolic of the great pace of change in Saudi Arabia, of the advancement of humankind made possible by tech innovation. When our event LEAP was conceptualised, its objective was to become the go-to platform to discover new technologies and where emerging tech gets adopted first. LEAP’s goals were to positively build on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA)’s brand internationally, accelerate digital transformation in the region, position KSA as the epicentre of technology and provide a platform to drive foreign investment and significant economic activity in the region.
To establish LEAP as a tech event on the global stage, we needed an agenda and speaker line-up that could compete with the likes of Web Summit, Viva Tech, Slush and Collision. We welcomed to the stage 513 global CEOs and tech powerhouses including Eugene Kaspersky (CEO & Co-Founder of Kaspersky), Peggy Johnson (CEO of Magic Leap), Christian Klein (CEO of SAP), Maëlle Gavet (CEO of Techstars). Our production team worked tirelessly to onboard outstanding speakers. Covering 12 tech verticals, our speaker line-up included never-before-seen in the region investors and experts including Stéphane Houdet (Paralympic Tennis Player), Björn Öste (Founder of OATLY) and Jennison Asuncion (Head, Accessibility Engineering at LinkedIn). The Saudi government and partners announced $6.4 billion in signed deals, and Saudi Arabia become the first country ever mapped into the Metaverse at the event, which attendees could witness. Our exhibition floor housed 716 global tech exhibitors including SAP, Microsoft, Mobily, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, who brought the latest tech innovations to the event for attendees to experience. We saw innovations in HealthTech to Sports Tech, AI to VR. Exhibitors hosted talks at their stands and invited visitors to explore their products and tech on offer. We wanted all visitors and exhibitors to make new connections. We had multiple networking trigger points throughout the event, including break-out zones, meeting areas, and the LEAP app which acted as a networking tool to initiate connections with attendees. LEAP broke Swapcard records with highest number of profiles ever on the app with 127,276 people.
We launched the inaugural Rocket Fuel Start-up Competition with a prize fund of $1,000,000 USD. This competition took place over the three days of the event, with attendees able to watch 220 start-ups battle it out on stage to join the final with a celebrity judging panel featuring Dragons' Den Investors James Caan and Steven Bartlett, and BBC's The Apprentice judge Karren Brady. This was the first edition of LEAP and we set targets that we believed to be realistic and achievable. We ended up smashing all the targets, for example:
- The sponsorship revenue target was $4,500,000 USD. We closed $19,100,000 USD
- We aimed for 80,000+ preregistrations and achieved 137,473
- The onsite attendee target was 40,000+ and we achieved over 100,000 visits
- We set out to close 500 exhibitors and brought in 713
- We aimed for 400 global speakers and obtained 506
- Optionally, you may list creative and production credits for your event - a list of the people and organizations that contributed to its development:
- Annabelle Mander and Michael Champion
- All the Informa Markets team
- Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Information and Technology (MCIT)
- Saudi Arabia’s Federation for Cyber Security Programming (SAFCSP)
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