How we made SPP’s Climate Week presence unforgettable

Client

SPP
https://spp.earth/

Project date

September 2024

Services

Communication Design

The brief

The Sustainable Procurement Pledge (SPP) is a global community of procurement professionals working collaboratively with the shared aim at transforming the procurement profession and practices into a force for good around the world. With a mission to foster make sustainability the default by 2030, SPP tackles pressing social and environmental challenges, empowering professionals to become ambassadors of sustainability. Long story short: they aim to make procurement a driving force for sustainable change.

For their next speaking opportunities, two slots during NYC Climate Week, SPP enlisted our expertise to create a presentation that would not just support but elevate the stellar message delivered by keynote speaker Melissa de Roquebrune.

Our mission—should we choose to accept it—was a tight turnaround of less than two weeks to craft both an eye-catching presentation that would be shared live on stage as well as online, and an engaging postcard with a call to action for live attendees. Well, you know what? Challenge accepted!

The campaign

Our goal was clear: create a visually impactful presentation that would resonate with the audience while seamlessly orbiting around Melissa's key messages.

We hit a slight hurdle early on, though: a video, designed to showcase the SPP manifesto, that we once envisioned as a primary source of inspiration for the presentation general layout and color palette, took a bit more time than expected to take off, so we had to adjust our design strategy faster than Scotty can beam you up.

By fostering open communication with the SPP team, we created a collaborative atmosphere that felt more like a friendly space station than a conference room.

Drawing inspiration from an early draft concept, we developed a dynamic presentation featuring video and animated loops as slide backgrounds — think of it as visual fuel to propulse the ideas put into words on each slide to the stratosphere.

Despite the urgency and the need to adjust our creative trajectory, our dedicated crew ensured we met our launch window without compromising quality, staying within budgeted hours.

The results

Melissa and the SPP team got to New York with postcards to hand out, and she could present the SPP Manifesto in front of a crowd that was no doubt as captivated as if they were watching the first Mars landing.

You don’t believe us? Well, here is what they had to say about it — straight after a "that was out of this world!" comment:

The Friday session was particularly impactful: it was the first time ever that over 80 Chief Procurement Officers (or assimilated, because you know how fancy titles can get) got together to be part of the solution in terms of sustainability in their field. And when you get people who spent a total of over a trillion dollars (that’s 1,000 billions, 1 million millions, or 1,000,000,000,000 if this is as absolutely abstract for you as it was for us) on procurement purchases in 2023 to talk about a more sustainable approach to their core business, you can say your mission and your presentation will no doubt have a sizable and lasting impact if even just a few of them decide to join you.

Conclusion

Thanks to SPP and the trust they placed in the Laika crew, we could showcase once again our agency's strengths in agility, creativity, and a shared commitment to sustainability — though we acknowledge that our space travel metaphor addiction might not be the greenest way to show it!

Most importantly, this collaboration also marks an exciting milestone as the first official project for our newly established in-house communication design team, who answered the call like the space troopers we always knew they would be!