Event Advocacy
Yokogawa Beyond Borders Tour UK
Event advocacy around Yokogawa’s Beyond Borders Tour UK — from preparation and pre-event storytelling through live coverage, interviews and short-form content, followed by a longer piece pulling together the themes that mattered.
Image: Kevin O’Donovan / A Bit of This and ThatThis collaboration started before I arrived in Chester. I had attended the first Beyond Borders Tour event in Düsseldorf the previous October, so part of the preparation was understanding how Yokogawa’s story had evolved and what was going to be different about the UK edition. The overall theme was again “Collaboration for Transformation”, but the UK agenda brought a particular focus on Industrial AI, industrial autonomy, smart operations, energy and emissions, safety and security, and the challenges facing UK industry.
Ahead of the event, I worked through the agenda, the people involved and the areas that were worth exploring in more detail. The aim was not to arrive with a set of scripted corporate questions, but to understand enough of the context beforehand that I could follow the conversations, challenge where useful and pick up on the things that became interesting once people actually started talking. We also started the storytelling before the doors opened, setting out what I was going there to explore and what I would be looking for.
On site, the work was a mixture of listening, talking, filming and reacting to what was happening around the event. Alongside live posts and short reels from the two days, I recorded five separate interviews with members of the Yokogawa team — Trevor Wren, Nick Clark, Kevin Worster, James Reilly and John Hartley — digging further into topics including Industrial AI, IA2IA and the journey towards industrial autonomy. The event itself gave us the context; the interviews gave us the opportunity to go further than the presentations.
The content did not stop when the event finished. The interviews were broken out and shared individually, alongside shorter pieces of content from the event, before I pulled the wider themes together into a longer article. That gave us a mix of immediate event coverage and content with a longer shelf life, rather than trying to squeeze everything into one recap post.
That is really the point of Event Advocacy for me. It is not simply turning up and posting photographs from an event. The useful bit is doing enough work beforehand to understand the story, being close enough to what is happening on the day to spot the interesting conversations, and then turning those few days into a body of content that continues the discussion after everyone has gone home.