Marble LDN, an event agency that works with brands and agencies to deliver live experiences, has recently outdone itself with the work it put into CognitionX’s technology festival, CogX, 10th-12th June.
CogX is a festival of “AI and emerging technology” that has run every year since 2017. It is the largest AI festival outside of China as well as the largest festival dedicated to technology in the UK. This year, it applauded a 400% increase in attendees and a 129% increase in speakers.
The festival was Marble’s biggest project to date and required 12 purpose-built stages to host the 687 speakers over three days. The event agency also designed and created all the sponsor areas (bar one) for the likes of HSBC, Google X, Accenture, Vision2030 and QuantumBlack.
Robbie Parry, CTO at Marble LDN, said: “The CognitionX team approached us with the desire to quadruple the size of the 2018 festival, with the new 67-acre Kings Cross site already in mind. This left us to tackle all other event aspects; the design and layout of the whole site and all elements within it and all onsite build and technical production to bring all of our designs to life.
“Producing a festival of this size in central London meant that not only were we liaising with the client and their sponsors on a daily basis, but also the local council, local businesses, property and security teams. The whirlwind project took place over a fairly tight timeline of three months, including a 21 day build onsite.”
London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, opened the festival ahead of London Tech Week 2019 to the 20,000-strong audience that travelled in from 98 different countries.
CognitionX’s co-founder, Tabitha Goldstaub, thanked the Marble team for its “amazing” efforts: “I love working with the Marble team, every single one of them has just that attitude we need to deal with both the stress and the joy that comes with an even of this size. Together, we’ve brought the vision of the festival I’ve had in my head to life.”
Parry continued: “My personal highlight piece was creating a custom stretch tent inside an old gas holding cylinder – this was a listed structure which meant we weren’t able to touch any of the frame, however, we still managed to create a 500 cap tiered staging structure, with a 900m2canvas over the top. It looked fantastic!”
Author: Molly Hookings
Molly joined the editorial team in March 2019. She has several years’ experience working in broadcast and journalism, as well as marketing and PR. Past experience includes working for the BBC and independent publishing houses. If you have a story you think Molly might be interested in, please email: molly@eventindustrynews.com
