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AMC Upfront
Client
AMC
For their 2023 Upfront presentation, AMC hosted an in-person event with between 200 to 250 attendees at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Tuesday, April 18. We designed the Upfronts for AMC to align with the brand’s vision for the most innovative and future-facing upfront in industry history and showcase a presentation that reflects the premium quality of their programming.
Live Event and Branding
The project was a big one for BGSTR, as we were tasked with designing toward a focus on partnering with marketers around targeted audiences, creative ad products and an exciting slate of high-quality programming to build on AMC’s ability to engage passionate fan communities around franchises and universes. The event itself was also the first year back in person for AMC, and it was important to get the approach right.
Because of the nature of the event, we had a ton of deliverables and the project was very technical as a whole - our team was fine tuning edits down to the last hour before the event. Our team enjoyed the ride, though, as this was a chance to get to flex our branding muscles on a massive scale.
From the outset, we wanted a modern design that could deliver information on hundreds of animated slides clearly and seamlessly flow throughout the presentation. Organization played a key role throughout the course of the project— naming conventions, delivery buckets, and workflow were all kept super tidy to facilitate the mass output of deliverables we were working with.
Feedback was a large part of our process due to the many internal touchpoints the presentation had within the network. We had a system that would incorporate the input from the marketing team, the executive team, the talent and more. From there, we would have to make changes on three slides for any one change; because each slide requires a seamless transition, any changes would have to be applied to the slide before and after the one being touched to ensure continuity.
The project gradually ramped up through its course with the biggest push occurring the few weeks before the presentation. The BGSTR team enjoyed designing for the AMC universe and the variety of platforms the brand touches— linear cable, digital or smart TV products and multichannel bundles.
The event itself was beautiful and seeing advertisers and media buyers dine alongside actors and AMC personalities against the backdrop of our design was a great feeling. Thanks to our partners at AMC for the great experience.
Props where props are due
Credits
AMC Upfronts
Founder, Executive Creative Director Josh NortonExecutive Vice President, Executive Producer Carson HoodVice President, Head of Production Virgil ConklinCreative Director Ross HendersonAnimation Director Casey DroginAnimation Chris Scales, Brian Landisman, Ayden Ackerman, Liu ChialungDesign Riley Carson, Nick Woythaler, Sohyun Park