Branding a hackathon

I was lucky enough to be approached by IBM to help brand the joint venture between IBM and BMO called Innov8. IBM and BMO would work together to create and host a hackathon for the Digital Acceleration team at BMO that would be open to all contractors and full time staff to help breed creativity and outside-the-box thinking that was needed to push the boundaries on our digital products at BMO.

The original logo was just for display sake, ie. print material focused on just advertising the initiative. When we realized the scale of the logo and how far reaching it would need to be, I went through the entire branding exercise to create the BMO Innov8 logo in its’ entirety.

Focusing on advertising

As planning for the event went on, we realized that we had to focus on promotion. It was 3-4 floors worth of employees that we had to target, with no centralized way of targeting them except for posters, emails and word of mouth. So we immediately went to work on guerrilla merchandising and creating a website to help promote the event.

Below are some of the materials I designed to promote the efforts.

The results

We had started the month with only about 10 people signed up, but after a month of promotion, we were able to increase that to 110+ people signed up. Before we had just a clipboard and word of mouth, but after the website was launched and the stickers and t-shirts handed out, we had registrations, emails and even a slack channel all set up and ready for the event.