ADM Creative Group
The Corporate Events Disruption Machine

Human beings have been holding meetings and events at least since our cave-dwelling ancestors enacted the hunt before the rest of the tribe.

Meetings have evolved a bit since then.

Corporate events, for example, have graduated from rock walls and campfires to ballrooms and light boards, opening sessions and breakouts, keynote speakers and networking lounges. Those are the standard elements clients and audiences have come to expect over the last five or six decades.

But a sameness has crept in, and the process of creating corporate events hasn’t evolved much over the years. Both clients and audiences deserve better.

That’s the perspective of ADM Creative Group, an events and communications agency that’s on a mission to disrupt the industry.

Setting the Stage

“We believe the events industry is broken,” said Carol Gentile, COO of the New York-based company. “When there are multiple vendors separately managing creative, production, logistics, or anything else, the process becomes complex and expensive, messages get fragmented, everything slows down and creative suffers.”

According to Gentile, “We thought, Why does the industry operate in this condition? ADM was built to fix it with an all in-house, single-source, self-powered business model.”

ADM’s Chief Creative Officer, Russell Reich, elaborated: “Delays, unexpected charges, and less-than inspiring creative have become event norms. They’re so well-established that many people don’t know what they don’t know; they think that’s just the way things are. Our aim is to show them it doesn’t have to be this way. We can challenge the traditional models and status quo to get to something better.”

How? ADM brings every major event need under one roof. Gentile said, “Diverse expertise in every department, we own the equipment, we have the facilities—even the tractor trailers to transport everything to the event site—they’re all ours. That way, we maintain responsibility and quality control for every part.”

ADM also assigns a dedicated, on-staff team that familiarizes itself with the client's brand, event, audiences and business goals. The executive producer, the primary point of contact, coordinates various departments to form the team that specializes in the technology, creative, strategy, video production, and graphics that each client needs.

This consistent team stays with the client event after event and year after year, flattening learning curves and boosting efficiency.

Reich said, “The most tangible advantage to our in-house model is speed. We’re able to turn around changes faster, even at the last minute, because everyone and everything our clients need is always right there.”

Since the resources are already available and accounted for, ADM breaks from an industry standard and does not charge for multiple set revisions, script rewrites, or video edits. “We all know revisions are a part of the corporate event world ... and we don’t think it’s right to bill the client for them,” said Gentile. “Change is a constant in business, and our way of working embraces that reality. We listen, learn, and respond to our clients in the ways they need us to and their audiences can relate to, always connecting to their business goals and the competitive landscape they’re operating in.”

A Purpose-Built Machine

Aside from its all in-house business model, ADM Creative Group also leverages one of the habits of highly effective people when starting a new project: “We begin with the end in mind,” said Reich. He went on to explain that quality results depend on quality input from clients, on defining what clients are targeting. Then ADM works with them to formulate their event strategies.

According to Reich, “It’s our role to be supportive, optimistic, and ambitious on our clients’ behalf.” That sometimes requires reframing and reinventing what an event is. We tell our clients that we don’t really produce events; we create purpose-built machines designed to prompt and support a particular kind of conversation—the kind our clients need to have with their most important stakeholders.”

ADM works from a desired outcomes perspective, asking how an event can transform how an audience thinks, feels and behaves. Because if there is no transformation, there’s really no reason to have a meeting. They see it as their role to help clients define these outcomes and then create elements that achieve those outcomes to give meetings greater value and purpose.

“Curiosity is one of the most important pillars of our service delivery approach,” said Gentile. “We always push ourselves to ensure we understand client requirements and exceed their expectations.”

Gentile adds, “It’s about discovering the message that your company wants to share with consumers, with your team members, your sales force, your shareholders … whomever your audience might be, and creating an event or communications campaign that informs and influences and shapes their beliefs and behaviors.

Because when that's done successfully, and you do this holistically, events and campaigns create lasting change. That's what we're looking to do.”

Client Success Story

In a notable instance, ADM successfully navigated a challenging scenario for a client undergoing a spinoff from its parent company.

Faced with uncertainties surrounding the new brand’s emerging identity, the client sought ADM's expertise in orchestrating productive and meaningful meetings during the transition. ADM’s strategy transformed those meetings into audience-driven events, not just for them but by them; audience members assumed roles as hosts, stage managers, and camera operators, showing a high level of employee engagement and commitment to the company, and the ability to do whatever needed to be done through a period of transition and uncertainty.

What Clients Think

ADM’s clients include familiar brands across a variety of industries: Johnson & Johnson, FIS, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Kenvue, Shaw Floors, and Goodyear.

We believe the events industry is broken … ADM is built to fix it with an all in-house, single-source, self-powered business model

Reich said, “Our all in-house model emerged from feedback from our client base. We find that when we talk to prospects, there is great consistency in the pain points that clients are having. We wanted to fix that.”

Once clients get a taste of the ADM difference, they tend to stick around. Many of ADM’s client relationships are measured in decades, not years. Canon has been a client for 37 years. Goodyear, 21 years. Abbott Labs, 15 years.

Reich said, “Fortune 500 companies are embracing the disruption we champion and the results we’re getting for them. Many are now expanding their engagements with us, bringing us communications opportunities that we wouldn’t normally think of as what an ‘events company’ does.”

For example, ADM has recently been involved in return-to-the-workplace initiatives, social media influencer experiences, and communications campaigns that bring event thinking, media, and messages outside traditional meeting settings and into the offices and diverse locations and channels where corporate and consumer audiences live and work.

Reich said, “We’re expanding by bringing ‘event thinking’ beyond the ballroom and delivering communications in diverse forms and locations.”

“We dare to think and work differently,” says Reich. “Our invitation to clients is ‘let’s be different together.’”

Email:
sales@admcreativegroup.com