An Inside Look at Milwaukee’s High-Tech Press Event

It began months ago. Bid processes, presentations, selection processes, detailed meetings and much more. We’re not yet at the finish line, but this week a major announcement was made naming Daktronics as the Milwaukee Bucks partner for video displays in and around their new arena in downtown Milwaukee. And I was there to see it happen.

For this announcement, technology was used to unveil technology. We brought a 1.9-millimeter UHD LED display as a press backdrop, the same technology the Bucks will receive in their new press room at the arena. A 6-millimeter curved podium display showed a rotation of Bucks and Daktronics logos throughout the event as team and company representatives stood behind it and spoke about the LED displays that will grace the interior and exterior once the arena is complete.

As a picture is worth a thousand words, the UHD display did a large amount of talking when it showed an animated flythrough of the arena to highlight the LED displays and their location as media members captured the moment through their camera lenses and mobile phones.

The event went very well, due in large part to the back-end preparation by the Daktronics demo group. They drove their moving truck full of equipment approximately 8 hours from Brookings, South Dakota, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the day before the event. But after the long drive, their day wasn’t over yet. Immediately after arriving, set up for the event began. Unloading, packing elevators, constructing the display panel by panel, completing connections on the backside, running power, firing up the display, fine-tuning the display face to optimize the picture, loading the content to the control system and ensuring playback was seamless. Roughly three hours later, the stage was set for the press event.

Other preparations were made on the back-end as well. News releases were drafted and edited, fact sheets were prepared, jump drives were loaded with content for the media to take with them, talking points were bulleted out and discussed, a run of show was drafted, a quick conversation between the three speakers prior to the event nailed down the run of show and when to cue the videos. Even the minor details, such as leaving a three-chair ‘aisle’ in the seating to allow cameras to see the full podium display in front of the speakers, were thought out and planned for. And if we did our job right, the people in the room never even noticed.

The event began at 10 a.m. and lasted 15 minutes. Follow-up one-on-one interviews accounted for another 15 minutes. And mere minutes after the last member of the media left the room, the teardown process began. The demo group was on the road back to Brookings by 12 p.m.

In today’s instant online world, social media was so active during the event that “Daktronics” was trending on Twitter in the Milwaukee area. Announcement posts were made by the Bucks and Daktronics while media in the room shared the news at the same time leading to a massive amount of mentions in the social stratosphere. And over the 24 hours that followed, about 50 online outlets had shared the story with their audiences as the story was widespread throughout Milwaukee and beyond.

With big news, great customers and hard work by all those involved, the result is a successful media event.