SportFWD Conference
Athlete Remix & the Future of Sport: Our first in a series of game-changing events
The Attention Span team hit the ground running in 2018, pulling 26 speakers from all over the country to San Diego for a full day of insights, problem-solving, and future forecasting.
We planned for an audience of 200 at Qualcomm Institute on the UC San Diego campus, then ended up packing the house with over 250 attendees. Between panels and keynotes from industry gurus like Guy Kawasaki and Dr. Arah Suppiah, attendees toured the QI’s VR Cave or connected ideas in the sunny courtyard. Feedback was overwhelming positive and the Attention span team is already gearing up for our next SportFWD conference series. If you missed it this year, here’s a recap to hold you over until our next Attention FWD Conference.
The first step in solving any problem is fully understanding it before tackling possible solutions. To that end our editorial team and futurists spent hours gathering information into emerging technologies. Ones already changing the game as well as some that were gearing up to in the near and far future. The team also researched international and domestic movements, preferences, commerce and more. All of this culminated in the team using their expertise to identify the most consequential of these factors. Add in some feedback from the rest of the Attention Span team and event partners and the conference was starting to take shape.
The Sport FWD Conference put on by Attention Span and San Diego Sports Innovators was the kind of event so good and jam-packed with mind-boggling information and predictions that you almost had to be there. If you were there, you wish you could experience it again in order to make sure you heard some things correctly.
Kevin AceeSan Diego Union-Tribune
Building a Conference
Now that the team had a clear understanding of what should be covered we moved from the foundation of the conference to it’s scaffolding. We scoured our networks and beyond, looking for subject matter experts and thought leaders to both head up and participate in the conversations being planned. These folks were pretty floored to be involved in something as exciting and timely as conference on the future of sports especially once we shared our planned topics and areas of focus with them. Recruitment was a breeze.
Designing the Event
Conference / event design and branding is a unique challenge. Due to the way most materials will be presented it is important that they be engaging but unobtrusive. It should all compliment the space, the content, the presenters etc… The Attention Span design lab got started early creating branding for the event as well as other collateral like event passes / name badges, events signage, presentations and more.
