Written by Christelle Gental 

IBC 2016 treated us with the hottest weather in 20 years -and with the prize for the Best Stand Design in its size category -described as providing an 'inviting, stunning and fresh approach'! What a wonderful surprise and amazing reward for the team who worked hard for the last 4 months to make this happen.

On Saturday at 5PM (CET), Roger Thornton, newly appointed chairman of IBC Committee, turned up on the Cisco booth with a Certificate declaring the Cisco Booth the best looking stand of this year's show. I had the privilege to collect the certificates and the invitation to the Innovation Awards Ceremony taking place that very evening at the RAI auditorium -a very impressive 500-seat conference room which was packed. Bruno Touret represented George Tupy and joined me for the ceremony. We were greeted as VIPs with sparkling drinks... took our seats and enjoyed the ceremony rewarding innovative video projects such as BT Sports (a Cisco customer) and NASA -as well as the amazing film director Ang Lee who shared an early projection of his new film.

When it came to the Stand awards category, both our names were called -we walked to the stage being filmed and photographed during the crowd's applause. It was brief but we felt proud! One thought crossed my mind: 'so this is how it feels to be famous... I could get used to it'.

This prize is a shared trophy for the team who engaged in this process back in May -starting with Ally Thorndike who focused our efforts on understanding the customer journey -a critical process to identify our objectives which shift slightly every year. One strong idea that came out of this was to have a partly closed stand with demonstrations facing inside which would help us being more focused on invited guests and less on passing traffic. We'd keep a whisper suite on the top floor for our special Infinite Video Next which gives an amazing taste of how personalized Video can engage viewers -and the ground floor would display here-and-now solutions in an open environment that facilitated traffic flow. The hierarchy of the messaging was simple but effective -Cisco logo treated with modern effect, the corporate campaign tagline adapted to the show 'There's Never Been a Better Time to Transform Entertainment' which conveys so perfectly our story and where we are in transforming the Service Provider Video space, concise solution descriptions for each area and a twitter call to action#neverbetter facing the passing traffic. The icing on the cake was the beautiful floating cube display and LED wall with amazing content from Cisco campaigns and customer testimonials. The whole stand was then wrapped up by a subtle LED line at 5m height linking up all the parts. Check the photos!