The Verizon Excellence Awards

Staging a spectacular event is a feat in itself. Orchestrating events in multiple locations — at the same time — can be challenging, but not impossible. Taking corporate awards on the road is, we believe, one of the most powerful ways to connect with customers, colleagues, and the communities a company serves. The Verizon Excellence Awards taught us exactly how.

The Verizon Excellence Awards honor extraordinary achievements with a new theme each year. Working with Verizon Wholesale Markets, our team created the visual language that turned every theme into a fully realized world — from tropical island ballrooms to Vegas-style showcases, from grand atriums dressed in royal blue to intimate red-and-black dinners centered around towering tulip arrangements.

Magee then managed the program’s digital footprint — the internet sites, the marketing campaign, and the special newsletters dedicated to the awards. We introduced signature posters and flyers, branded promotional collateral, and a refreshed visual identity that traveled with the program from city to city. Print, digital, and broadcast all spoke with a single voice.

The most consequential redesign was the nomination tool. Together with our team, Magee re-architected the online application used to submit VEA nominations — simpler, faster, mobile-aware. The results were immediate: more than 6,000 nominations were received, a 100% increase over previous years. Excellence, it turned out, only needed an easier door.

Next came the part most producers dread — and the part we built our business on. Magee and his team designed and executed 32 events that were exactly alike. A logistical landmine at times, the project required securing identical decor, floral arrangements, lighting, entertainment, and audio-visual treatments for each of the events, across every market.

From the palm-lined ballrooms of the South to the Manhattan atriums of the Northeast, every Verizon Excellence Awards looked — and felt — like the same evening. The lucite podium gleamed identically in Atlanta, Dallas, and New York. The first sunflower of the night was cut at the exact same height. When a recipient was called to the stage, the music, the lighting cue, and the engraved plaque waited for them in precisely the way it had waited for the recipient one city earlier, and the one one city later.

That, in the end, is what corporate productions do at their best. They take a brand’s belief in its people and translate it into a room that everyone leaves a little taller. The Verizon Excellence Awards traveled to 32 cities. The standing ovations did not change.

— Excellence isn’t a stage. It’s a standard, faithfully reproduced.