For the inaugural B2Believe conference, LinkedIn wanted to challenge conventions and expectations of typical B2B marketing conferences by inspiring an audience of thousands of B2B decision-makers to push their creativity and develop B2B advertising on par with celebrated B2C campaigns.

Hosted at San Francisco’s Pier 27, the two-day IRL and virtual conference was programmed with interactive installations, keynotes, breakouts, parties, and rare opportunities for the B2B marketing community to connect and co-create.

We didn’t want this to feel like a typical B2B conference, but rather an experience that brought the community together through unexpected creative collaboration.

An overall design language was developed that considered core themes of connecting, inspiring, and celebrating.

Key to the brief for inspiring our audience and pushing their creativity, we created a community powered digital graffiti wall to unlock the creativity within each of our IRL attendees. A prominent LED installation allowed attendees to collectively transform something that literally begins “boring” into something beautiful and expressive. To create a realistic feel of painting, we developed custom made hardware to mount HTC Vive Pro 2 trackers onto paintbrushes, markers, paint buckets and paint rollers. We also provided traditional wheat pasting materials to create a massive mural that worked as a counterpoint to the digital board.

The conference was separated into 2 days. Day one was the first year of B2Believe, an experience engaging a broad B2B marketing audience. The second day was the 12th year of PartnerConnect, focusing on a smaller group of key LinkedIn Partners.

This presented a unique opportunity to establish the basis of a new conference (transforming this to feel more like an experience vs. event), while also leveraging the historical approach of Partner Connect.

Early on in the project we identified three core themes to deliver upon:

Connect the B2B community

Inspire them to approach B2B marking more creatively

Celebrate the accomplishments of the community

Every touchpoint of the event was considered against these key themes to create a cohesive and functional experience.

In addition to the spatial design of the overall event space, we focused on creating communal creative moments for the audience.

A prominent moment was an interactive digital graffiti wall that allowed attendees to collectively transform something that begins bland and literally says “boring” to something that was beautiful and expressive. A blend between creative tech and physical installation, this was meant to inspire and create a magical moment.

Through the use of multiple digital painting tools participants were able to deface the expected and create something unique. The experience was designed to be fun, expressive, and intuitive while having the range to create infinite pieces of collaborative digital art.

To create a realistic feel of painting, we developed custom made hardware to mount onto HTC Vive trackers, paintbrushes, markers, paint buckets and paint rollers.

Our strategy to amplify the in-person B2Believe experience via LinkedIn Live was a success, generating a livestream engagement rate of 11.3% - 4x the average engagement rate! In person attendance goals exceeded expectations and there was a strong 61% show rate for those that registered. The event garnered an NPS score of 68 which well exceeded median industry standard.

The event drove conversation on-platform as attendees were sharing their excitement for the B2B space and key event takeaways. The team was excited to see key posts from attendees representing important companies including ServiceNow, IBM, LEWIS Global Communications, Sprinklr, and Zscaler.