Chris Demeulemeester, international sales manager at EMG focuses on the technology needed to provide seamless communication in high-stakes event planning environments, especially when in a multilingual conference:
At last October’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Summit in Marrakech organisers needed to create a tailored venue from the ground up. This involved the orchestration of an integrated IP network with global Media Access Management, over 200 remote-controlled cameras, 35 galleries, a bespoke Master Control Room, and the implementation of a sophisticated intercom system.
The IMF and the World Bank, two major global financial organisations, traditionally hold their annual summits in Washington, D.C. Every three years, however, they move to an international location, with Marrakech chosen to host the latest meeting.
With over 14,000 attendees, the meeting brought together central bankers, ministers of finance and development, private sector executives, civil society, media and academics to discuss issues of global concern, including the world economic outlook, poverty eradication and job creation, climate change, among others.
Key themes for the event included building economic resilience amid global uncertainty, securing transformational reforms to foster inclusive growth and digitalisation, and reinvigorating global co-operation to address challenges like climate change, food insecurity and pandemic preparedness. In focusing on these issues, the summit also set out the need for strong policy frameworks, social safety nets and international collaboration to create a sustainable and inclusive future.
Effective technology infrastructure
The event’s organisation was entrusted to AVANT SCENE, a Moroccan PR and publicity company, who put the technology infrastructure requirements out to tender. The summit required infrastructure to support over 1,200 delegate meetings across 10 days in a temporary venue constructed specifically for the event. Comprehensive recording, broadcasting and content management capabilities were needed to facilitate global media access and transparency. Moreover, real-time communication had to be enabled across stakeholders navigating language barriers.
AVANT SCENE selected EMG, global provider of media and broadcasting production, to handle these broadcast requirements with a solution based around the creation of a large, integrated IP network to facilitate flexible and interconnected broadcasting capabilities. This network supported over 200 remote-controlled Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras and 35 galleries, enabling highly effective coverage of the event meetings. EMG also built a bespoke complete high-end Master Control Room (MCR) for content generation and quality control.
Another key aspect of the infrastructure solution was the development of a custom-made Media Access Management (MAM) system. This cloud-based tool allowed worldwide media access to all audio files and meeting recordings, complete with translations and relevant metadata.
EMG also designed a bespoke folder system for real-time content delivery to meeting rooms, ensuring that last-minute changes of supporting visuals were accommodated efficiently.
According to the team at AVANT SCENE, they selected EMG as their key supplier not only because we have experience with large-scale Institutional work (such as NATO and European Parliament), but also because we have set up very reliable broadcast infrastructures (from the World Cup to the Olympics). EMG supervised for more than a year the entire set-up and proposed a workflow that was transparent to all parties, and it definitely helps tremendously when you have technicians who are perfectly fluent in several languages.
An integrated and advanced intercom system, also implemented by EMG, ensured smooth digital communication across the extensive summit venue and several MCR’s in Washington. This system was crucial for coordinating the diverse array of activities and for facilitating instant, reliable communication among the event’s various stakeholders. To overcome language barriers and enhance operational efficiency, EMG’s team played an important role in facilitating communication between French-speaking Moroccan clients and English-speaking American stakeholders.
Delivering information transparency in real time while navigating linguistic diversity was a huge challenge to solve, but we solved it adapting our resources to our clients’ needs. That was possible to achieve thanks to our global team of experts from different parts of the world and our bespoke technology, such as the MAM system which allowed global media partners immediate access to recordings and translations of all meetings.
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